Episode 209: Parenting Bytes’ Best of CES, Part 1

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Andrea:
This episode is brought to you by Comcast.

Andrea:
Hi everyone, and welcome to Parenting Bytes. I’m Andrea Smith and this week I only have Amy Oztan with me because Amy and I are in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.

Amy:
Yes, we are!

Andrea:
Rebecca decided a few years ago it’s just not worth the CES flu.

Amy:
She hates it! She hates CES. She hates everything about it. She refuses to come.

Andrea:
So we’re here, we have had an exhausting week, in fact, I’m heading back home today.

Amy:
Like literally as soon as we get done recording this. We’ve been walking the show floor. We’ve been seeing some really cool stuff. We have, we have so much to tell you about. But we’re gonna do just a little today because we also have an exciting interview with Comcast Xfinity, who is at the show. And then we’ll be back next week to tell you about more. But we’re gonna start right now. Let’s dig in. Amy and I are gonna kinda give you not our top five, but let’s just call it like our first five.

Amy:
Yeah, like the five interesting things we saw so far cause I still have two more days at the show.

Andrea:
Oh my goodness!

Amy:
Yeah!

Andrea:
Okay. So should I start?

Amy:
Yeah!

Andrea:
Okay.

Amy:
Go for it.

Andrea:
I’m going to start. So I have to say, hands down. The coolest thing I saw at the show was from Lenovo. It is the Lenovo X1 Fold. It is the world’s first foldable PC.

Amy:
Andrea has a video of this thing. Of her folding it and putting it under her arm like a little clutch that we’re gonna post. And you have to find it because it’s so cool looking. So I don’t have the specific specs. It’s like a 13.3-inch tablet. It folds in half and you can put, you know, programs, one program on one screen, one on the other. The bottom half turns into a virtual keyboard if you want. It also comes with a small Bluetooth keyboard. If you’re on a plane, if you’re traveling in a tight space, you pop the little Bluetooth keyboard right on top of the virtual keyboard and you’ve still got the screen in front of you.

Amy:
And the screen that folds is seamless.

Andrea:
It is so seamless. But what I really love is on the outside, there’s this black leather material. So when you fold the entire thing in half. Not only does it charge the keyboard that it is inside, but it turns into this gorgeous, trendy black leather folio that you slip under your arm and you look so chic heading off to a business meeting.

Amy:
It’s, it’s really cool. I want to try. I even wanna know how much it costs.

Andrea:
Yeah. I think it’s twenty-four ninety-nine.

Amy:
Depending on the specs that could be worth it.

Andrea:
Yeah! It’s coming out mid-year, twenty-four ninety-nine. And you know Samsung had issues with their foldable phone. I’m just gonna say it.

Amy:
Yeah!So you know this hasn’t been put through The Ringer yet by the reviewers. But I have to say, I mean I talked with Lenovo. They went through very rigorous testing. They did a lot of things because they learned from other people’s mistakes. And it’s kind of cool! It’s very cool!

Amy:
That’s awesome!All right! I’m gonna stay on the geeky thing for a minute. Lenovo also had something. I thought this was so innovative. It, it’s the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus. So basically what it is, is this 13.3-inch Full HD display laptop. Your regular laptop,10th gen Intel core i7 Processor, which is a very geeky way of saying fantastic. 16 Gigs of ram, solid-state drive, 10 hours of battery use. But check this out. When you have the laptop closed on top instead of your normal aluminum or whatever your body is made of, a 10.8 inch E-ink display is integrated. It is the top. It’s basically the top of the cover.

Amy:
Oh that’s cool!

Andrea:
So I use case for, this would be, you know, you’re running to a meeting. I mean, here we’ve been running around all week. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to take out my phone, open my calendar. What suite is it and where am I going? You can just tap the E-ink display. You can check your calendar. You can read Kindle books. You can read PDF. You can use the pen and it like, the stylus and you can take notes on it. So if you’re in a meeting, you just start taking your notes. It gets saved as a OneNote.

Amy:
Oh, you know how much I love OneNote!

Andrea:
I know!

