On Episode 111 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re continuing our conversation with inventor Falk Wolsky! This time we’re talking about why it’s important to stay curious as an innovator!
Tag: #tech
What Sets Inventors Apart From Other People?
On Episode 110 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re continuing our conversation with inventor Falk Wolsky! This time we’re talking about what sets inventors apart from other people!
Exploring Innovation & Inventing With Falk Wolsky
On Episode 109 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Chief Innovation Officer Falk Wolsky, about innovation and inventing!
Archiving for Perpetuity: Is it Relevant?
On Episode 64 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Greg Arnette, about new business technology and archiving for perpetuity.
Show Notes
Greg Arnette’s Website
Find Greg Arnette on Twitter
Contact Greg Arnette
Find Greg Arnette on LinkedIn
Sonian’s Website
Barracuda’s Website
Blockchain
What is Blockchain?
Bitcoin
What is Bitcoin?
This Man’s Lost Bitcoin are Now Worth $75m – And Under 200,000 Tons of Garbage
How To Boost Your Internet Security With DNSCrypt
Cloudfest
Link SaviorLabs Cybersecurity Assessment
Sections
New Business Technology On Our Radar
Malware and Viruses: The Wild West
Are You Ga-Ga Over Blockchain?
The Conundrum of Bitcoin
Reinventing Business Solutions
What is Greg Up To?
Is Archiving Messages Relevant?
Archiving Family History: Storing Data for Perpetuity
How Can the History of Places Be Digitally Preserved
No End of Things to Get Excited About
Closing
Archiving for Perpetuity: Is it Relevant?
New Business Technology On Our Radar
Paul: So well let’s, let’s talk about like business technology. What’s fascinating out there now? What’s sort of on your radar. You’re sort of, if I dare, a visionary.
Greg: I think we share that same trait.
Paul: Well, yeah. So what are you seeing out there? I’m reading some of your articles. I’ll go into those if you, if you don’t remember some of the things.
Greg: Yeah. So from a business-technology perspective, a lot of security stuff, especially email collaboration security. That’s also part of my job function, is to be a security evangelist for the company or tech evangelist on data protection and security. I’m interested in the ever evolving set of technology building blocks that are being put out there by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google that can help folks like us go and solve a business problem faster. So every six to nine months, there’s a new service that we can take advantage of that just means we don’t have to write more code.
And at some point down the road…So, tied into that is server-less types of ideas — so functions as a service or Lambda functions that they call them from Amazon or OpenWhisk from IBM — where we can get pure about the software we’re writing, not even thinking about how it has to run in any environment and just focus on the business logic. So, low-code/no-code environment, app environments, I think, are really interesting and going to make a comeback.
I remember doing tons of those Microsoft access web applications that didn’t really require much technology coding but solved the business problem. I think that’s going to coming back in full force. And I’m interested in the cloud building blocks and how we can take advantage of them to do more.
Malware and Viruses: The Wild West
Paul: I don’t know if you wrote an article about this, but what do you think about all the malware and viruses and all the attack vectors that are open now? Is it going to continue to be a problem, or is it going to level off and decline? It seems like the Wild West in some ways.
Greg: Yeah. I think that’s a great way to characterize it. I think it’s going to continue. It almost feels like an arms race or mutually assured destruction, especially now that machine learning and AI stuff is, can be used for good and for bad. The black hats and the white hats are going to be dueling it out in cyberspace, getting smarter on each other. And we’ll continue to see, I think, exploits and vulnerabilities, unfortunately. And we’ll get smarter. Hopefully we just shore up the defenses on all fronts, protecting data at rest, protecting data in transit, training people on stuff. Human behavior always gets in the way a lot in terms of where problems can happen. And so there’s lot of, I think, opportunities to keep solving these problems and leverage massive data sets, leverage machine-learning frameworks like TensorFlow to do good if you want to step in the dark side, I guess you could do all that stuff and cause problems.
Are You Ga-Ga Over Blockchain?
Paul: That’s true. That’s true. Now, are you ga-ga over blockchain?
Greg: Very interested in it and trying to figure out what the business problem to solve. Is there a problem to solve? Is there something you can do to make blockchain work better, or can you build business solutions on the blockchain technologies that somehow do something very different than what we have available today. I just came across a, what they call a collaboration system built on top of the blockchain to foster open but open yet encrypted and audited collaboration. So it’s like a Google Docs equivalent but built on top of the blockstack.
I thought, oh, okay, this is interesting. These things are starting to show up. I think Office 365 and G Suite are very popular and not going to go anywhere. But if you want to kind of roll your own and do it in a blockchain-like of way, there, there’s these new platforms that are coming out that probably a technologist can subscribe to but yet not a business person.
Paul: Well, I tend to be a reductionist, I reduce things. I try to, in my head, reduce them to the simplest things. So let me ask it. Isn’t it just a… it’s not even federated. But it’s a bunch of people, a bunch of nodes recording that block, and they all agree on it. And because, if there’s 99 blocks that agree on it and one that doesn’t, they’re going to discard the one. So if you wanted to – I know this is…at the scale we’re talking about, it’s not reasonable – if I could coerce the 99 to change all of the blocks that credibility could be broken.
So, we store the number 25 in the block, and if I can convince every one of those 99 or 100 blocks owners to go in and change it to 26, I have now changed reality. So that rolls me back to the point of a blockchain is to give some authenticated this-is-what-the-answer-truly-is, or what the information truly is. Am I reducing it too far, or is that what blockchain is?
Greg: From what my understanding and newbie, nascent in this, it sounds right. The open transparent, distributed ledger kind of concept – so the transactions are in the transparent, so to speak and so yeah. So if you could convince those 99 computers or nodes that you have a different version of reality, in theory, that should not be possible given the mathematical sequences that require to compute the blockchain, so to speak. So I guess that’s the counter measure of, it’s not, in theory, supposed to be possible, but we often say that and we actually find that.
Paul: Exactly. So now then we say, okay, well that’s great. So I have a public ledger. That’s great. Now a lot of people seem to infer that it’s anonymous, but the blockchain is inherently referential – from most of the implementations I’ve seen – that will say that, oh, Greg put that number in 10 days ago at 4:00 in the afternoon. And so I think – again, I’m exactly like you. I’m sort of like trying to understand it, and I’m nowhere near an expert. And so people that are listening can correct us – or me – please do so. But it doesn’t seem anonymous at all. In fact, it seems non-anonymous because I can know where that data entered the thing. I might not be able to identify you, but that’s ultimately…
Greg: Yeah. My goal is that it’s supposed to get rid of that problem of anonymous stuff, which is what people get concerned around. And, especially kind of in the social media aspect of things, and haven’t seen anything that blockchain can solve in that world right now, but maybe down the road a future version of Twitter or Facebook will be based on that kind of concept so. You’ll have authenticated entities not bots or whatever that are polluting the conversations and so forth.
