Google takes on Ring with latest Nest cameras

but I don't know. So anyway, whatever it is, if you're new to the show, welcome, Thank you. We'll see if that was just a fluke next week. But I enjoyed seeing the increase in numbers. That was kind of fun. One thing that was kind of ironic about last week is that I actually did a little experiment. So I have been spending a lot of time on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all these things, and I decided to try deleting them from my phone to see what would happen with my life.

Now I'm on TV, and of course I am in the public eye all the time, always the pressure to post and to kind of share things that are happening in my life. And I enjoyed doing it, don't get me wrong, but it become a thing where I am, you know, always looking at this. I'm always on it. I'm getting messages twenty four to seven from folks, and so I just figured, okay, let me just see what life is like without these, and I will tell you,

Oh my gosh, it is very interesting. It is very freeing because I did not feel pressure in any way, shape or form to be on my phone, to check my phone, to post on my phone, to check what people are saying about what I posted. And it was very very i don't know, like it made me become more in the moment. And I've got them back on my phone at this point. But I don't know what the solution is because I don't have my notifications turned on.

I'm not sitting there, you know, every time someone texts me or tweets me, you know, I don't see that instantly.

with things, but you're not. And it really is one of these things where when I look around at people out and about in the world, they are just all looking at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. And it's funny because when I'm out and about, I always kind of look to see what people are doing on their phones. And I was at the Santa Cruz Amusement Park. It's called

the Boardwalk Fun Place by the way. It was really nice, but everyone was just kind of on their phones, and I get it, you're in line, so what are you gonna do? But I noticed that Facebook is still king. I think Facebook and Instagram are still king when it comes to.

story of the week. New from Google Nest. They've got a couple of new cameras and doorbells, and everything they're doing is basically.

many different things. The ecosystem with Ring is is kind of like unsurpassed, right, And so I know there's a lot to talk about how people some people don't like what Ring is doing with privacy, but I don't have those problems, and I actually really enjoy what I've got going on with Ring at my house. So, and I

also have some of these nestcams too. But the problem with the nestcam in the past, and they did address this, is that they're basically worthless unless you are subscribing to their service because the Nest camps only let you live stream and they don't record anything unless you pay. Now that has changed, not with the old cameras, but with the new cameras. So let me just tell you about

the cameras they've got. So they've got a new Google Nest Cam with a battery and this is an indoor, outdoor battery powered camera that's going to be one hundred and eighty dollars. Then they've got the Google Nest doorbell, which used to be called the the I think it was called the Hello. This is a battery powered doorbell, which is also a first that's one hundred and eighty dollars.

Then they've got a Google Nest Cam with a floodlight which is basically Ring's floodlight cam which they've had forever. That is two hundred and seventy nine hundred and eighty dollars. And I'm trying to think how much I paid for the Nest cam that I got. The are sorry the Yeah, the Nest floodlight cam. I think it was two fifty but I think they also have a model that's one ninety nine now. But anyway, so now Google has their answer to that. And then they have the Google Nestcam,

which is kind of their standard camera. That's the wired camera for inside, and that's going to be one hundred dollars and that's their lowest price ever. But quite honestly, you can get a Ring Cam, I think for sixty dollars for indoor. Now, there is a difference here the Ring cams. You know, they let you live stream, but they don't record like continuously, so you can get the events from them, but you can't get like the last three hours and just scroll through like you can with

the Nest cams. So the nestcams now include three hours of recorded events for free, and that is a big change because it used to be had to pay to get any sort of recording on the Nest cam.