Amy:
My entire life is on OneNote.Anything you put on here is gonna be saved to OneNote so that you can convert it to text or, you know, whatever you want to do. And its always on and doesn’t, you know, E-ink takes up no better life. Yeah. That’s coming March of 2020. Starting at one thousand one hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I’m gonna move over to beauty really quickly. I saw a couple of beauty things. L’Oreal has what’s called Passo. It’s basically what they’re doing is they’re doing a, they’re using AI to custom create makeup for you. They’re starting with skincare. So they’re basically like looking at your skin, looking at your routine, examining dark spots, pore size, skin texture. It all happens with taking a selfie. Then the app uses. Do you live in Las Vegas, where it is 100 percent dry, dry, dry, dry, dry and I’m living with Chapstick every hour or do you live in, you know the Florida, Everglades where it’s total humidity, takes into consideration? The temperature, all that kind of stuff and creates a skincare routine for you and then you use a little pump down the road. They expect to be able to do this with lipstick, foundation colors so that it is designed like great for your skin. Neutrogena is doing something similar. They don’t have a device, but they have a new app. I went to talk with them yesterday. They’re doing the same thing. They did us a,a picture of my face. They told me my skin was fabulous.

Amy:
Oh!

Andrea:
It was like 88% or something. It was up there. I had a little problem with fine lines, but then they’re gonna recommend products for you. But here’s what they’ve done. It’s not all Neutrogena products.

Amy:
Oh!

Andrea:
They’re actually corporate’s. It’s not like, here use all our stuff.

Amy:
So you use the app, you’re not just tied into their stuff. You’re not tied into their ecosystem. They know people want choices. They know maybe you like their daytime cream. But you use something else at night so they help and, and it tracks it over time and lets you know if your skin is getting moisture, drier or whatever. Those are really high-level things that I, that I’m gonna talk about for beauty. But I wanted to take a minute or two to mention. I can’t call them vibrators but they’re women’s health tools so.

Amy:
Yes! Some of them don’t vibrate.

Andrea:
They don’t vibrate.

Amy:
So we’ve been corrected when we call them vibrators.

Andrea:
Quite the education.

Amy:
Yes!

Andrea:
In a nut shell. Last year, a company, Laura DeCarlo, had a vibrator called the Osé. It won a CES Innovation Award and then CES decided that it was obscene and it didn’t follow the tech standard,so they renamed.

Andrea:
There was all this uproar, so this year. They pulled her in. They had her and somebody named Suki Dunham from OhMiBod, they’ve been around forever. I interviewed them back in 2012. Build out a section called Women’s Health. And while it wasn’t, you know, 20 Vibrator Companies in a row. They were scattered throughout the health and wellness section.

Amy:
Yeah!And it was good. I mean, I talked to a lot of these people. And what they’re really trying to do is just say, Hey, these are pretty. They are healthy for women. They’re putting them out on the shelves to be seen, touched, looked at, given away. I’m not gonna tell you how many of my suitcase.

Amy:
Yeah, I was going to say, you didn’t just talk to these people, you came back to our suite with a bag full of vibrator.

Andrea:
I did.

Amy:
It’s not vibrator.

Andrea:
Well not. Well, they don’t all vibrate. That’s the other thing. They have incredible Robotics, which is the TechAngle with this. They now simulate oral sex. And it, it doesn’t vibrate. It’s an error thing. One of them is a Kegel Exerciser. When is the last time you did your Kegel exercises? 20 years ago?

Amy:
Well, my oldest is 18, so probably about 17 years ago.Okay. So it, it was just interesting. We’ll probably talk more about it next week when we have Suzanne Kantra. Our friend from Techlicious.com talking with us. But it was, it was just really eye-opening. And I think it was amazing being able not only Laura DeCarlo but being able to talk to all of these companies who with a straight face. The Pier companies are telling you about using these for women’s health.

Amy:
Right! Like there’s when you go talk to these, these people, there’s nothing like hush hush about it. This is what they do all day. There is nothing embarrassing about it. They are just, you know, sharing the tech and really making it normal, which is what it should be.

Andrea:
Normalized.

Amy:
Yeah, they’re totally normalizing it, which was awesome because, you know, the controversy last year was they won this big award and then it got taken away.

Andrea:
Because it was obscene.

Amy:
Because they decided that it was obscene.

Andrea:
But they were showing porn in a virtual reality headset.

Amy:
Right! But that was fine. But, you know, women’s vibrators weren’t. So now that they reversed that decision and said that, you know, okay, they’re not obscene now, it’s kind of opened the floodgates for this, this sector.

Andrea:
Right!

