What's In A Name

I'm going to step off the techno-socialist soapbox I've been using for the past few months.  Instead, I'm going to put on my old marketing gloves, open up the sales toolkit and do a product tear down.  Though, not really.  What I want to tear down is the launch of a product, not the product itself.

The item in question is the new Apple HomePod, announced last week at Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC).  The HomePod is a package of tech that is roughly the size of that urn your grandmother keeps on the mantle.  The one full of your grandfather's ashes.  Only this one may be full of something else.  Something smellier.

Smart, Natural, Google Home

Let the Games Begin!

The last two weeks have seen some announcements in the home automation voice assistant space.  The big news is that Google bowed their 'Google Home' product, an answer to Amazon's Echo.  Apple also is rumored to be working on a home version of Siri with maybe a camera.  And, just for kicks, Amazon released an in-browser version of Alexa more to explore the concept than anything really earth shattering.

For the sake of brevity (a first for me), I'm going to ignore Apple's home assistant for now.  They haven't made any official announcements and the camera thing... well, even the rumors are a little unsure how real that is.  It would be nice for context on who is issuing commands so that I can over ride the MSD's requests, but the privacy issues may be too much for most of us to bear.  Enough on that.  On to Google Home.