So Google knows this, and they showed me a demo of their AI that is on camera now, which means it's not going off your camera to figure out what's happening in the frame and they showed me a little clip of a FedEx truck pulling up to the front of the house. And as the truck pulls up, the machine learning and artificial intelligence knows that that is a

delivery truck. Then it anticipates that it knows someone's going to be walking up to your front door, and then it knows that a package is going to be dropped off. And so the alerts now can discern between people, animals, vehicles, and also packages in the case of the Nest door bell,

And that's a big deal. It may sound like, ah, Rich, that's not that big of a deal, but I do believe it is because I, you know, I get these alerts, especially when you're on vacation of you know, motion at your cameras with your ring cameras, and they're pretty much useless because I'm getting them twenty four to seven all day long. So because a camera can tell that it's an actual person or an animal, or a vehicle or a package, that is very helpful. And by the way,

these are again being processed on device. You do not need a subscription for these types of alerts anymore. So the most important alerts are actually going to be included with these cameras, which is a big deal. Now, the other thing that still requires a subscription is the familiar Faces alerts, and that will require subscription because it does

use some cloud processing to do that. And that's when you have you know, you can you can what's the word, sort out whether it's actually a friend or a family member coming to the door, or a stranger that's coming for the first time. Now, there's one more thing that's kind of interesting about these new cameras is that they have local storage fallback. So the Nest doorbell, the nestcams, and the floodlight will record one hour of events on device.

So that's pretty interesting. And that means that if the I guess they've got some internal memory on these things, that will help them record to the device if the power goes out and you know, if it has a battery in it obviously, and so that's a cool feature as well, because you don't miss anything in case the power goes out. So anyway, cheaper prices, more features, more artificial intelligence. That's the story with the new nestcams. And

I think that it's it's competitive. I think that for me personally, Google is just all over the place when it comes with their with their gadgets. So I feel like Ring is much more focused in here's what we're doing, here's what we deliver, Here's you know, our old stuff, here's our new stuff. It all works together. Whereas Google, you know you can invest in this stuff. And I've had a nestcam at my house for years now. It's fine, But is it my favorite and is it the best?

of your credit and debit cards. The website is earnwipogo dot com. Yeah, the website seems legitimate. The site and the features is not something new. We've seen this many many times. There's an app folk featured called drop and it's very similar and there's so many of these rewards apps, and the endgame with all of these apps is basically the same. They are taking your data in exchange for

giving you a little bit of rewards. And so, yeah, your data is worth a lot of money and these companies know it, especially as the iPhone and all this tracking is kind of cracked down on. That means that you handing over your data willingly is going to be even more valuable these days. And what kind of data are they collecting? Well, this company actually has it on their front page and it says, here's what we're collecting. We are collecting your receipts and purchases and that's the

thing we Oh, they also serve your relevant ads. So what they don't do is share your contact information, access your bank credentials, or withdraw funds. So to make this work, and the way that a lot of these things work is that you have to connect your bank account to this service. And so once you connect your bank account, they go through they see all your transactions. You know, they even know how much money you make because they see your paychecks. You know, you connect your credit cards,

you can see you know, your transactions there. So what happens is they get a great idea of just how much money you have and where you spend that money, and they, you know, the credit card companies know this and they share it and aggregate. But for a third party company like Pogo to understand that, it's very valuable so they can sell if they have a lot of people, they can sell a lot of information across you know, a lot of data across a lot of different people.

So they know how old you are, how much you make, where you spend your money, and that's very valuable, as you might expect. And they give you a piece of those rewards. How much do they give you? Let's see, Well, they give you points and then once you get those points, you can redeem them for various rewards cash out via Venmo or PayPal when you reach three dollars. So it just depends is you know, is it for you?

always bugging you. Some of them ask you to upload receipts. This one does not, but in general, you know, they might ask you for surveys and this and that. Now you can look on the flip side of this and basically it's free money for you know, just giving a little bit of your transactional data to these companies. So you might say, hey, rich, you know, that's not that big of a deal to me. But either way, most of them are legit. I would just be very careful

when you look at these companies. The only thing about Pogo that I don't like is when I look on their website, I don't see anything about Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and their only contact information is support at Earnwithpogo dot Com. So I don't like that. So for that reason, I personally would not be signing up with this website. Let's look at drop which is another website that I featured on KTLA, and let's see what their website has when it comes to you know, the information that I like.