Amy:
Which is just fantastic.

Andrea:
I also love that they have these people. This woman at one booth was wearing a jacket that said Chief Pleasure Officer.

Amy:
We have supposed.

Andrea:
All right, I’m gonna stop there cause I could go on forever.

Amy:
Okay!So mine. I haven’t actually been on the show floor yet, so minor all from like the evening events, where some of them were a little more experimental. Some are, some are like established companies that we’ve talked about before. But my first one is called Relief Band, which is not new. We might have even talked about it on the show before, I think.

Andrea:
Yeah. Then the anti-nausea.

Amy:
Yeah. It’s like, it’s like a bracelet, like wearable watch type thing that you wear for anti-nausea. But the reason that I’m talking about it is, number one, they have this new $200 version that doesn’t look like a medical device on your wrist. It looks like, it looks like a wearable. So if you’re the kind of person who has problems with this a lot during morning sickness, if you get carsick and you’re using something like that every day, you don’t have to look like you have this anti-nausea thing strapped to your wrist. The other thing that they have that’s new is, you know, maybe like me, you only need it very rarely. Like, I’m fine on big ships, but on a small boat, I get nauseous immediately. So I could buy one of their versions that works for 48 hours, 72 hours, seven days.

Andrea:
Right!

Amy:
And it’s not continuous.

Andrea:
And it’s a lower price point.

Amy:
It’s a lower price point.

Yeah. It’s a low. That’s what was so cool. It’s a number of hours.

Amy:
Yeah!

Andrea:
That’s how long the battery will last. But it’s a lower price point.

Amy:
Right! So you can keep turning it off when you’re not using it. So it’s not like you turn it on and you only have it for seven days. You turn it on and you have seven days of when it’s on. So I think that’s fabulous for people who don’t need it all the time. And they’re getting FDA approval for like so many different causes of nausea.

Andrea:
Right!

Andrea:
They’re moving into hospitals. They’re moving for chemotherapy and hospital.

Amy:
Yeah. Chemotherapy. For you know, I think I mentioned morning sickness. I want to try it on my husband who can’t go in those motion simulator rides.

Andrea:
Yes.

Amy:
So, yeah, that sounds fantastic.

Andrea:
So speaking of Relief Band, it’s funny cause I tried something called Relief Heat.

Amy:
Oh!

Andrea:
You know, I get Sciatica and, and there’s this Relief heat. It’s basically, you know, heat therapy wrap that you wear under your clothes or over your clothes. It’s rechargeable. And so you don’t have to like I’m constantly running in to my microwave.

Amy:
Right! To heat up one of those things.

Andrea:
Right! To heat it up and then it’s too hot and it’s too cold. So you wear it around your wherever that it hurts, but it has an app so you can adjust the temperature in the app. So if you’re, if it’s too hot, you can make it cooler and you can also set a time to how much how long you want it. Okay so.

Amy:
No, that’s very cool! Okay. So my next one is called the scammer. It sells for one hundred twenty-nine dollars. And it’s a device that you can point at an ATM or, you know, a bank of gas station pumps or something like that. And it will tell you if there’s a skimmer in a 50-foot radius.

Andrea:
I’m one of those people who won’t use a credit card at a gas station. I pay cash.

Amy:
Okay! So you could, you could point this thing at the pumps and it will tell you if there’s a skimmer, if they, if there’s something that, you know, somebody stuck on there that can steal your info and then you don’t use that.

Andrea:
Oh,okay!I think that’s cool.

Amy:
Yeah! I think,I think that’s fantastic. My next one is called. I don’t, I don’t know how practical this is. I want some tests on this because if it works, I’m buying one. It’s called the Y-brush and it brushes your teeth in 10 seconds.

Andrea:
That’s for me!

Amy:
Yeah, it’s because every day, like I,I love my toothbrush. I have fantastic toothbrush. But, you know, sometimes I don’t wanna do the standard 2 minutes that it takes to properly.

Andrea:
That’s why you’ve got some sanicare. Right?

Amy:
I’ve definitely got some set of sanicare. I love it. I travel it. But I have it here with me in Vegas. Sometimes, you know, you wanna get out the door quickly. You don’t wanna do an entire two minute cycle. So this thing, it has bristles all around. It’s like in, in your mouth shape. You do five seconds on your top teeth. Five seconds on your bottom teeth. And then say you’re done.