Paul: So yeah. We could get to the root of the message, where the message originated, that it came from Paul, or it came from Greg. And we know that because when it got introduced, everybody journaled that.
Greg: Right. And all the attributes were journaled, and it can’t be tampered with. You should not be able to go back and alter that record because that’s going to become bedrock of knowledge, a source of truth, so to speak.
Paul: Right. Exactly.
Greg: I think that’s what appeals to me about this whole concept is the source of truth that can’t be altered. Because it’s a theme that I deal with in my work life is we provide a service that has immutable records of conversations with an audit trail so that we can attest that this is what was said, and here’s when it was said, and it hasn’t been tampered with, and here’s all the infrastructure around that to supports that way of operating.
The Conundrum of Bitcoin
Paul: So, switching gears just a slight little bit here, did you buy bitcoin 15 years, 10 years ago?
Greg: No. It was invisible to me.
Paul: It was just like… I thought about it. I thought, oh, I should just throw up an old machine and mine some.
Greg: Yeah. Shoulda, woulda, could– All those domain names you could have purchased 15, 20 years ago.
Paul: That’s true.
Greg: I just lump them into that category of just whistling through the fields here.
Paul: That’s right. Exactly. Why did you buy McDonalds.com?
Greg: There’s that well known story of the person in England that lost the hard drive with the bitcoin wallet.
Paul: That’s scary.
Greg: Trying to actually go back in the landfill and find it.
Paul: Are they really?
Greg: That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Paul: Wow.
Greg: There will be lots of examples of that. I guess the thing about bitcoin and the wallets, it feels like the way we think about bearer bonds. If you have that thing, it’s yours.
Paul: That’s a good analogy.
Greg: You can’t really question it, I guess. I mean, I guess you could go into the courts or legal system. But if you have it, it’s yours.
Paul: Right. It’s a redeemable…that’s it. That’s the redeemable-ness of it. It’s, it’s like a gold coin.
Greg: Right. Yeah. So it’s sort of, that’s sort of the analogy that we should be thinking about with these. Ways you protect them and… Was it Coinbase or one of these ones were hacked and, and so…
Paul: That’s scary.
Greg: I was thinking, well, you could just go back and trace the transaction. But no. If that, whoever has it owned now can just redeem it on an exchange, and now they can benefit from it.
Paul: Yeah, that is going to be interesting because you could see, you know, somebody say, “Well, I never transferred that to them.” It’s an interesting paradigm shift, because we don’t understand it. We really don’t. What’s the implication of it? You know, if I put a gold coin on the table here and walk out and you take it, there is no trace that I had it before. So bitcoin, I think, knows that I had it before, and now you have it. I think.
Greg: Right. That’s what I assume. And I was talking to a person who is much more versed on this subject, and they described to me why you would think that, but how it would be almost really difficult to actually trace that transaction down the road which surprised me.
I don’t know enough about how it works to…I thought, well how can you even steal these things because there must be a record that you had this at once. And how was it lawfully transferred to the other person? And so, yeah. It’s a conundrum.
Paul: A conundrum wrapped up inside of a what?
Greg: Enigma, I think.
Paul: That’s it. Yes, exactly. Fascinating.
Reinventing Business Solutions
Greg: Yeah, that’s, there’s a whole bunch of opportunity and, and, I think reinventing or reimagining current business solutions around a blockchain way of thinking and the distributed ledger concept – contract management, someone was even suggesting, think about DNS records on top of a blockchain environment or…
Paul: Yeah. I hear you, but it just isn’t solid. It’s not something I can grab onto yet because it seems like it has to be something that needs veracity over time. You know, and it’s like, yeah, DNS, that sounds interesting, but who cares? I mean, what the DNS was six months ago. Okay, you know. I mean, now, I think DNSCrypt – I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. That’s where you actually encrypt your DNS traffic so that somebody can’t get in the middle, and they can’t also just see where you’re trying to go and see where you’re trying to resolve. That’s a really nice thing. That’s cool.
Greg: I can see that being interesting.
Paul: That’s really cool. But, yeah, we’re doing that with a lot of our clients. We use something called Cisco Umbrella, which is basically, they bought OpenDNS. And they maintain their own DNS servers. So rather than going to the root servers or anything, you just use theirs. And so if you’ve got a bad site, they write it down as a bad site, and they won’t let you get there. And so the, they’re the arbiter – I mean, they could be the arbiter of taste. They could say, “No, we don’t want you to go here.” That’s the evil side of it. But what they’re doing is for malware and exploits and all that kind of stuff. And they could even do it for “I don’t want gambling sites being in my network.” And so it’s a cool concept, and it’s saved a lot of our customers’ bacon because they don’t know where they’re going, and then there’s an ad that shows up that has malware in it. Well, this blocks that ad. It’s some really cool stuff.
Greg: Yeah. I can see that being really valuable, especially for consumers and small businesses that rely upon MSPs for their IT services.
Paul: Yeah. Well, and even for big companies. Because what’s happening is… The reason why Cisco could do it is somebody has to keep up with the changes as the slew rate changing throughout the day, you know. This site got infected, so they say, “Okay, you can’t go there now.” And then it wears off, and that site is no longer infected, and they take it out of the list. So some cool stuff there.
Greg: That’s cool.
What is Greg Up To?
Paul: What else are you doing? What’s your days look like now that you’ve sold a company, work remotely, I would imagine. You probably have the same offices. Right?
Greg: Yeah. We have the same office. We’re one of two locations now for Barracuda in the Boston area. And the plan is to keep it the same way for the first, as far as I know, for the foreseeable future. And I spend a lot of my time on a focus of technology evangelism and also business development for the company on the product area that Sonian was responsible for. So I’ll be in Toronto next week meeting with partners and then going to CloudFest in Germany the week after. It used to be called World Hosting Days. I didn’t realize it got re-named, so I’ve been to WHD a few times, but it’s called CloudFest now. And I’ll be giving a presentation on the pros and cons at InfoSec in Orlando the week after that. So it’s an interesting time.
Paul: Yeah, you are busy.