And so I'm looking at the bottom of their website and it has Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It also has a fact it also has that do not sell my personal information at the bottom. So for this reason, I like Drop a lot more if you're going to go with one, because it seems a little bit more legit. The Pogo one I really do not like at all. Actually, they do have a privacy policy, uh and yeah, but I just I think it's a little lean on, kind

of like the front facing information. In fact, I don't even see a way to I don't even see a link to the app before I sign up, and I don't like that either.

I know, lol, but it didn't work. They still show up in group texts, but not individually. They are the top three in my contact favorites, but don't know if that matters. Sadly, I've lost all of our conversations and pictures they've sent. Is there any way to retrieve them? I don't know how you lost them? You know this is number one. I mean, I'm sorry that you lost

these text chains. But text messaging. We have placed an enormous emphasis on the importance of text messaging in our society, and I don't really understand it because to me, text messages are fleeting, they're fast, they're quick, they are you know, something that I would not think should stick around forever, Like my email definitely is like kind of an archive

of everything over the past ten or fifteen years. And so I understand that, but text messaging, in fact, I have mindset to expire after a year on my iPhone because you know, you keep three years of that stuff and it's it's weighing down. If you ever look at like this, this storage on your iPhone for text messages, it's enormous.

They're not making it better just to make it better. They're making it better so that you don't go anywhere else. And the problem with that is that I Message is terrible when it comes to exporting messages. When it comes to your backup, yeah, it's backed up somewhere in iicloud, But how do you access that backup?

that these are probably gone. You can look into your iCloud backup and see if you can use one of these programs to help you restore it. But the reality is these programs are you know you need a full backup. Let me tell you the program that I was testing that might work. It's called Imazing Imazig, and this will let you tap into a backup of your iPhone. The problem is, you need a backup of your iPhone and if you didn't do it before you lost these messages,

you might not be able to access those again. So if there's another way, let me know. If you're listening and you say, Rich, here's the easy way. But to me personally, I would switch to an app like I would switch to Telegram, and that's where I do my messaging, and it's fantastic I've got an archive and never expires.

It works no matter what phone I'm on, it works on my desktop, it works on my phone, and with messages and I message, it's just way too all over the place for me, and there's just no there's no standard, right, it doesn't, it doesn't. It doesn't adhere to any sort of standards for like exporting your messages that I can tell, And so for that reason, I just don't like it for my for a long term solution to like recording

and seeing messages. It's fun for just you know, chatting back and forth with people, but I don't have any sort of indication that I'm ever gonna be able to search those messages find something I need or see them ever.

children and minors. And of course that's you know, a smart thing for them to do when it comes to protecting children. Now, of course this is Apple, and they had to come up with a way that would protect people's you know, privacy, the average person's privacy, while also making sure that this kind of stuff doesn't happen on

their devices. And so they've done a couple of smart things, and I think that it's being way overblown in the privacy aspect, and quite frankly when it comes to this stuff, I mean, yeah, let's figure out a way to stop this from happening, because it's it's pretty gruesome. So what they're going to do. They've got a threefold plan. Number one, the Messages app is going to use on device learning

to war and kids about sensitive content. So if someone sends them a message that is potentially explicit in nature when it comes to a photo, the phone will scan that and figure that out and say and blur it and tell the child, Hey, Number one, we think this is bad. Number two, we don't think you should open it. Number three, you don't have to open it. Number four we're going to tell your parents too, so that is that's one thing they're doing Siri and search.

upload this stuff to iCloud, it's being shared. Whether it's being shared or not, it doesn't really matter. They don't want it to spread, and so they will look at these images, do a machine learning scan on your phone as they're uploaded to iCloud, and anything that is potentially a problem will be identified and notified. So there are

some ways that they're going to notify people. Let's see, so they're going to scan on device, they're going to compare them against images provided by child safety organizations, and then there's going to be what's called a voucher that's uploaded to iCloud along with the image.