Andrea:
I need to get that.

Amy:
Yeah. We need to test that out, cause if that actually works. Oh my! And imagine like, they have two sizes, they have kid size and adult size. And you buy like the unit that powers it. You only need one of those. And then you can put different, you know, brush heads on for the different people in your family. So, yeah, I would love to test that, like kids. Well, you can’t get a brush for two minutes.

Andrea:
Yeah. Ten seconds out the door.

Amy:
10 seconds and they’re done. So that’s called the Y-brush. My next one is really cool. It’s called Lux Life. It is not available in the US yet, but it will be. There just working some things out. And apparently when you’re dyslexic. You have two dominant eyes. People who can read normally only have one dominant eye. And having two dominant eyes just kind of screws with your brain and it can’t see the letters right. And so this is a light that you can point at any book, any tablet, any computer,any phone, anything you’re reading. And the light kind of makes only one of your eye dominant, eyes dominant so that you can read normal.

Andrea:
Wow. Like, does it trick the other eye in some way?

Amy:
I don’t know the science behind it. I would love to know. I would love to see some studies on how it works.

Andrea:
Yeah. That’s interesting!

Amy:
You know rather than just take their word for it. But they say that they’re having amazing results.

Andrea:
Oh, okay.

Amy:
So, you know, we’ll look for that to come out. They said it. They’re, they’re hoping for this year. And then my last one. You know, Andrea and I shared a suite here in Vegas. She can attest to how much pop I drink.

Andrea:
Oh my God!

Amy:
Yeah. And.

Andrea:
Can’t even tell you.

Amy:
Yeah! And I am known, especially if you follow me on Twitter for putting cans in the freezer so I can cool them down really quickly and then forgetting about them and then like, you know, the next morning or whatever. I open my freezer and the camp has exploded everywhere. It’s a huge mess. I do this like, let’s say about three times a year. So the Juno beverage chiller is this thing that sits on your counter. It can chill a can in one minute. It can chill a champagne bottle or a wine bottle in four to five minutes. It can chill a beer. And I think they said two minutes.

Andrea:
Cold chardonnay in five minutes.

Amy:
Yes, it’s five minutes. They, they sell a tumbler that will work in it for coffee. You can chill your coffee in like a minute. That’s what my husband and daughter would use it for this. So they’re not going to care about my cold pop, but if I say, yeah. But you can chill your coffee in a minute.

Andrea:
That’s it. You’ll sell him.

Amy:
They will be on board. Yeah. So that actually launched a couple of days ago on Indiegogo. And I have a really bad habit of backing things on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, so there’s a good chance I’m gonna back.

Andrea:
You might get that.

Amy:
I love it.

Andrea:
I would be surprised if you didn’t.

Amy:
I mean, it’s just the perfect, perfect thing for me. So.

Andrea:
All right. I think that this is just a preview and we’ll have more. We’ll try to organize it a little bit more into categories.

Amy:
Oh, yeah, we.

Andrea:
And I wanted here.

Amy:
If you could see it like we are so done, like we were so exhausted right now we can barely get the words out. So one.

Andrea:
But I did go to the Stevie Nicks concert last night.

Amy:
Oh we did and Pat Benatar.

Andrea:
I Did. And Pat Benatar.

Amy:
I did not go. Andrea invited me. And I just, I wanted to be in the room. We had stuff to do the next morning. And I just wanted to get ready. And I don’t love either one of them enough to like, make the effort. But you looked like you had a great time.

Andrea:
I had a good time, Even though I’ve had no sleep all week. I had a good time and had to go so on. But we do also have an interview. We had got an interview with Comcast. Comcast Xfinity has a number of announcements and one about a new advanced gateway and one about some Cyber Protective Tools. They’re doing some cool stuff. And we got a chance to chat with Comcast Extended EVP David Puckett. So that’s coming right up. Stay with us.

Andrea:
And we are back and we’re joined by David Puckett, the Vice President of Ex-Spy and Digital Security at Comcast. And you know, the thing is, we’re at CES with so many screens, new devices, new gadgets, new ways to kind of distract our attention. And a really important thing that we talk about all the time here on this podcast is how do we control this screen time? How do we kind of, you know, manage what we’re doing as well as what our kids are doing. So we’ve invited David Puckett to join us to tell us a little bit about what Comcast is doing. So, David, welcome and thank you for joining us here.