Greg: Yeah, it’s good stuff. It’s a wide variety of activity. It keeps me close to the end customer and that’s what I crave, is hearing the feedback. What problems are you wrestling with? And always thinking of what is the best way we can help them solve the problem for that customer.
At Sonian, we were sort of had the indirect model. So we sold to a partner.
Paul: Right. So you were one step removed.
Greg: And we always were challenged with what does the end user, what does that end business need? And, you know, oftentimes our partners were really good at translating, but for many cases, we were the domain expert for the partner in this area that we focused on – email archiving kind of stuff – and we had our ideas about what was needed, but we always wanted to hear from the end customer.
So now with Barracuda having, hundreds of thousands of end customers, there’s a wealth of opportunity to engage with that business audience.
Paul: Will they change the model to be less partner driven and more direct?
Greg: I think the model is going to stay basically the same but we have a pretty diversified go-to-market engine. There is an MSP focus with Barracude MSP. There is now Barracuda OEM, which is what Sonian was, is. And then there’s the traditional channels and direct sales that they do for the security data protection products.
Is Archiving Messages Relevant?
Paul: So you’ve seen this, that we’re collecting all of this data over time. And how relevant is it that you have a message from 10 years ago in your archive?
Greg: You ask different people, and different people would have different opinions. I appreciate having a durable archive of things. I love using Gmail and typing into to search box and just seeing conversation histories and, if something happens to be 10 years old but it’s relevant, I think that’s valuable, and it doesn’t cost me any money to save it. It’s not dragging down my productivity to have it around. It’s there if it want it. And I’m personally not worried about discovery of stuff. I like having an infinite kind of repository behind the scenes.
I just recently stumbled upon a USB drive that I thought was empty. It turned out it had my PST files from a couple of different jobs ago. I thought, I should just load this up into my client so that I have an even further, longer-term library back, in case I run into people I have communicated with and that kind of stuff. So, it sounds a little bit like a packrat, but it’s not. And I think it’s valuable.
Paul: Well, it’s relationships.
Greg: It’s relationships. I want to use this to train future things, analyze my communication patterns and help me do better going forward, that kind of stuff.
Now for businesses, there’s pros and cons of retaining everything for forever. Sometimes they can’t or they shouldn’t. They have thoughtful policies on how to age stuff out nicely with an audit trail so that you know what you got rid of, and you can defend on in court kind of thing. And some companies are still very rigorous around they don’t want anything past a year. They don’t want anything after six months. And some are the opposite. They only see the value in keeping it and then to be able to correlate it with other records in the company like what’s happening in the CRM, what’s happening in the ERP, what’s happening in the HRIS systems. You start to get this wealth of analytics that can help drive better businesses decisions down the road. So I think that’s a very interesting area to work on in the future.
Archiving Family History: Storing Data for Perpetuity
Paul: What is your thoughts on sort of, I mean, you’re being very thoughtful about keeping your history of information. So you’ve sort of gotten this history. You put the old PSTs in there. And, and I’m struggling with some of the concepts around like family history and old photographs and things like that. I saw another YouTube thing. Norm McDonald with talking about when you talk about your great grandfather, you have one picture of him. And, he said, “In 10 years” – in the typical Norm McDonald – “you’re going to have a million pictures of your great-grandfather.”
Greg: Wow. So true.
Paul: And everything he said. Everything. Moment by moment. And so, as I have noticed with our kids growing up, they never met my father. He passed away long before they came along. It’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind. At some point, they may think about it and say, they get the nostalgia, maybe in their 30s or 40s or something and want to go after it, but it’s on a disk somewhere, in a closet after, maybe, I’ve passed away. And it is a very interesting conundrum.
And that’s just for normal families. But then you have these people that contribute intellectually, that do something more than that, they write a book, or they do all this different stuff. It used to be that you’d go in, and they’d get all their papers and look through them and maybe publish things. Well now, they’re on disks somewhere.
I’ve got this notion for a business of sort of perpetuity. How do you store stuff for perpetuity? Because, they may not be relevant for 20 years. It’s just an interesting thing because do you just say, okay, somebody died. They wrote a several different books. They impacted a bunch of lives. Delete? It’s so easy to store, but how do you perpetuate it? And then how do you also make it available in the universe so that people can discover it? It’s an interesting conundrum. It doesn’t seem like it should be all deleted and thrown away on an old hard drive.
Greg: Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned this. It’s something I think about similarly and from different perspectives. I ran into a local tech seed investor who was describing a similar set of concerns that he had. He was querying me about whether things I did at Sonian could help solve that. And, very, very tangentially maybe, but it wasn’t as encompassing as video and audio and harvesting seed records.
Sometimes I think like Facebook wants to be that at some level as well. You know, they want to be the source of everything. But to self-serve it their own. And then there is the internet archive projects and all these different – whether they’re dot-orgs or paid-for services, was it Memory Box? You could put all your stuff into a… Like all your physical media and ship it off, and they digitize it. That has to be part of what you’re talking about.
Paul: Sure. Yeah. I’m doing the scanning of all the photos.
Greg: Right. Right.
Paul: And then I’m wondering, why am I doing this because is anybody ever going to look at them?
Greg: Yeah. And then analyzers will tell you who’s in it and how old they are and give you more details around it that makes it searchable – that index that you really want, because it’s the index that’s really going to be important of all this content that will probably live on the cloud. And then when the cloud becomes passé, it will live on a super high-powered box you have locally that will never die because it’s so durable. The pendulum is always swinging, right?
Paul: Well, I remember – I don’t know. It was probably in my teens or 20s when I learned about all of the archives at Ellis Island. My family came through Ellis Island. So it was like, wow. That’s really cool. Well, now we have the same thing but it’s not, it’s not stored in a ratified place, to say, this is where it’s stored. But we have it to the 9th degree. You know, we have all these details of these people’s lives. And I just worry about where is it going to go?
Greg: Yeah. How do you pass it on? How do you grant access? Insure, how do you sort of donate it to the public records? The Morman Church does a lot of this in terms of records online and so for a searchable database.
Paul: But they’re only doing it to the genealogical. That’s their interest is genealogies, but I’m saying me playing baseball when I was15 years old in a league. There’s pictures of that. Does that matter to anybody? I don’t even know.
The other thing that I also struggle with a lot is a sense of place, is that there’s not really a good place that says, here’s what’s here today, but here’s what’s here. Here’s what was here 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And the less we do of that, the more we’re losing, because you just don’t know. There’s the history of it is gone, I guess.