everything is very private. But I feel like they've come up with a system that takes the public interest into account by giving up a little bit of that privacy, especially when you're uploading things to the cloud. So I think they've done a pretty good job here. It's way

too complicated for me to fully understand. But I think at the end of the day, what Apple's trying to do is, you know, anytime it comes to scanning photos or looking for things in photos, there's going to be a bit of controversy, but I think that the way Apple has decided to do this is a win win situation because it will stop the spread of a lot of this material. All right, let's get to another question. Donna via Instagram. All right, I'll just do a lot

via Instagram today. We'll start out with those.

is the latest version. Now, the Apple Watch six is going to be the one that basically has all the latest and greatest features, and not just the latest and greatest features, but also the always on display. And it has what's called an altimeter, which means it can show you how high you are walking or hi looking at that you know, exact moment. It also has the let's see, it has the blood oxygen level, and it has the what it has the EKG as well. Now you can

go for the the SE. I think that one is going to be the best solution for you because you said you don't need the latest and greatest, and realistically, when you're looking at these things, you probably don't need all those top of the line features. And so again let me go over the differences. The blood oxygen sensor is in the Apple Watch six. The biggest difference is and this is according to an article I wrote for KTLA, the SE does not have the always on display, it

doesn't have the blood oxygen and it doesn't have the ECG. Now, both watches are going to give you GPS, they're going to give you the heart rate sensor, the speaker, the microphone, and fall detection. So at the end of the day, you're going to save about one hundred and twenty dollars if not more, by going with the SE. So I would say the Apple Watch SE is the device that you should go with.

But the reality is, these things are packed tight. There are no open seats on flights right now, and flights are canceled if there are, and so you got to stay safe up there. There's a lot of people, a lot of drinking up there. I saw people on my last flight bringing their own alcohol onto the plane. So everyone deals with this kind of stuff differently, and so I'm cognizant of that. But also, you know, there used to be a certain demeanor that you would have in

the skies. You know, maybe you were friendly, maybe you were respectful of others. Sometimes that is being lost these days, and that's being lost in a lot of different places across our society.

get free in flight access. Of course, this is a promotion which means it could go away at any time, but as of right now, as of this recording, American Airlines is using this to promote the fact that they have the fastest Wi Fi on more aircraft than any other US carrier. Now I'm not able to test that.

When I'm on planes, I do not purchase the Wi Fi unless I absolutely have to for work, because I think it is a complete ripoff to pay fifty dollars for a cross country flight or even eight dollars for an hour. I know Jet Blue has free Wi Fi. I have never flown Jet Blue, so I don't know anything about that. I'm on United most of the time,

and the Wi Fi situation has been fine. The times I've purchased it, but my kids always give me a hard time because I will not purchase the unlimited Wi Fi for the flight, because I refuse to pay the forty eight or fifty bucks for cross country flights some typically on So but I do like this, and yeah, a lot of these, a lot of these airplanes, they will offer certain things for free, like I know that what is it Alaska airlines, Like they all give you like little certain things for free.

I said, yeah, we could have been chatting the whole time. And so just take a look, go to the you know, whatever airline you're flying, just search you know, let's say Southwest WiFi and just see what the procedures are, because, yeah, for the standard Internet, you're typically going to have to pay on most of the airlines, but they also offer a lot of little things for free. So it might be I Message, it could be Facebook Messenger, it could be TikTok it could be whatever the other thing is.

You always want to download that company's app. So whatever you know, if you're on United, download the United app, download the American Airlines app, download the jet Blue app. Because a lot of these planes, if they don't have the seatback screens, they will let you stream the stuff through your phone using their app. But a lot of times you have to have the app before you get on the plane because the Wi Fi does not allow the app to be downloaded. But I thought this was interesting.

American says that, so to enable this, you want to go to the in flight signal, then you're redirected to aainflight dot com and then simply click on the TikTok ad for free access to the platform. And if you don't have TikTok you can connect to AA in flight to download the app without having to pay for Wi Fi. And that's actually quite different than the way United says, they make you download the app before you take off,

because once you're in the air, you cannot access the app. Now, once you have the app you can download, you can access the United website. So if you want to book a flight while you're in flight, you're free to do that. I've also noticed that some of my notifications come through every once in a while.

a link to scan the phone for viruses. Then says calendar, do you want to continue receiving notifications?

bottom of the screen. Now you can do that. If you're in an earlier version of iOS, you can open the calendars app at the bottom of the screen, tap calendars, look for a calendar you don't recognize, and then tap to lete calendar.