David Puckett:
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.

Andrea:
So, again, we’re talking about all of this screen time, and I know that Comcast and Ex-Spy has done a lot in this space. Right. Can you give us just some tips and some of the things that, that you’re helping parents do to kind of keep a handle on how much screen time kids are, I guess, taking, taking part in? I mean, I know that a lot of it has to do with school, but, you know, what are you doing to help parents manage this?

David Puckett:
Yeah, absolutely. So we do a lot of consumer research, of course, and a lot of our consumers homes, and I think the things that really come out of those learning are, parents are just looking for ways to get information, a little bit more transparency about what the members of their household, the children of different ages are doing, how often they’re online. Is it, is it healthy? And so what we’ve done with our really our home networking service through a thing called EX-Spy is give them a hardware, the router in the home and some features over a mobile app that just really extends control over who’s connected. When are they connected? What is like my son Cooper doing at nine o’clock online and really given that control to the parent to say, you know what, I really would just like him to have about 2 hours of time online, maybe after school. So we’ve created features that allow a parent to schedule that. And for those times that they don’t want them online, they like over bedtime, they can set a scheduler that applies to all the kids devices to shut off Wi-Fi. Like for in that time. We also just quite honestly found from consumers. And I’m one of them because I have four children myself. My wife and I have kids from 9 to 16 who have different, you know, really internet habits and devices that we wanna just have visibility to how much time they’re online and then have the ability as a parent to take control of that and, you know, decide, you know, are they doing homework or they gaming too much and things of that nature. And so Ex-Spy, what we’ve done at Comcast is really just trying to put that control in the hands of the parents.

Andrea:
And I think what you’re saying also is it’s a little bit of awareness as well as control, I mean, just, just knowing what’s going on and also making your kids aware that maybe Wi-Fi time is limited. So, you know, you’re gonna have this much time, you can use it how you like, but then it’s over. It’s finite.

David Puckett:
Right! And so we, you know from a technology company we look for ways to really be real time with the users and give them that ability to say, hey, there’s a. He just came online after school. And you have the control. Then at that point, anywhere on your, on your phone, you have an Internet connection to decide. Well, no, we should be doing homework. Or maybe it’s a younger child that needs a nap. So I can pause that internet any time they want. It’s really about the information. Andrea, I mean, we see an intent here of just helping the parent have a conversation. You know, in our home, we have it’s just like regular habits, right? We all grew up washing our hands before we eat dinner. What we’re finding in a lot of homes now is that parents are looking for ways to have more digital habits that they can teach their children about. When is too much time to be online and when a devices need to take a time out like a bedtime?

Amy:
Well, that’s the thing. I think that so many of us, since we didn’t grow up with all this technology, we look at it as something totally different than the other habits that we’re trying to build.

David Puckett:
Absolutely. And I think where you if you really talk to consumers, you’ll find that most parents are like us, that they just don’t know how much is too much. Right? And so they’re looking for just information right now. And then they go to their trusted friends and family and others to kinda compare how much time does your kid online, do you even know? I think most the consumers that have been using Ex-Spy were not just with their own children, but with themselves or are realizing just how connected we are. And I’m a guilty parent. I know my children probably model their behavior after me and my wife, and we are connected a lot to devices. So finding opportunities to show them with this information that, you know what, dad’s gonna take a break. It’s dinner. Everybody just put your devices down. This is technology that just helps people facilitate that and get the conversation going.

Andrea:
So I don’t wanna get too technical, but we are, you know, it’s CES time and we do talk about technology a lot. I think a lot of parents don’t understand. Okay. How does this work? I mean, how do I turn off the Wi-Fi? So can, can you just give us a little maybe broad strokes? I mean, this isn’t going device to device. This is, this is controlling your router, correct?

