The smart home is official here. This holiday season, it has been reported the Amazon’s Echo Dot smart speaker and its built-in Alexa voice assistant dominated the sales charts. So following the Christmas holiday, Amazon announced the Echo Dot was the best-selling product of the holiday season on its website. The Alexa app also made its way to the number 1 spot on the App Store for the first time, and the Google Home app managed to sneak into the top ten. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh look, a lot of people got smart speakers this holiday season,” but this is an important milestone, as the smart home is finally upon us. If you are like the many people and got a smart home speaker this holiday season you are not alone.
We got the Amazon Echo Dot and it’s quite the cool little gadget. We hooked it up to control our lights. We purchased two outlet plugs along with the Dot. You can also get smart bulbs but did the plugs because they were cheaper and on sale, plus I wanted to test everything out first. There is so much this device can do it’s incredible. It’s like today’s version of Rosie from the Jetson’s. I will do a post reviewing the Dot at a later date, but I am going to talk about utilizing the Logitech Harmony Hub with the Amazon Echo Dot.
Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology platform that Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) must embrace as it continues to evolve the next few years. The biggest opportunity that VR will present to DMOs is inspiring meeting planners and helping consumers make decisions about where to travel. With the virtual reality market predicted to increase to nearly a billion units sold by 2020, now is the most opportune time to get on board with the VR and 360-degree video technology.
I have been thinking about cutting the cord and getting rid of cable for awhile. We already had Netflix and we had the Roku streaming player. Our son was mainly watching Netflix and my wife and I were getting sick of paying well over $100 every month for channels that we didn’t watch. Plus, we always complained about not finding anything on TV that we wanted to watch. Even though my wife was ready to cut cable, like most people, we stayed a prisoner to the cable company simply because I didn’t know how to get rid of cable without missing out on my favorite TV shows, and live sporting events. I was holding out as there was no easy way to watch my local sports teams. Sound familiar?