So if you go into calendar app, you know in the web so calendar dot Google dot com, click settings and then for event settings, and then there's a setting that says automatically add invitations and so that means that any invitation you get in your Gmail will not automatically follow through to your calendar. Now that's a problem because for me personally, I get a lot of legitimate invitations from people for meetings and events and things that I can't turn this off. And it's been a while since

I've actually seen one of these calendar spams. But that's how you do it, and so you can manually add these things to your calendar if you need it.

target you with. So it could be a website that's trying to steal your information, you know, trying to get you to log in. Whatever it is, don't fall for it and always be skeptical. Just that's the bottom line. You have to be very, very skeptical no matter what you see online. Just be just be on your guard, because that's that's the main thing you need to know.

do not like at all. There's a lot of there's a lot of speculation, let's call it on Nextdoor about what's happening, and I don't think that that's very useful, Whereas what Citizen is doing is they are actually listening to police scanners in the area and using AI to figure out what's happening and then send you notifications based on that. Now they could be doing more at this point because Citizen has grown a lot in the five

years since I covered them when they launched. But that was the idea back in the days that they would use artificial intelligence to listen to police scanners, parse out kind of the important stuff, geolocated all and send out notifications to the affected users in the area, versus the typical way that things work, where you would just see something happening in town that's not really near you, so

it doesn't really affect you as much. Of course, it affects you on a certain level, but when it comes to your neighborhood, that's really where you're interested.

you'd like to have it. But here's how it works several different ways. So you have it on the app. You can have emergency responders come to your exact location. So if you need help, these agents can get nine one one to you because they'll basically call them. They can notify your loved ones if you need help. It can guide you to a safe place if you're feeling unwell or unsafe. They can give you peace of mind.

So if you just want someone to sort of virtually walk with you as you walk home from a dark place, they can do that. They can also alert nearby citizen users if your situation meets an alert criteria, which is you know, they don't describe what that criteria is, but.

emergency help your way. Let's see, it's only available on iOS right now, the protect mode, but they will be adding functionality for Android. Now, this is something that's not necessarily new. Now they're using. The AI is kind of new, but it's also it's funny because the stuff that I, you know, covering this stuff for so long, I've seen different iterations of this stuff, so nothing I see is

completely new all the time. So the AI portion of this is something that a company called Deep Centennial or is it Deep Sentinel, is using and they are a company started by one of the founders of Redfinn and they have security cameras they install it your house, and they're using AI to monitor what's happening in those security cameras, kind of like what I was talking about with Google earlier in the podcast, but this is much more real time and much more connected to a human being.

I mean. Now, this is also something the second side of this, the personal agent is something that we saw with an app called Bond and we did a story on this. It's called the Bond Security App and it looks like it's still around, but this is a personal security app and same thing where you basically subscribe to

personal security agents. And so these personal security agents will monitor over you, listen to your phone while you're walking, or help you out, and then they will actually speak to someone that might be you know, I don't know, intruding on your space or whatever, and they will intervene. So again, these are all different ways of kind of

doing the same thing. But I mark my words right now, we are going to see a lot more use of artificial intelligence in security because there's no way that if you're trying to start a company, you can scale someone

watching over cameras or phones twenty four to seven. But you can have AI listen for certain things that would that would reveal distress and that AI can now kick that that stream up the ladder, so to say to an agent who can then take take control and kind of look at what's happening, assess the situation from a human standpoint, and figure out what needs to be done. All right, let's see what else do we want to