David Puckett:
That’s correct. So everything’s connected through that Ex-Spy Gateway, the router and through our mobile app that comes with that service. They are able to really assign devices that are connected to the router to particular individuals in the home. So as I mentioned, I have four children, so I have four profiles. Each child has its own devices these days. We have over 35 devices in my home, mainly because I’m a techie dad. And then, you know, and these kids, they, we all use them a lot. But really, what it does once you’ve applied devices to really these profiles. I can now determine, you know, do I want to put a computer control as an example of my 9 year old that filters out adult content from any of his devices? Access and absolutely do. Do I wanna put a pause on the Wi-Fi for those devices overnight? Every day there’s a schedule I can just say week nights, school nights, you know, your devices are gonna go offline at 8:00 pm. And what’s really happened, guys, is in my 9 year old will just come into the kitchen and he knows around that time now cause he’s they’re creatures of habit that it’s time to charge the device and put it down. Right. There’s not a conversation anymore there’s never me trying to track him down. Like Cooper, let’s, let’s put the device down. Let’s disconnect. It’s, it’s not become just daily habit for him. And so the ease of this, is you got a simple mobile app that a parent can assign devices to, to children or to guests or whoever and has a number of different control features they can assign to him.

Andrea:
And that kind of takes the pressure off of parents. You don’t have to have that daily argument with your kids. It’s time. Five minute warning. Three minute warning. You know, it kinda takes you out of the equation.

David Puckett:
That’s right, and like just example, over the past holidays, we’ve had my other grandparents over and so I created a grandparent time. Right. Where all of my kids devices went offline. When, when we were expecting when we had the grandparents over. So that, again, that’s another one, right? So come on, grandma and grandpa here. It’s time to spend time with them. Okay. So now they have, you know, again, just giving that parent control over that and to determine however they wanna use it. There’s up to 30 different schedules in our product that parents can set on a daily basis per profile. Right? So it’s really got maximum flexibility. You might wanna, I don’t know, a nap time or homework time or whatever. They have that ability now. And it does ease those conversations that takes the work out of the parent.

Andrea:
So let’s talk a little bit about your announcement at CES. I know cyber security is a really big thing for parents because, you know, God knows what kids are putting out there and what they’re downloading and what they’re bringing in. So tell us a little bit about your announcement.

David Puckett:
Yeah. Very excited we have, we’ve had a premium service for the past year, we’ve been really experimenting with consumers, which is really a cyber security layer of service that sits on the gateway. So think of this like if you had traditional and it secure in the past that you had to install on each individual devices, you no longer have to do that. It, it’s one program that sits on a gateway. It’s automatically turned on. There’s nothing to download or install. It covers every device that’s connected to that gateway, which means it also connects. It protects from outside threats and intrusions on a lot of these smart devices we see at CES. Right? And so a lot of these devices are vulnerable to hacks. They’re, they’re which called headless in the industry, which just means there’s no screen or keyboard. Right? To download and they don’t have software, they can’t download to them. So we really put.

Andrea:
Are you talking about devices like a video doorbell or a security camera?

David Puckett:
Yeah. Or anything on camera?

Amy:
Your thermostat.

David Puckett:
Yeah. A peloton bike like anything that’s connected to, you know, over Wi-Fi. You know, is gonna be cap, you know, protected on this level of service. And really what it intent is to do is block it, any outside threats from trying to reach these devices, whether we know about them or we don’t. And so we use all what’s artificial intelligence and machine learning, some sophisticated stuff in the cloud that the consumer never has to worry about. But that is constantly monitoring the activity of those devices on the Wi-Fi to look for abnormalities. Right? And these are things that typically go undetected from a consumer that we’re now able to block those threats. It also just protects, like you mentioned, from users in the home from accessing or accidentally or unintentionally access and phishing sites, malware and things like that, that are known to be pretty nasty and sit on those devices forever. We can block those before the user reaches them and then it notifies them right in their browser. What we’re doing and they can bypass if they like. But the reality is most people say, okay, thank you very much, I’ll leave. So this is all happening now on the Gateway. And the, the announcement is that we’re making it’s available to all 18 million of our Ex-Spy internet customers starting in January. And that’s exciting because it was a 599 product that people to pay for. But we’ve learned so much that this fits every profile of home, whether you only have a couple of devices or you have thirty five like mine.

Amy:
And I’m sure it saves you guys time on your end with people not contacting you, saying, oh my God, what happened to this device? What happened when I, when I visited this site?

David Puckett:
Yeah, we are always the first line to call whenever anything goes wrong with anybody’s connected device, whether we manufactured it or not. And that’s just what people have come to trust their Internet service providers to do, right? So in the past, we’ve had to try to deal with those things with this layer of protection. You’re absolutely right. This is just proactively now giving a cleaner connection in the home that doesn’t disrupt the customer’s life. And then, you know, we don’t take those calls.

Amy:
Nice!