Greg: Yeah.
Paul: So those are some things that I’m struggling and thinking through. It’s like, well, what do I do?
Greg: Big brain questions.
Paul: Yeah. Exactly.
Greg: Yeah. I love thinking about that kind of stuff and anticipating maybe things that you could create that would help others sort of who are figuring this out or have a pain point in that area. There is something there. And there’s a couple of different things that are coming, vectors into it, lik the scanning of the media stuff as a service, so you don’t have to worry about it. And that’s a lot of friction to do it. No one has the time, and it becomes one of those rainy-day things you never get to. And then who pays for the storage and how do you pass it on to your heirs? And how do you search across it and analyze it? And then there’s privacy issues. So there’s a lot of things to consider.
Paul: It is.
Greg: It’s a meaty kind of subject.
Paul: Yeah. So well maybe if you have any thoughts on that, let me know. I’m very interested in that.
Greg: Yeah. I can connect you to this other person that was thinking or interested in this, more from like wants to use a service like that because they don’t have it, and they’re worried about records for their kids and ancestors and so forth.
My grandmother and her sister were very much into genealogy, going to cemeteries and rubbing gravestones and they actually wrote books for our family, internal books.
Paul: See, now that’s cool. That’s really cool.
Greg: And it’s a really nice thing to go back and look at occasionally. That’s all different now with online versions of everything. So, it’s really more the index and search-ability, I guess. That’s where some innovation could happen, as well as removing the friction of digitizing the physical assets that we have all around us that we want to get up into the cloud, so to speak.
Paul: Yeah. I think one of the, the coolest things that I’ve ever seen is the Google Face Movies. You know, in Picasa they introduced it, where you could do a person over time. It’s really cool. It’s really familial, if you will.
How Can the History of Places Be Digitally Preserved
Greg: And now, like even you’re mentioning what was the place looking like over time, like Street View, if it’s been a long, long visited place, you could go back in time and look at it, as long as they’ve been recording it.
Paul: That’s cool. Yeah. That’s cool. But I can always remember. There’s this department store called Big N that was at the one end of town that we used and I used to buy my plastic models there. And it’s gone. And if you’re not 50 years old, you have no concept that that it’s a K-Mart or something, and then now it’s probably closed. And it’s really like what’s there? Even this building. This used to be Bay Bank.
Greg: Oh, wow.
Paul: And the room we’re next to, there’s a safe that’s the size of a car. That’s where they put the checks that they were cleaning every night. They were physically clearing the checks.
Greg: That’s a really cool history.
Paul: And this office is where they did that. So it’s like, that’s a cool piece of history and that’s not anywhere except in our heads, and there’s no geotagging way to deal with that. So, anyway, some of the things that keep me up at night.
Greg: And a place for people who have the memories can contribute into the system and others can add to it or double check or verify. It feels like the Googles of the world have the infrastructure for that and potentially the resources like financially and sort of like, hey, let’s just go do it because we can and without having to have a business case.
Paul: Right. Exactly. But this is how businesses get born is these kinds of conversations to say, this would be really cool. And I think what you’re pointing out is that the technology now is… 20 years ago, there would have been… Oh, gosh. I mean, think about building YouTube 20 years ago. Oh my gosh. Who’s going to pay for the storage? But now, like you’re saying, we can buy these components, these utility computing things and just do it and see how it grows.
Greg: It’s going to foster a huge amount of exponential experimentation and potentially you solve solutions to problems that plague us today that we felt almost insurmountable.
No End of Things to Get Excited About
Paul: Have you done much, any, anything in the Maker Space stuff or being a maker? Because that’s really what you were, is probably a maker.
Greg: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny. I haven’t. I haven’t dabbled in 3D printing. It just feels like that’s something I keep saying, oh, that’s when I get more free time. I’d love to get involved with that.
Paul: They are exponentially improving every year. So it’s sort of the longer you can wait, the better it gets.
Greg: I didn’t mean to say 3D printing is the Maker Space but I was at, are you familiar with Twilio, the AP, telephony? I was at their customer conference last year, and they’re fostering a lot of hardware innovation around devices that integrate physical devices that implement their protocol and so forth. And there is this representative from a consortium of Chinese manufacturers that sell to the maker space, and I’m drawing a blank on the name of it right now. But it’s, you can add it to the show notes. I have the card at home. And it was just like a marketplace of everything you could have want, you could imagine. Remember the Edmond’s catalog?
Paul: Yeah, yeah.
Greg: So it was like that, like on like steroids. Anything you had an interest in making, you could get the, like the parts for that through a marketplace, like an Alibaba type of thing.
Paul: It’s not Banggood?
Greg: No, it has like double Es in it, like three or four Es in it.
Paul: I’d like to know that. Have you done much with like Arduinos and Raspberry Pi and things like that?
Greg: Nah. I have a couple. Just played around with it.
Paul: Oh, they’re some cool stuff. They’re really cool stuff.
Greg: Yeah. I have friends that are doing this, and they’re doing things with drones and all that kind of stuff, and getting the drone racing.
Paul: Oh, really? Oh, I hadn’t heard of that.
Greg: Yeah. It’s becoming a thing.
Paul: Is that really?
Greg: Yeah. So as electronics get lighter, faster, all that kind of stuff.
Paul: Oh, that’s cool.
Greg: Yeah, putting on virtual reality, augmented reality stuff. Watching it, kind of from afar and getting… Your know, maybe I’ll take a step in that direction. I didn’t jump on the Google Glass thing when it was on the first iteration, but maybe the next one I’ll figure that out.
Paul: And Entel’s got something, some sort of glasses.
Greg: Yeah. That seems pretty cool. So, yeah. No end of things to get excited about.
Closing
Paul: So, alright. Well, we’ve been talking with Greg Arnette, and what’s your official title now?
Greg: Technical evangelist, business development for the OEM platform.
Paul: Of…
Greg: Barracuda Data Protection.
Paul: Okay. Barracude Data Protection.
Greg: Yeah. That’s the group that I’m in. Yeah.
Paul: Okay. Cool.
Greg: Yeah, it’s like an exciting opportunity.
Paul: So, good friend, great insights. We’ll hopefully see you soon again.
Greg: Thank you for the opportunity to get together. This has been a great conversation.
Paul: Excellent. Thank you.
Greg: Thanks.
Terrific Tech Trends on Our Radar
On Episode 63 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Greg Arnette, about some of the latest tech trends and gadgets that are on our radar.