talk about here, Sandra says, help. I downloaded the latest version on my iPhone and I lost one whole page of icons for apps that I use. They are there because I asked SyRI and she'll open them. The page of icons I used all the time. We're on that page. Thanks in advance for your help. I know you will find the answer. I went on Apple's page and I didn't understand what they said. Sandy, Uh, Sandy, Sandra, here's the thing. I think what happened is that your your

layout of your home screen got reset. And I think that's what happened. So there's a couple things you can check. Number one, you can there's a couple of things I would look into. So number one, you can look at your home screen and you can swipe to the right, and if you swipe to the right, you'll notice there's

an app library, which is in the latest version. Now, if you want to see what's going on, I would tap a hold on my screen and now everything's wiggling, and if you look down at the center, there's actually towards the bottom there's like a little highlighted area with some dots. If you tap that, it will actually show you all of the home screen pages on your iPhone. And I have actually one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine home screen pages, but I only show the

first one, and you have to show one. But I think that's the first place to look. And so if you look there, you can see if maybe one of your home screens has been hidden, and you can tap the check mark to bring it back. Now that's the one way you can do it. The other way is that you can just go into your app library, look for the apps you you want, press and hold one and drag it onto a new home screen or your existing home screen. But those are the two things that

I think happened. I think you just got reset there.

works for you. And let's talk about Voodoo. Voodoo has become Roku's official movie and TV store as Fandango has killed off the Fandango brand. This is according to Variety. That's the headline from Todd Spangler. So the bottom line is that you now have Fandango now gone. If you had movies in there, you had a collection, everything's going to be.

with any Internet connection speed. So the magic, the magic sauce of Voodoo was that they would download portions of popular movies or eventually movies that it figured you might watch to your Voodoo box. And so that way, when you press play on a movie that you want to watch, it would start faster because some of that movie was already on an internal hard drive, and so it would work twenty four to seven when you were not using

the box to download a bunch of stuff. And so it would take a slow Internet connection and it wouldn't really matter. This was before internet connections got really fast and streaming got really good because half of Netflix's business is the proprietary way that they can download things super super fast or stream them, I should say on any Internet connection. That's part of you know, Netflix's little magic

sauce inside secret sauce, I should say. Anyway, Voodoo ended up being purchased by Walmart many years later, and now they're purchased apparently by which I didn't know. So yeah, I guess NBC bought Voodoo. I had no idea that they had purchased them, So yeah, I guess. April twentieth, twenty twenty, NBC Fandango acquiring Voodoo from Walmart.

So I love the channels on SiriusXM. I love some of my favorite channels there. They just sort of play a blend of music that I really don't find anywhere else. And even with things like Spotify and you know, iHeart and all these different there are some my like at iHeart as well, but you know, I really have some of my favorites. My my all time favorite is called Serious XM Chill, which is channel fifty three. And I've never found a playlist that rivals what they do until now.

And this is a website called xmplaylist dot com and a guy named uh, let's see, what's his name, Scott, he has, he's got it, he's rigged up. Away that listens to it must listen to Serious XM channels twenty four to seven and then catalog what they play. So you can go to this website and it tells me four minutes ago they played Beautiful Mistakes by Maroon five, seven minutes ago, it played Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo. Fifteen minutes ago it played Stay by Justin Bieber and

the kid Leroy. So now that's cool in itself, but they take it a step further and somehow it actually makes a playlist on Spotify of the songs that the these stations are playing, and it's not fully updated because I'm looking at these stations and the last time it was updated, oh, it's three days ago.

you know, you don't get it. The channel I was listening to last night in the house is called The Blend, and all of a sudden, we're listening and a Christmas song comes up, and so that was a big I guess these things are not perfect, and I don't know who. I think it's all pretty much automated, so I guess the song has to take a certain amount of time to fall off, and clearly that Christmas song did not fall off.

why they should listen. Just go to rate this podcast dot com, slash rich on tech, or your favorite app but mostly iTunes, just go there or Apple Music or what is it Apple Podcasts and you can rate it right through there.

My name is rich Demirol. Thanks so much for listening. I know there are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. Stay safe, I'll talk to you real soon.