Andrea:
Does it, will it automatically block the activity if, if they see suspicious activity on one of your smart home devices or does it tell you or both?

David Puckett:
Yeah. It, it automatically looks for it, so if you have it, it doesn’t have to be our device like any device a consumer brings into their home. Let’s say that it’s making a call right to a third party that it’s not intended to do because that’s not what the manufacturer built it for. We’re able detect that and block that connection. And that’s typically a hack, right? That’s some, something, somewhere is trying to access that device as an entryway into the customer’s home network. And once they’re in the home network, then a lot of bad things can happen in terms of extracting information on consumers undetected. And so.

Amy:
There were stories last year about people’s networks getting hacked through their light bulbs.

David Puckett:
Yeah, absolutely. And, and what happens is even normal device like game consoles, like an X-Box or PlayStation will open up what’s called a port on a router. And those are like, you know, similar to an open window in a house that has a door locked. Right? And intruders can still come in. And then once the ran, it’s not that they’re trying to attack that device necessarily. They’re just looking for an entry way into the home network or they can gather more valuable information.

Andrea:
And I think all of us remember a few weeks ago, the, the video of the kid in her bedroom, you know, where somebody was talking through her security camera in the bedroom. And clearly that was a hack. You know, it’s, it’s a probably a, their password was one, two, three, four, five or their street number or something. You know, obviously, on top of the warning that you all should have very secure passwords. Would this protect against something like that?

David Puckett:
Yeah, it depends on the particular hacker incident. The one most recently that’s been reported. I believe was using the actual legitimate credentials from the user to log in and access that. And so, you know, in that case, that’s comes back to your point about just password hygiene, as in users, we’re all guilty of this, myself included. We don’t use things like two factor authentication as much as we should. I would argue a lot of these devices should have them built in already just to prevent these types of intrusions. But there’s a lot of you know, this is just the nasty stuff on the web sometimes that there’s programs out there that will just constantly try to figure out what your password is on some, you know, very popular things like Amazon or you know Facebook or Netflix or wherever. And as users, we typically use the same password. All right. And so it’s, it’s easy to kinda access these devices, you know, layers of security that we built and are looking for. Did somebody find another way into that device? My outside source. We can block those, but it’s difficult, you know, when people are either sharing credentials or they’re having their credentials stolen and, you know, or companies are logging or hackers are locking in as if they’re the end user.

Andrea:
Tell me a little bit about the advance security once, once you roll this out, will all your customers get it right away?

David Puckett:
Yes. So we are rolling it out this month, in January. All new customers get it as soon as they activate the gateway. All our existing 18 million customers were starting to roll it out over the entire month of January. So by the end of January, every one of our customers will have this available. And like I said, there’s nothing to turn on or install. They just, just log in to Ex-Spy, just use the Ex-Spy mobile app as we talked about earlier.

Andrea:
That’s great cause people hate downloading new apps, installing new apps.

David Puckett:
They won’t do it.

Andrea:
Getting new passwords.

David Puckett:
I know, I know. I don’t do it anymore, but we’re trying to make this really easy.

Andrea:
It sounds like easy, you know, especially for parents who, you know, have so much already on their plate. I think that the easier, the better. You know, if you can maintain security in your home and teach your kids good, healthy internet habits, anything, anything that anyone can do to help, I think is a good thing.

David Puckett:
Right. And it’s you know, security is not fun. Right. So, you know, there’s a lot of gadgets. The stuff we’re going to see here this week that are, they’re interesting, fun and cool. Security is it’s like. And like, I tell my, my, my family, it’s like, it’s just it’s part of your daily habits. You’ve got to be careful about what you share. And on top of that list, as a internet service provider, we wanna make sure that’s, you know, just super easy for our customers to have. It’s a, it’s a huge benefit. And why they, you know, in many ways we want them to choose our service.

Andrea:
All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing your news with us and for giving us some tips and ways to keep our kids safe and ourselves safe online, especially with all of the stuff that we’re seeing at CES. So David Puckett, thank you so much for joining us.

David Puckett:
Thank you, guys.

Rebecca:
Hey, this is our Parenting Bytes disclaimer, everything we talk about on the show is our own opinion. Any products we recommend? It’s our own personal recommendation for entertainment purposes only. If you buy something through our affiliate links or you just happen to buy or see or read or watch something that we recommended, it’s at your own risk.

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