Show Notes
Greg Arnette’s Website
Find Greg Arnette on Twitter
Contact Greg Arnette
Find Greg Arnette on LinkedIn
Sonian’s Website
Barracuda’s Website
Apple AirPods
Apple Iphone
Android Phones
Amazon Fire Tablet
Verizon Wireless
AT&T
LED Light Buying Guide
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Sonos
Sonos – The Wireless Home Sound System
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Echo Data Called Upon In Criminal Case
“Alexa device helps solve string of break-ins” – An article Paul Parisi commented on
Link SaviorLabs Cybersecurity Assessment
Sections
Sonian Acquired by Barracuda
A Lot of Hard Work
Apple AirPods: The Coolest Technology This Year
Iphones Versus Androids
Phone Reliability and Quality
Verizon or AT&T?
The Latest Lighting Technology
Replacing Florescent Bulbs With LED Bulbs
How to Store Media
Sonos Audio System
Home Automation
Amazon’s Alexa
Terrific Tech Trends on Our Radar
Sonian Acquired by Barracuda
Paul: And so now you were just acquired.
Greg: Right.
Paul: Sonian was just acquired by Barracuda, which I think at the same time, got acquired by somebody else, or there was a sort of cascade of acquisitions there?
Greg: There was. So in early November of 2017 Barracuda completed the acquisition of Sonian, and then about a month later, they announced that Barracuda would be going private. So Barracuda was a public company at the acquisition of us, and then a private equity firm in San Francisco called Thoma Bravo took Barracuda private. And well, now we’re a private company. So it’s a common trend you see these days.
Paul: Yeah. Dell did it and…
Greg: Rackspace did it and GoDaddy did it.
A Lot of Hard Work
Paul: So you were an overnight success that took–
Greg: 10 years.
Paul: And I would say, as a distant observer, a lot of hard work.
Greg: It was.
Paul: You guys did some hard work. So you were tired after IntelliReach. Were you tired after Sonian? Not that we’re after it yet, but was it as tiring, or had you learned more or dealt with it better?
Greg: Certainly had better mental tools to deal with stress, startup world, raising capital, dealing with board of directors, dealing with investors, growing companies and so forth. And, I wouldn’t say tired; maybe a little fatigued. I’m always excited about what’s next. It was excited about finding that next problem to solve, taking the latest in technology trends and turning it into a business service kind of thing.
Paul: So, do you have things that you’re excited about now?
Greg: Oh, so right now I’m focused on helping Barracuda go to the next level. They’ve already achieved quite a bit of success. I mean, they’re known around the world, a brand name and so forth. But there’s a bit movement to migrate everything to the cloud and what attracted them about Sonian was our cloud platform, just the fact that we have sort of “born on the cloud” kind of a company. Back in 2007, 2008, there were a lot of projects that kind of started right around the same time, and they all kind of ran for about 10 years and got acquired or went public, so it’s sort of a traditional path, the enterprise SaaS.
Paul: So, okay, so let’s shift it a little bit. So that’s sort of your professional background. And we talked a little bit about growing up in technology and the right end of a soldering iron.
Greg: Yeah, that’s important.
Apple AirPods: The Coolest Technology This Year
Paul: So what’s the coolest piece of tech, physical piece of tech, you’ve seen this past year?
Greg: Oh, interesting. It was probably just this past year, the coolest piece of tech are the Apple AirPods.
Paul: AirPods. Okay. And why? What’s…?
Greg: They just work so elegantly. It’s kind of a weird little thing. I just got a pair that, after looking at them for a long time and trying out different wireless earbuds, Bluetooth-based earbuds for listening to a podcast or talking on the phone, for my iPhone. I just think the product – the packaging, the seamless usability, just everything is just magical to me. They’re so tiny.
Paul: I was really impressed.
Greg: It’s hard to pick one thing. I’m just so…a big appetite.
Paul: We’ll get into some others. But of all the things, that’s really the coolest that you think. It’s sort of the newest for you.
Greg: Yeah, it’s pretty new. New for me, for sure. They’ve been around for a while.
Paul: I thought it was really… The little package it comes in or the charging case. That’s ingenious. That’s really cool. Well, well done.
Greg: Yeah. Just the way it connects so seamlessly to your iOS device and this is after backing probably three or four different Kickstarter campaigns for various other attempts to do what the AirPod has done well. And even I have one of them…it’s just like is it anchor or…? The really popular USB company.
Paul: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Greg: They have a division that’s focused on audio. They came up with their version of this and I’m just drawing a blank on the name of it. So I finally got my Kickstarter reward. I was like “Oh this is going to be great.” This is before I got the AirPods. And I couldn’t fit the darn things in my ear. They had those complicated gel-based inserts, and it just felt so uncomfortable. I said this is not going to work. So I said I’m going to go for the AirPods.
Iphones Versus Androids
Paul: So now, you obviously use an iPhone. Do you have an iPhone X? What do you have?
Greg: I have a really old in that function. I have an iPhone 6s.
Paul: That’s what I have. That’s what I have in Plus.
Greg: Oh, the Plus, the bigger size.
Paul: Yeah, the bigger size.
Greg: This is after having the original iPhone for way too long.
Paul: Okay, why do you not have a 7, 8, or X?
Greg: For some reason, around my phones, I don’t know if I’m being conservative or just being thrifty. I just…
Paul: Well, you’re a New Englander, so you gotta be thrifty.
Greg: Yeah. So, I saw an article recently. It said don’t get the iPhone 8 or X, just get the 6s. It’s just really all you need for it. So I bought a refurb 6s, and it’s been great.
Paul: You bought a refurb one on top of it?
Greg: From Apple. Yeah. I just bought it outright. Didn’t do the phone, the phone leasing or whatever. For some reason, I like to own my phone.
Paul: Yeah. Me too. I know exactly what you mean.
Greg: And I don’t want to spend a lot, because I’m afraid I’m going to drop or break it. And at some point, I do lust after that iPhone X, but I’ll get one eventually, I’m sure.
Paul: There’s going to be the X plus 1 soon. I mean, they gotta come up with the 11. That’s fascinating. So have you ever tried Android phones?
Greg: I have. Yeah. So before the iPhone 6 I had an Android for many, many years. Yeah, various different Android phones. And I’m a latecomer to iOS, the iPhone. I’ve had iPads for a long time, and iPods for a long time. And I was just kind of wanting to bridge the Android-iOS device gap. I have an Android phone but just got tired of it and said I’m just going to–
Paul: Tired of what?
Greg: It just seemed like it… Let’s see. It was a Verizon Android phone. So it had all the Verizon apps on it were all kind of crappy and it didn’t feel as tight. I was less interested in fiddling around with phones. I just wanted it to be a really good utility device that I could count on and work. I was getting more and more into the Apple product family. I have a Mac and iPads and I just thought, I’ll just go that direction.
Paul: A good friend of mine who is a security researcher, announced on Facebook – this was probably four years ago – “I’m switching to Android.” And he was a real fanboy for Mac and iOS. And I was like really? I just can’t believe this. So I watched, and I kept asking him every few weeks, “How’s it going? How’s it going?” And he was enthusiastic initially, but then about a year later, he said, “I’m switching back.”
And I’m like, “What happened, Dan?”
He says, “The apps just aren’t as tight.”
Greg: That’s a great way to say it.
Paul: It’s like quality control isn’t there. And it is profound thing, but on the opposite side of that, I have seen – which really shocks me – is the willingness for people to switch between iOS and Android based on a sales decision in a phone store. I mean that aren’t techy geeks like us. I mean, I had to deliberately switch and say I’m going to tolerate this for a while and ultimately went back. But I was surprised at how willing…
I have a friend who’s a housewife, and she said, “Oh, I went in and looked at all the phones, and I bought a Windows phone.” This was three, four years ago.
And I went, really? Why would you do that? And then she went back a bought an Android phone a couple of years later. And she – I don’t know if it was good sense but – asked me, “What should I buy?”
I said, “Get an iPhone.”
She went and bought an iPhone, and it wasn’t that crises of changing in their mind. I’m surprised at that. That the people are willing to make that change. I mean, there’s people like us who have a real hard time with it but…
Greg: Yeah. No, I completely resonate with how you’re describing that. Seen similar examples, the phone kiosk at Costco or something. People are just, “I’ll just take that phone” and not thinking about it. Like, I would analyze every app, and I would like overthink this.
Paul: I did the same thing.
Greg: But in general, it just feels like just Android apps aren’t as crisp or tight or something. And maybe it’s there’s less rigor or less…the frameworks aren’t as good. I’ve never built a mobile app, so I don’t know, or built an app that was designed for mobile. I’ve done the what’s the platform for that phone? Something, phone gap or something.
Paul: Oh PhoneGap. Yeah.
Phone Reliability and Quality
Greg: But, for example, so I have a couple of those Amazon Fire tablets around the house because they’re really inexpensive, little devices to have around for controlling things.
Paul: Oh okay. So you’re using them for a task.
Greg: Yeah, like the Sonos controller or the Hue Lighting. I have some Hue bulbs in the house. And I can compare and contrast the iOS version of the app versus the Android version, and they just feel different. Like you said your friend said. It doesn’t feel as tight or crisp. And so that’s one thing that kind of works against me on thinking of Android.
I do follow people in the tech space who switch kind of as part of their wanting to be up-to-date, they switch back and forth every year between each device, just so they can live in the other environment. And I don’t have a need to do that for like my education or I’m out building products for those. So I don’t think it’s important. But I just need a really good phone that’s going to be reliable. I’m on the road all the time, and that’s what I count on the most.
Paul: Yeah. That’s the biggest frustration. I bought a OnePlus, and I bought the second version and the third version. And there’d be times when I couldn’t answer the phone. And I was just like…
Greg: That’s frustrating. It’s failing in its prime directive.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. It’s like this is a utility, you know. It’s like thinking about the old Telco guys who did it a certain way. And that’s the way we did Telco. And it always worked, you know. And now we’re in this Wild West of Voice over IP where it works sometimes.
Greg: Yeah, it’s funny that with all the great technology we have, the quality of the connections has really gone done in terms of like plain old POTS lines, plain old telephone service.
Paul: But I have noticed when somebody calls you from an iPhone, and you’re on an iPhone, the quality is incredible.
Greg: It does some like some magic happens. Some kind of like special handshake.
Paul: My brother called me one day, and he’s like, “It sounds like you’re right here.” He was calling on his iPhone. He called my iPhone. But, man, I was just like, wow. So there is some magic. I think there is. There must be.
Verizon or AT&T?
Greg: HD voice or something I’ve seen.
Paul: Is that just a marketing thing or is that real?
Greg: I think it’s real. I think it might be kind of what you’re describing in terms of a higher fidelity or more crystal clear connection. So, at home, on the Outer Cape, and Verizon cell phone service is kind of spotty. In the early days, I bought one of those network extender devices from Verizon to have a little mini cell tower, but it didn’t really work that well beyond a sort like 20, 30 feet from the device. So it kind of defeated the purpose. But with the newest iPhone, I found that I can… it uses the Wi-Fi connection over my Comcast for voice. And it just sounds really clear when that happens. So I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s a positive experience.
Paul: So now I’m interested. You mentioned you’re using a Verizon phone?
Greg: Verizon iPhone. Yeah.
Paul: So why that? Why not AT&T?
Greg: Coverage, just for me. Maybe it’s just all marketing and it worked well, but they just say the best coverage.
Paul: Well, how about the fact that on an AT&T iPhone, you can do something while you’re on the phone. You can use the internet while you’re on the phone. I don’t think you can do that on a Verizon.
Greg: It’s really weird. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t. I’m not sure why. But previously that it was a big drawback is that – what is it? – CDMA didn’t allow for voice and data at the same time. But with LTE and something else, I’ve–
Paul: Okay. Maybe that’s an edge.
Greg: But I have seen times where I’m on the phone, and I have no data. And I have seen times when I’m on the phone, and I have data. So I haven’t been able to figure out why that works but it’s not as good as the GSM-based systems like AT&T. I don’t know if 5G changes all that again or not but whether we should be able to voice and data at the same time.
Paul: Or something. Or we can cook, do voice and data at the same time.
Greg: It could be in some cases I’m doing a VoIP call and don’t realize it, so it’s just all data anyway. So that might be why it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
The Latest Lighting Technology
Paul: Interesting. Okay so what other things and technology are real cool and zippy?
Greg: Beyond AirPods?
Paul: Beyond AirPods. Yeah.
Greg: Let’s see. Well I mentioned the lighting stuff again. Getting into sort of the latest generation of lighting.
Paul: So are you reinvigorated about that, or was there a lull in it? Sort of you put it in, it worked, it aged, and now it’s… I mean, there’s a whole new world with the lighting. It’s quantum difference.
Greg: It is. It’s amazing how fast it’s changing now. It feels like every six months there’s new advances in that area, just in time to help us save our planet.
Paul: Right. Exactly.
Greg: Low watt, low wattage, high fidelity bulbs…
Paul: Well, I have a 2004 Acura MDX. Works great. One of the lightbulbs burned out, the headlights. I put an LED in. It’s just stunning.
Greg: They have a retro kit fit for that? That’s really cool.
Paul: Snaps right in, and you plug it in. It took me five minutes. And, bought the pair of them for $33. The most difficult thing was figuring out which bulb I needed to get. On Amazon, I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, they have this thing that says, “Oh, tell us about your vehicles.”
I type in it’s an Acura MDX, etc.
“Well, here’s all the things you can buy for your vehicle.” So you can register your vehicle there. And they had suggested the wrong bulb. They sent it to me. Couldn’t fit it in. Sent it back. Got a different set. Popped it in, and man, it’s brighter. It’s whiter. It’s just fantastic. A real pleasant experience. Really better than I thought.
Greg: That’s interesting. I was wondering when that was going to be a possibility as to retro fit, yourself, to LED bulbs.
Paul: Yeah, and it happened without us even knowing it. Nobody gave us the memo. I don’t know why.
Greg: Yeah. Just sort of stumbled upon it.
Paul: Exactly.
Greg: Or Amazon surfaced it for you with their machine learning, artificial intelligence.
Paul: Yes, yes.
Greg: Because they know everything about you.
Paul: Yes, it was like, wow.
Greg: Yeah.
Replacing Florescent Bulbs With LED Bulbs
Paul: So what other cool things? What are you tinkering with around now?
Greg: So setting aside cloud and the business side of technology, which is where I spend most of my time right now, uh, let’s see… So retrofitting LEDs in the house, switching out a lot of fluorescents with LED tubes. Those are really cool. It’s like hit or miss as well. It’s kind of a weird thing right now because you have different ballasts in the fluorescent bulbs. Some work; some don’t. I stumbled across a brand of GE tubes that seems to work best across a wide variety of applications.
Paul: With the old ballast?
Greg: With the old ballast. But they’re never in stock because everyone else has figured that out too.
Paul: So you made the choice of changing the bulb to work with the old fixture, old ballast. What about stripping the ballast out and putting in just a… Like if it were 10 years from now, you wouldn’t be looking at a retro fit kit.
Greg: No, no.
Paul: So why not go with what we would go with in 10 years, in two years or whatever it is? Because I’m making the same decision. My wife has a plant light. It’s a tiered plant light, and it has all these expensive bulbs in it that are 15″ long, and they cost $20 or $30 a piece – grow lights. And I’m saying, well, I can buy new grow bulbs, or I can buy LED grow bulbs that work with the current ballast, or I can just retrofit the whole thing. What would you do?
Greg: So I just went the exact same process–
Paul: Ah, see? This is perfect.
Greg: I was planning – this is after studying a number of different websites and trying out some things that Costco had. They have some LED kits now that, from the FEIT company which didn’t really work out for me so well. So I was on a plan to basically bypass the ballast in my ceiling fluorescent fixtures in the garage, and I bought the replacement they call them… What do they call those? The things the bulbs plug into? I can’t think of the anchors or the…
Paul: Oh, uh…
Greg: The tombstones.
Paul: Tombstones, yeah. I just learned that yesterday.
Greg: So I bought the right tombstones. It’s probably a 15-minute rewire per fixture. And then a friend of mine of said, “Hey, I found these bulbs that…” Someone had told me that you don’t have to do anything. You just put them in, and they work. I tried them, and it actually worked and said, okay, I can save myself the time now. Down the road, I’m sure these ballasts will eventually give out, I’ll just do that rewiring trick then. And so it’s basically just saving some time right now. I would prefer to get the ballast out of the picture. I think they’re probably zapping some of the electricity so… But these lights don’t go on for very long, so I’m not too worried about that, so… I do like the purity of it. I want to just get things out of the way.
Paul: Exactly. Exactly. Less failure points.
Greg: Yeah. Less failure points. So I’m kind of kicking down the road a little bit of more work I’ll have to do. But this way I can just literally plug in new bulbs, and I have it. It’s all working fine.
Paul: Right. And it’s also hard to work above your head like that and change those tombstones is not trivial.
Greg: Yes. Yeah, and so I might have underestimated, actually, how long it would take. But I have all these instructions and–
Paul: And there’s sharp metal up there. You’d think it should be easy. When it’s down on the desk, it’s easy to work on a trough or a fluorescent light. But in the ceiling, your head gets, your neck gets all twisted.
Greg: You’re right. Yeah. So it would have been those projects that I probably have never have gotten around to had I not found the plug and play model.
Paul: I’ve never done that. I’ve never, not gotten to a project.
Greg: And also, I’m kind of a stickler on color temperature of lighting, and I didn’t want like different color temperatures. That would drive me crazy. So got all the same bulbs, and they seem to have a long lifespan. As long as they initially work, they should work for as long as I probably will have to deal with them. So, yeah. So there’s the light retrofitting project. And then sort of pulled out a original whole-house audio system and replaced with Sonos.
How to Store Media
Paul: Oh, okay. Cool. Where do you store your media? Your audio and… Well, let’s talk about that for a minute. So I’ve never been one of these people who wants to rip all these movies and store them on hard disks. I, I don’t understand the use case there. I mean, maybe you can offer insight there. And people use Plex to watch their movies. And I’m like I’ll stream it. I mean you can stream just about anything. Now maybe that’s a holdover from five years ago.
But the one thing I do sort of get is, I want to store all my music. Now, as my daughter has Apple Music, which she loves. She’s only 14, so she’s got a lot less library to think about, and I’ve got stuff that’s pretty esoteric. So I’m thinking, well gee, I want to store everything in the cloud. What do you do for music storage, video storage – that take of stuff?
Greg: Yeah, it’s an evolving conversation at home, but the core anchor is a Mac that has iTunes on it with a very large music library that, over time, as CDs have been ripped and stored electronically the last few years – I mean, maybe the last four or five years – I don’t think I’ve bought anything physical. It’s always been just mp3 files either through iTunes or Amazon Music. And now more recently, it’s everything is just streaming.
Paul: You don’t buy it. You just rent it for the time you’re listening to it.
Greg: Yeah. Sonos has been a good. It lets you kind of look out across all your sources with a seamless consistent interface, and I don’t think much about whether I have it as a local file on my mp3 or whether I’m getting it from the cloud, whether I’m entitled to it forever, I’m just sort of renting the song as part of a subscription. And Apple Music has been the primary music subscription service we use at home after sort of looking at Spotify and Pandora and stuff like that.
Paul: Interesting.
Greg: I think Amazon Music is too, I think.
Paul: Yeah. So how do you differentiate when you choose to play something at home? Do you just say, “I want to play this song” or…? And it goes, figures out where it is or…? I’m wondering how Sonos deals with these online libraries the streaming libraries.
Greg: Think of it sort of an Uber directory around, over it, or, or index of it, if you will, which melds together your stuff you have locally. So you build playlists of local and stuff in the cloud or stuff that you stream. Oftentimes I’ll choose a song and, say, build a playlist around this kind of thing and just kind of be serendipitous about it.
Paul: And Sonos is that, does that?
Greg: I might actually be Apple Music that’s doing that, part of it. But Sonos is giving me access to it. They’re getting better and better about the integration between the Sonos software and the controller and iTunes or Apple Music services, after a long time of being not really working well together, which was kind of a shame because it appeals to the same audience – the high-end Sonos and people that are probably iTunes fanatics.
Sonos Audio System
Paul: Okay so you ripped out a whole-house audio system and put in Sonos.
Greg: Yeah, sort of. Yeah. So that kind of weird time frame around 2004 when home automation was was dominated by these brands called Crestron and Elan and, and stuff. We were fortunate to be able to put a system in when the house was built and kind of just rolled it into the cost of the house. Now that I look back and what we paid for that thing discreetly, it just blows my mind. We have touch panels in some of the rooms that cost like a thousand dollars. And then we hardly ever used them either. They just demoed really well in the showroom.
Paul: Yeah, it looked cool.
Greg: It looked cool.
Paul: But it didn’t transition to usefulness.
Greg: Yeah. You could actually watch a TV on the touch panel. Like we never ever did that.
Paul: Right, of course. You’re standing at the door watching the touch panel. Yeah.
Greg: Like, yeah. Just choose that ABC show or something. So paid a lot for something we didn’t use and, in hindsight, it turns out the quality of the music, the quality of the audio that was being processed through these big mega room controllers was much, much more inferior to sort of just a traditional amp that would power a nice set of speakers. So that system sort of developed problems because it became kind of aged and these system weren’t built, probably, for long-term durability with really good manufacturing. So, just making some big, gross exaggerations here, but…
Paul: Yeah. No, I understand.
Greg: So, they’re very expensive to next. So when, in consultation with a home audio consultant, pulled all that stuff out and put Sonos in, but leveraged the existing amps, the existing speakers, and now we have keypads and controllers on the wall that we don’t use, and I think eventually, we’ll just have them ripped out and just sheetrocked over just so we can make it nice and clean and so forth.
It’s funny. Sometimes you walk into a house that might have been built in the ’60s. They have those intercom systems in, and they look just very dated, and these keypads and controllers will look that same way down the road when it’s all wireless and tablet-based and so forth. So, yeah. So I was able to replace all the control system with Sonos, and it’s the Sonos that doesn’t have the amp. It just drives an amp. So they’re called bridges or controllers or something.
Home Automation
Paul: So do you do much with home automation? Are you using Z-Wave or Zigbee or Insteon or any of that?
Greg: I think I will in the future.
Paul: Oh really.
Greg: I’m not sure which one yet, but right now the home was built.. So the audio system was separate system on controllers. And then the lighting system was based on Lutron, a RadioRA, which was pretty state of the art a long time ago. But you couldn’t control it with a computer. It’s a kind of a closed system. And I’d like to replace it with the modern version of all that down the road.
Paul: Well, when you’re ready, let’s talk.
Greg: I’m going to.
Paul: We had X10 for the longest time, and we switched to a combination of Insteon and Z-Wave. We basically support all the protocols. You can get any device and integrate it. It works really well.
Greg: Yeah. I’m curious around that. I had a big X10 thing prior to the Lutron, and with the bridges and the controllers, I actually just have a whole box of it I want to bring to the place to recycle electronics because it’s just not useful anymore.
Paul: That’s right. It’s true. It’s very true.
Greg: Yeah. The programming and the macros and all that kind of stuff for turning things on and off… It was hit or miss though.
Paul: Yeah, well, it’s gotten a lot better. So it’s gotten a lot better.
Greg: Yeah, there’s a lot of improvement there. And then it, then it’s kind of figuring out what system to be the anchor. Right? What’s your hub strategy? What Amazon is doing with Alexa is pretty cool.
Amazon’s Alexa
Paul: Yeah. Do you have an Alexa?
Greg: Yes.
Paul: Do you use it?
Greg: Yeah. For simple things.
Paul: Did you hear the story in Gloucester? I was asked to comment on this. It happened a young six-year-old boy broke into in neighbor’s house and stole some money. And the woman who was the owner of the house, got home, and her house had been broken into. For some reason, she thought to go to Alexa and listen to what was spoken during this time. And it was clearly this little kid talking.
Greg: Oh, because it, it…
Paul: He was muttering in the room, and Alexa picked it up.
Greg: Wow.
Paul: And the police used that to go to his parents and say, this is not good and all that. But if it were an adult, I don’t know. A conviction? So I’m intrigued by that, and sort of that unintended consequence there. So now you can go home and worry, I guess. You know, whether what you say…
Greg: We joke around all the time with what’s being recorded, where does this stuff live? How much get uploaded to the cloud? How much is discoverable later, down the fact, after the cash gets purged?
Paul: Yeah, exactly. Well there’s another story. A husband and wife were arguing about something. And one of them said to the other – I think this is probably embellished but “What are you going to do – call 9-1-1?” Police showed up.
Greg: Oh, wow.
Paul: So, it was just like, oh, wow. That was an unintended consequence. So you use Alexa. Do you use any of the others?
Greg: No. Like Google Home or Siri? Alexa just started off as… I think I got like a free original, the tower Alexa from AWS or something and said, oh, this is pretty cool. And then I replaced that with the one that has the digital, the LCD, the Alexa Show for the kitchen. So it’s countdown timer, what’s the weather, you know. Simple things. Haven’t mastered the how to talk to it effectively to get it to do things. And haven’t really got it to figured out how to do control Sonos yet because you just have to use a specific order of words to get it to do what you want. As we’re training them, it’s also training us.
Paul: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly.