Article posted on Jan 04
Okay, so apologies in advance… this is a long one.
As most of you know, we did various podcasts over the last year about various Utah companies and the cool stuff they are doing. Several people have asked us if there is a way to get a transcript of those podcasts. As such, over the next several days we will be posting podcast transcripts here from the last year. Again, these are fairly lengthy, but we hope they are of some value.
| Steve Spencer: Good afternoon everybody. This is Steve Spencer with the Utah Tech Spotlight. I’m here today with Eric Smith from Control4. Eric, thanks for joining us. | |
| Eric Smith: Sure. Thanks! | |
| Steve Spencer: Eric, Control4. I guess for starters, why don’t you just talk to us a little bit about the name, what it means and how that really ties in to what the company does. | |
| Eric Smith: We started the company about fours years ago. A little more than four years ago and we basically manufacture home automation. It’s stuff that controls all the stuff in your house. Most people aren’t very familiar with it but bottom line is, everything in the house talks to each other and you can really get some synergies out of making things work together. | |
| We’re talking about your home theatre and your audio and your video and your security and your intercom and your lighting and your temperature control, kind of, all the things work together. Make it so that you can have a cool lifestyle. It’s kind of sometimes hard to explain without going through a few scenarios. | |
| 01:11 | Steve Spencer: Do you want to maybe walk us through a scenario? |
| Eric Smith: I’ll give you a couple. One in my house, if the smoke detectors go off. Instead of just beeping really loud and annoying you, they do some actual valuable things. You know, most people know that you get trained when you’re a kid that if you have a fire in your house it’s not the fire that kills you, it’s the smoke. Right? | |
| Steve Spencer: Right. | |
| Eric Smith: Well, most of us in the United States, at least, have nice forced, air heating and ventilation systems for cooling your house and doing those kinds of things. I like to call those equal opportunity killers because they just makes sure the smoke gets everywhere evenly. When smoke detectors go off, turning off the A-Track system is a pretty good idea. So you don’t circulate smoke. | |
| Steve Spencer: Sure, that’s huge. | |
| Eric Smith: Another issue that happens is lighting. It’s dark at night and night is usually when fires kill people. Even if there is a fire in the day, someone figures it out and puts it out. Or they see it and they can get out. The time that most people die in fires is the night. So, in my house, smoke detectors go off, the heating system stops circulating air, the lights come up part way. Not all the way so they don’t blind me. Wake me out of bed but they come up 25%. | |
| 02:14 | The house actually announces over the audio system exit routes and tells me even where the fire is so I know which detector sensed it. Even all the motorized blinds in the garage door pop open and things like that to help me get out of the house quickly. |
| Steve Spencer: Now, talking about this different pieces of automation, can you just list off for us, I know there are several pieces that you folks either manufacture or partner with other companies that tie into your course system. Do you want to touch on what some of the key things are? I know you touched on smoke detectors, that are H-backer or there are some real corner stones of what your integration strategy works with. | |
| Eric Smith: The foundation of our system is usually a thing called the Home Theatre Controller. The truth is that most people don’t wake up in the morning saying I need to get me a home automation system. It’s not even a category most people are aware of but most people are going out and buying flat panel TVs and other things like that for entertainment because we are kind of moving to HD-TV right now. | |
| 03:10 | Almost all consumers understand having the problem having a TV and a receiver and a tape deck and a tuner and a DVD player and a satellite receiver and a Tevo and they’ve got all this gear. They got, like, eight remote controls and only their fourteen year old son knows how to turn on the TV and watch a movie. |
| So, our entry point often is, a simple little box that makes us so that one button pushed on the remote turns on the TV, sets all the surround sounds right, turns on the receiver, flips the inputs, makes it all correct and kind of greets you with an onscreen interface. Through that interface then you can have access to all your movies and all your music. | |
| Eventually, if you add other things, your lighting control and your temperature control and your security and IP cameras and all kinds of things. That’s kind of our core foundation and that’s usually how our dealers who sell our products into the home is by basically solving that problem of the Home Theatre. | |
| Then it’s very easy to start adding other products, like we make a thermostat. You just take your current thermostat off the wall, put ours on and now while you’re sitting in your theatre, you can change the temperature if you’re feeling a little cold or a little warm. You can also log onto your house through the internet and control your temperature. So, while you’re on vacation you can turn the air conditioning back on the day before you come home. | |
| 04:16 | Steve Spencer: If I could just get it to bring me a bag of chips, I think I would never move.
[Laughter] |
| Eric Smith: You’d be set! We make light controls. So you can take out your existing light switches and replace them with ours. Now those lights would just work like normal light switches but they also have dimming capability but more importantly, they also talk back to the controller. So now they can be turned on based on a schedule. | |
| So, when you’re not home it can make your house look occupied. When you start the movie the lights can slowly fade over twenty seconds to kind of create an ambiance. We also make touch screens for user interfaces around the house for controlling the music through your home and lots of other devices. | |
| Steve Spencer: So, one of the things that I thought was really interesting when you and I spoke about this before was that really a key component to the solution is WiFi. As people listen to this and they think, “Oh yeah but this is probably for those new homes that have the wiring all built in and so on and so forth. Really, most of the components that we are talking about are WiFi enabled, is that right? | |
| 05:11 | Eric Smith: We actually use two wireless standards. We use WiFi for some thing where a higher bit rate is needed. Then there’s another standard called Zigbee. You know WiFi is 802.11, Zigbee is 802.15.4. It’s another iTripoli standard. What’s cool about Zigbee is that it’s a mesh networking control technology. |
| So that’s what’s in our light switches, our remote controls and some of our control devices but leveraging the two makes it possible to actually put this in any home. So, you don’t have to have a brand new home to do this. That’s really what has limiting the market historically. It’s really only been a pretty high end phenomenon. | |
| So, it’s essentially rich people that just happen to be building new homes this year. By just solving that wireless problem, if we didn’t solve some price problems, we could at least sell to all rich people not just the ones that happen to be building a new home this year. We have also solved some price problems where we can actually get into a much broader market not just the multi-millionaires but regular people can have this stuff. | |
| 06:04 | Steve Spencer: So, there are lots of different verticals that I want to explore further in our conversation here but let’s start with just the home users. So, if I am a home user, one of the easiest entry points for me, really is that if I’ve got mp3s on my computer, which I probably do. I’ve been putting them on my mp3 player. |
| I’ve been inputting them into iTunes so I that I can load them on my iPod. If I set up a window to share on my computer, and if I take my DVDs that my kids are always scratching anyway. My little girl has taken to actually shoving the DVD movies in the VCR which is wonderful. So, I can load my DVDs in a changer. I can share on my Windows box and all of a sudden, it’s all integrated. I can access all my movies on screen and my music. | |
| Eric Smith: So, so this Home Theatre Control will automatically then catalog on your Window share on your PC or on USB hard drive if it’s plugged into the back also. Catalog it, we’ll get the cover and get the rich meta data with information about the album and what year it was made and all that kind of stuff so you can even browse your media. | |
| 07:06 | So, it does that, catalogs it all, makes it all available so you can now browse it your TV. You can build play lists on your TV. You can then stream it around the house too for the other products we make. You can also, like you said the DVD changer. If you add a DVD changer to the system — you just put in your DVD in and automatically our system will load that DVD into the changer and then go out into the internet and find out all the information about it, bring in the cover art. |
| So now, you have rich meta data about your movies too. In fact, my kids, that’s how they do it. They don’t touch the DVDs anymore. They just hit the button on the remote. They go to videos and they can browse the DVDs by cover art. So, my two-year-old can go find Barney and start Barney and never scratch a disc and I don’t have to worry about it. My two-year-old does know how to hit the four button, just turn on the whole thing. He knows how to hit videos and chose that. | |
| Steve Spencer: Now, what about the speaker components because one of the problems with not just Home Theatre but home sound systems has been distribution of the speakers. To use these same wireless capabilities. Can I take a speaker set upstairs and plug into the wall and once I’ve got AC power I’m good to go? | |
| 08:10 | Eric Smith: Absolutely you can. We make two versions of that, basically. We make a big centralized amp like an eight-room amplifier. Where if you do have wires in the walls and have speakers you can put that in and it’s a very cost effective way to add audio to all the rooms but we also do have a product called Speaker Point. |
| It’s basically a box that plugs in the wall that has a WiFi receiver in it and an amplifier. So, imagine you want to add music to your kitchen, all you literally have to do is you go buy one of these boxes from us, plug it into the same spot the microwave’s plugs in. Set it on top of the kitchen cabinets, place two speakers up there and your done or put them in the bookshelves in the living room. | |
| If you have some attic space you can even go up and actually do custom installed speakers but you don’t have to pull wire anywhere. You just need to find power, which there’s power all over your house. | |
| Steve Spencer: So from a Home Theatre Home Sound System, stop having to repurchase DVDs because my kids are no longer destroying them. Perspective obviously. From those respects, this makes a lot of sense for the home consumer but some of the other features that maybe the cameras, I guess, it depends on the person. The light switches is, at least for me, as a home consumer maybe a little bit of a questionable luxury. | |
| 09:15 | Where have you seen more uptake? What verticals have you seen that really have different needs that people may want to hear about other than the home consumer? |
| Eric Smith: Well, we sell into several other places. MDUs is a place we go into which stands for Multiple Dwelling Unit. We’re in a lot of condo complexes where they put us in every single unit. We’re in a lot of hotels and resorts are putting us in their properties. We also have a deal with Johnson Controls where Johnson Controls will actually, they OEM our products, put their names on them and they are going after light commercial. | |
| Kind of the sub hundred thousand sq. ft. office building and doing things like scheduling lighting. But what’s there is also interesting is there is a whole new thing happening right now. People wanting to be green. There’s the whole take care of the environment kind of thing happening. One thing we can show is putting 25 of our light switches and just having the system automatically set them back instead of running them full bar, dimming them 15%. | |
| 10:11 | Also in your common areas — doing things like we’re in a hallway. The lights trip with the motion sensor than turn back off after a little while. We have a study we’ve done and just by purchasing 25 light switches, you doing it fairly moderate. Just dimming the lights 15% which is not even noticeable to the consumer. |
| Then managing lights more effectively in some of the common areas. Reduces CO2 emissions because you are not using the energy equivalent of driving a car a thousand miles.
Steve Spencer: Really? |
|
| Eric Smith: That’s our yearly savings. So, it’s almost like taking a car a thousand miles off the road every year that you have one of these. | |
| Steve Spencer: Interesting. Well, and not to mention the cost savings as well. I can guarantee you right now the light in my walk in closet is on. I’m sure of it. | |
| Eric Smith: But taking a simple contact sensor and tying that to that light so that, basically, every time you open the door it trips the light for a certain amount of time and turns it right back off. It can be smart enough where if there is some ambient light coming in from a bathroom into a closet or something. It doesn’t turn on the light during the day but if it’s after sunset then it will turn on the light but it only turns it on for three minutes and shuts it back off again. | |
| 11:10 | Things like that are very easy and you save a lot of energy. You can even save more when you start managing the heating system and the air conditioning system aggressively. So when you arm the security system, it automatically sets it back. So, there’s a lot of people starting to get interested in the lighting, not so much from just the luxury side. It’s not that we can’t save tons of money for people today. Our lighting stuff is a little bit expensive still today but to go out and put your whole house in lighting might be $3000. |
| So, it could take quite a few years to pay this back but you are saving the environment and you are being a better citizen. It’s just like buying a Honda Civic. You know the hybrid Civic versus the regular Civic. You have to drive it like half a million miles before you get the payback. That’s not why most people buy those cars. They buy them because they want to be good to Mother Earth. | |
| Steve Spencer: A couple other aspects I’d like to touch on with Control4. In addition to the products that we’ve already talked about is a little bit about Control4 from a business perspective. I think you mentioned Control4 has been around for four years. Can you give us a little input on the size of Control4? What it’s up to? I don’t know how much you want to share from a financial perspective with everybody. | |
| 12:16 | Eric Smith: We generally don’t disclose financial numbers but what I can say is that we are at a 175 employees. We had, for our first year of revenue, we had three x growth the second year. We expect to double again this year and we are the largest, by far, vendor of these kinds of systems in the world. |
| We ship thousand of systems a month now. We shipped over half a million devices at this point. So, shipping lot of products, having lots of success. We’re leading in the industry that we’re in. | |
| Steve Spencer: Okay. Here in Utah when you look at the skills sets and the types of employees that can draw for employees in Utah versus the skill sets or the equipment or the products. Do you need to bring from somewhere else? What do you find is valuable and worthwhile to produce in Utah and what do you find is more economical to have done somewhere else? | |
| 13:12 | Eric Smith: Pretty much all the physical products we sell, all the items we sell come from overseas. Unless they are in Mexico but the bottom line is we build our stuff overseas. We do keep all of the engineering and even the mechanical design, industrial design — all that’s done here. Except for one product. We do have one product the we OEM and put our name on. |
| Everything else we have and our whole product line is stuff that we’ve engineered here. So I’d say all the high value added work is done here and we like Utah. We’ve always thought it was a great engineering bed. As a matter of fact it’s kind of a joke in the home automation industry and in that kind of home controls industry that Utah is the capital of home automation. | |
| It is stunning the percentage of tech companies that build products for this space that are based in Utah. Probably most Utah people don’t even know that but that’s the case. | |
| 14:00 | Steve Spencer: Interesting. I imagine we destroy more DVDs with our children and need more bedrooms in our home with more individuals that are leaving the lights on than anybody else. |
| Eric Smith: In the home lighting market, I’d say three of the top five manufacturers of lighting controls in homes are in Utah. Us being one of them. The other being Lite Touch which is a company based in Salt Lake and Vantage which is this company based in Orem. Several major multimedia product installed speaker companies are here. | |
| One of the biggest cabling companies called Kimber Kable is here. I mean there is like five or six speaker companies. The highest in speaker in the world is based in Utah. | |
| Steve Spencer: Really? And who’s that? | |
| Eric Smith: It’s Wilson Audio and they’re in Springville. They make speakers that range from in the low end $ 20,000 a pair up to $ 200,000 a pair. They’re kind of world leader in the really high end speakers. So, in building a company here in Utah, I’m with you. I love the environment. That’s why I live here. | |
| I mean, we’re sitting in your office looking out the window of some absolutely stunning-looking mountains right now but looking past a wonderful, stunning-looking plasma TV to do that.
[Laughter] |
|
| 15:10 | Steve Spencer: What do you find the core components of a business? Everything from getting initial capital to, you know, on the management team you’ve got marketing, you’ve got sales, you’ve got financial, you’ve got technical. Then the resources like you mentioned, the engineering. If you just looked at those and said, “Hard versus easy.” Which of those have been easy and do you thing Utah does a good job of and where was a little bit more of a challenge? |
| Eric Smith: You know, I feel we’ve had a pretty good experience as far as like being able to see the market and understand what the need is for the market and building a product that meets it. So, I and my business partner for fifteen years now, we’ll last. I think we’ve been pretty good at that piece and so we’ve had not needed to looking for that so much. | |
| I find engineering talent to be very good here. I found it to be pretty good to find sales we put all over the country. So, we’ve haven’t had any real challenge and in all the places we’ve tended to go outside of the state is we’ve tended to go outside the state for legal. Just because of some of the deals we’ve been doing. | |
| 16:15 | There’s not been that many deals done here in Utah as big as the ones we’ve had to do and so we’ve found hiring expertise outside we’ve done. Same with intellectual property lawsuits. We’re in the middle of a lawsuit right now. We’re being sued by a big competitor and we’ve gone out of state for that kind of a thing. |
| We’ve had a lot of good experience, actually using PR here locally. We’ve had a lot of experience building marketing and add campaigns. We found it pretty easy to do that. We’ve found it pretty easy to hire for most of the roles within the company here. | |
| Steve Spencer: Great! So, for those that don’t know, we’re actually recording this podcast the day before the Tech Spotlight. So, we’re going to sit down tomorrow and get a really good look at your product and go hands-on through it and I know I’m very excited about that but in addition to what people are going to come away from that seeing. Can you give us any kind of sneak-peek. What’s on the horizon? What’s the future got in store? | |
| 17:11 | Eric Smith: You know, we’re careful about that too. Occasionally, some of our dealers find these things and I get in trouble [Laughter] but one of the things we do is we move music around the house digitally. So, over the network and making it possible to have all your music on a hard drive and then access it from any room in the house. |
| We’re definitely working on doing the same thing on video. So you can take you’re entire collection of DVDs and not just having them in a DVD changer but have them sitting on a hard drive and access those from all over the house. We’re working on some other cool features where more things with remote access. Ability to log onto an IP cameras so you can remotely view your house and see what’s going on. | |
| We’re continually working on new user interface devices that will make people happier to be able to access their content better than what we have today. Those are the kinds of areas we’re working on right now. | |
| Steve Spencer: Great! You mentioned media and music specifically. As you look at media and what media is available and I know there’s a big battle right now about DRM or not DRM. Can I get a raw mp3? Does that affect at all the ability to integrate with your system? | |
| 18:11 | Eric Smith: It definitely does and it causes challenges. We’d really like tighter integration with iTunes but Apple just won’t budge. Now Apple is really leading the charge to remove DRM from music too and so we like that. But we are bringing in this fall and we’ll be introducing downloadable music services because I do believe that the way the world’s moving, is just like if you use Rhapsody or some of these other services. |
| You don’t need to buy music anymore. You just can just buy subscription and every song ever written will always be available to you and I think that’s the wave of the future. I think it will be the same with movies and videos. You’ll pay one subscription and pretty much every TV show that’s ever been recorded and every DVD, every movie that’s ever been made and every documentary that’s ever been made will be available to you. | |
| You’ll pay a monthly fee. It’s kind of like your cable fee now but right now those are linked. The distribution piece and the content piece are usually one. You have cable. They’ve got a cable on the ground that brings it to you and they also provide you with the services. I’m not sure whether those will be linked or not but I think they’ll be both models. | |
| 19:07 | I think sometimes you’ll buy bandwidth from someone and possibly you’ll buy content from someone else in the future and it may be bundled. I really don’t know but what I do know is that the next five to ten years you won’t watch, except for news and sporting events, I don’t believe you’ll mostly watch. |
| Content has been provided for you that’s on at 7pm or on at 8pm. You’ll just go to a site and you’ll go to Today and if it’s not Katie Curic or Matt Lauer or whatever his name is that’s on there. You’ll go to Today and they’ll just show you the top stories and you’ll pick the story you want to watch. | |
| You won’t deal with this whole watching it the moment they choose to give it to you and if you want to watch Gilligan’s Island episode 76 you can go get Gilligan’s Island episode 76. I really do believe that’s the way it’s going. It’s systems like ours will create that kind of capability. | |
| Steve Spencer: Now what’s your take on user created content? Podcast is a big buzzword out there right now. As we move forward with a vision like what you express there where content is just content. It’s available. I buy my pipe to get stuff. Do you really see that user created content getting traction? | |
| 20:13 | Eric Smith: Absolutely but I think this kind of thing is what opens that model up because now if your providers are set on the internet, you can go get it from anywhere. But the challenge right now is bringing it to your TV. Right now we tend to like to watch our video type things sitting at a TV and not at a computer and we tend to do other kinds of content on the internet. |
| You talk about the lean-forward-lean-back experience but right now that link is still challenging. Right? How do you watch your YouTube in a format that looks okay and is acceptable on your TV. So, your just sitting there being entertained and find it. | |
| And how do you find the content? I think those things need to be solved but, yeah, I do believe that the model is going to be — there’s content out there, you’ve got a receiver sitting here in your living room and you go pick it. That really levels the playing field. So now NBC has no better ability to distribute it in your home than you yourself have to then distribute it in my home. | |
| 21:04 | Steve Spencer: One of the other things I want to touch on in the podcast, Eric, is so that everybody listening really understands that Eric Smith and Will West really bring a lot more to the Utah Valley than just Control4. You guys have done some other companies here. I know you are working very actively with the school districts. Can you fill us in a little bit on some of that? |
| Eric Smith: Will and I met sixteen years ago, I think it was now, and started a company together and this is our fourth company. So in Control4, the real reason for the name is that it’s control for lighting and control for entertainment but it does have this fun side. Meaning, it’s the fourth company we’ve started together and all four companies have been the world leader in what they did. | |
| One that most people would know about is our last company which is now know as iBAHN . When we started it we called it STSN. It’s kind of the world leader in internet for hotels. So, when you go stay in a hotel and pay $9.95 for the internet, we’re the pirates on the other end collecting that fee. | |
| 22:07 | We built that company. Started back in ‘98 and did it. Will is really famous. I’m kind of his sidekick on raising money but one of our claims to fame that we don’t like to claim very much but others give us is that we’ve raised more money in Utah than anyone else. At least private equity. We’ve raised in our careers about $ 330 million. |
| Steve Spencer: Wow, I’m a little shy of that number.
[Laughter] |
|
| Eric Smith: So, we’ve raised a lot of intra capital and we’ve worked hard though to try to make more capital available to others too. Will was very involved to getting the Fun To Funds kicked off for the listeners who don’t know about that. The Fun To Funds is basically a $ 100 million fund that the estate of Utah invests in venture capital firms who are willing to locate an office in Utah and invest in Utah companies. | |
| Will is currently the chairman of the Fun To Funds and so that has done a lot to help. There’s at least five different VC funds now have moved and put offices in Utah that were not here earlier…
Steve Spencer: And that’s you. |
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| 23:07 | Eric Smith: …based on that. Will is also the chairman of the UTC. So, he spends a lot of time on that and helping that get going. Helping tech companies grow. I spend most of my spare time working on the state charter school board involved in the charter school movement and helping create more school choice in Utah. |
| Steve Spencer: I want to make sure that we touch on that a little bit just so everybody knows it. When I walked in Eric’s office today, he was telling me some really exciting stuff going on with the school board. Is that something you can talk about Eric? | |
| Eric Smith: Yeah, I mean, for listeners who don’t know what a charter school is. Basically, the cool thing about a charter school it’s like injecting free enterprise into public education system. What happens is a group of parent can essentially create a charter application which I like to equate to a business plan for a school. | |
| So, it’s just like a group of entrepreneurs going to a venture capitalist with a business plan for an idea to run a business but the difference is you’re coming with a plan for a school and the goal is not to make a profit at all. As a matter of fact, you’re not supposed to make a profit. It’s just how will we take state dollars and create a school that will educate children and further the education in Utah for children? | |
| 24:14 | The concept is to procreate different ideas and different approaches, essentially inject choice because all kids are not the same. The districts are really good at educating the broad market but there’s going to be different kids that want different kind of niche needs and I found out about this years ago. |
| Charter school movement in the country started ten to fifteen years ago and when I found out about it I thought this will be a great thing to have here in Utah and I found out that some efforts have already been made to create a pilot program in Utah for charter schools but I felt like it should be a broader thing. | |
| So, I got involved with a group of parents and we actually pushed for a broader legislation to kind of open charter schools up. Back in that day there were a couple thousand kids in charter schools that were in this small pilot program that was a three year program. Today, there’s more than 25,000 students in Utah in charter schools | |
| The cool thing that’s happening is not only are the kids in those schools really getting a unique environment and a unique learning experience. I’ll give you an example. Tuacahn in St. George. Most people are familiar with the musicals that go on down there but there is also a performing arts high school that any parent that wants to send their kids to can sign the kids up for and it’s free because the government pays for it. | |
| 25:16 | That’s a charter school and kids can go learn about performing arts. There’s one in West Valley called East Hollywood High School. East Hollywood High School is honestly built originally for troubled kids that were not doing well in high school and were bored of high school and were thinking about dropping out. |
| What it does is it puts a film spin on all of their courses. So, when their studying physics they’re studying lighting about shows and when they’re writing, they are writing scripts. When they’re doing art, they are designing sets and so it really focuses the curriculum around film production. So kids really get excited about it. | |
| There’s a new one we approved today. This morning at the state charter school board we approved of a school called Venture Academy. Venture Academy is an expeditionary learning school. Where what you do is each term you basically do a two-week expedition. You might go to the Colorado River and study all kinds of things. | |
| 26:06 | Then, from then on, that term, your biology lessons and your writing lessons and your mathematics lessons and lot of your things are built around that expedition you did. It’s just been a great experience. The other thing that’s happened though is also some other schools that are more traditional. |
| What they try to do it to bring more of a private school, academically more rigorous approach to a school but to make that available to more people not just parent who can afford a private school. The schools I’ve built have been like that. There’s a school called Timpanogos Academy in Lindon that I started. | |
| It’s just an academically, rigorous, back-to-basics study the evil, white guys kind of school and it’s been very successful. What’s interesting to see happen though is not only the kids that get into this school have been benefited and seeing really good test scores and things like that but we’ve seen changes within the districts around these schools. | |
| We’re the districts of awesome students and they started asking questions, “Why are we losing all these students? Why do all these parents want to go to this other school?” So, we are even seeing improvement within the district schools. So, what’s happening is not only the education improving in these schools but education, as a whole, in Utah is getting better because of charter schools | |
| 27:13 | Steve Spencer: So how do individuals listening to this recording right now find out more about this? |
| Eric Smith: I would do a search. I’d go to Google. I don’t even know the web site. Go to Google and go USOE. Utah State Office of Education and under there there’s a charter school section that’ll show you about the different charter schools you can find in your area and find out information. | |
| Unfortunately some of them are still way oversubscribed. The wait list and they can only handle so many students. Many of them are not and it’s a neat thing but if there’s on in your area that’s oversubscribed, write an application and build your own. It’s such a neat experience. | |
| Steve Spencer: Wow, that’s huge. Speaking of finding more information, anybody who listens to the podcast today. Anybody who listens to the podcast today. Anybody who sits in on the Tech Spotlight event that we’re having on the 18th who is interested in doing exactly what I did which is having my credit card leap into my hands so that I could swiftly go out and buy a DVD changer and your control unit and several other pieces of hardware, ones I can Google for my spouse. | |
| 28:19 | Where can somebody go to purchase some of the equipment that we’ve talked about today? |
| Eric Smith: We have a thousand resellers in the United States and the best way to find them is go to www.control4.com and there’s a dealer locator. Like there’s a where-to-buy link.and you can punch in your zip code and it will show you the local guys. I will tell you there are different level of guys. | |
| There’s some guys that focus on the really high end and if you don’t want a couple hundred thousand dollars on them, they won’t even look at you. There are other guys that would love to come in and just help you with the Home Theatre and sub-thousand dollar kind of thing. | |
| Steve Spencer: Great, Eric. We’re right at the end of our time today. I want to thank you for not only meeting with me today but for all of the exciting things that clearly Control4 is clearly doing in the industry and all of the exciting things that yourself and Will have and continue to do in the state of Utah. | |
| 29:11 | Eric Smith: Well, I’m glad to talk to you and I’m excited about tomorrow too. |
| Steve Spencer: Going show it to the guys. Good night. Thanks so much. |
Article posted on Dec 04
You know, Jeremy Hanks is a very easy person to get excited about. If he’s not busy making his company of one Inc’s 50 fastest growing companies, then he’s probably busy interviewing with Utah Business Magazine about the fact that his companies is one of the best companies to work for (You can see his smiling face on the cover of this month’s issue), or just generally finding ways to make Utah a better place (such as wit the event where he got Guy Kawasaki here to Utah to speak to 500 people, and then donated all of the proceeds to charity!)
As I read through the article on why people love working at Doba, there were several specifics… renting out theaters for family movie nights, ping pong tables, and more. But one thing that I know is really at the core of it all (and I think you will hear this come through in the podcast) is that Jeremy is just a really nice guy. There are few people I have ever met that are more genuine, and just generally likable.
Please join me during this podcast in learning more about what is not only a successful, and exciting (not to mention fun to work at) company here in Utah, but also in celebrating a person who is a real icon of what an entrepreneur, and a person should be.
Article posted on Nov 12
For those who were at the event with Unspam, you will know already that this local company does an awful lot more than the Child Protection Registry that got them their initial start. Unspam has got a lot of really interesting products that they are making available to folks (most of them for free) to help put a collar on this beast we call Spam. They have solutions to protect your web servers, and keep an eye on questionable users, and other solutions to track the email address harvesters that are at the head of the Spam food chain. Check it out. Watch for the Doba podcast in a few days, and look for some exciting announcements about upcoming events (we are planning to change things up a bit, to make sure that people get more value from the events.) Let us know what you think, who we should be spotlighting, and if there’s anything we can do better!
Listen Now (34.2 MB, MP3)
Article posted on Jul 16
Well, unfortunately I was not able to get the audio all pulled together and online before leaving to Norway for two weeks, so forgive me for the delay, but we now, finally, have the Podcast interview with Ryan Money from HireVue. Kudos go out to Ryan and Mark from not only making HireVue the company to watch in their space, but for making yet another Utah company into a front-runner. In doing these interviews, I really found Ryan and Mark to be some of the most grounded entrepreneurs I have worked with yet. Bringing HireVue to the point where it is is an impressive feat on its own, but I think that the fortitude they have shown in overcoming some of the real obstacles of being a startup is what gives them a seasoned, realistic perspective that people don’t always get to learn when everything goes well.
I really enjoyed getting to know them both as part of this Spotlight, and will look forward to (and keep us all posted on) their continued success.
Article posted on Jun 20
First I want to apologize… I am running a bit behind this week. Normally I would have the podcast from the event up by now. I will earnestly endeavor to do so by end of week.
But enough of my whining… on to the review. Friday of last week we met at the Bohemian to hear Ryan Money from HireVue tell us about his company, and to share his wisdom. While Ryan’s product was definitely intriguing (and we will have all sorts of good stuff about it during the podcast Q&A), I think that all in attendance would agree that Ryan’s demeanor, openness, and willingness to tell us all “..let me tell you how I got this scar,” was what made him especially engaging. In addition to getting to know about his product and company it was as much an entrepreneurial peer to peer session as anything.
In regards to the product, it was good to hear how well it addressed two distinct end of the spectrum: Those hiring lots of cheap local labor, and those hiring specialized, expensive labor that they need to scour the globe for. In the first example, in becomes clear how having video interviews of a large number of people allows a person, or committee to quickly go through them and decide yes or no, without taking their valuable time in the actual interview process. In the second example, it became clear how flying people around, impacting their schedules and lives (not to mention paying for the travel), and then compounding that in a large company where they might have to go to more than one location in order to meet several of the key players can be painful and expensive.
The World is becoming a smaller place. It is clear not only that a product like HireVue is needed, but its reviews make it clear that it is THE frontrunner in the space.
Want to learn more about HireVue? Watch here for the podcast. Want to learn more about exciting companies here in Utah? We’ll see you at the next event in August (we’re skipping July).
Article posted on May 23
Thanks to everyone who made it out to the event on May 18th to hear Eric Smith from Control 4. For those who might have missed the event, or those of you who attended and would like to hear more from Eric, have a listen to the following podcast. Eric and I speak at length about Control4, and how they home automation solutions allow you to have access to all of your media from on on-screen menu on the Television… How to watch all of your movies without ever having to touch your DVD’s again… How to access your MP3 shares, adjust the temperature, control your lights, make your family safer, and all sorts of other really slick stuff. We also touch on what Eric has been up to with Charter schools here in Utah, and what Eric and his partner, Will West have done with their companies, and how they are giving back to Utah.
Listen Now (34.2 MB, MP3)
Article posted on Apr 23
I want to thank everyone who came out to our April Utah Tech Spotlight event. 
This month we spotlighted Mediaport, makers of a a digital content distribution kiosk, or “music ATM.” As many of us have seen recently, the parking lots of Blockbuster or Holywood Video continue to become more and more empty (although they still never seem to have the movie you’re looking for), while redbox units are popping up all over the place. So the question is, as music sales continue to decline, will music stores continue to become more and more empty, just like the video stores have been? Perhaps, but Mediaport offers an exciting solution to not only help bolster up music sales for struggling music stores, but to offer a wider selection of music and other media in locations where a full-blown store is impracticle.
Due to the large amount of data that can be held on a decent sized disk array, a Mediaport unit can hold far more music than all of the shelf space in the rest of the store. This combined with the fact that the vast quantity of music still being purchased is 4 years old or older, allows a store to instantly offer the selection that they couldn’t before. Think about it… how often have you walked into a music store, ready to buy, but walked out empty handed?
It all sounds good, but is it just a theory, or have the proven it? Well, the stores where the units have been placed have showed that roughly 10% of all revenue coming through the store is coming through the kiosk.
There is no question that media purchasing and consumption will go through some major changes over the next several years. I think there is no question that 5 years from now we will all be streaming media over the airwaves to our cell phone/ media player combos. But there is an interim step… not everyone adopts that fast, and technology never seems to become ubiquitous as quickly as it seems. Mediaport is currently the lead player to capitalize on the “redbox” step of music and many other forms of digital media (podcast, movies, etc.) If they play their card right in that transition, they could definitely be in the mix for wherever media is headed.
They’re here, they’re hip, and they’re hiring, and I for one am happy to have a Utah based company at the forefront of such an exciting industry.
Want to learn more? Check out the podcast to hear an interview with John from Mediaport. Thanks again for attending.
Article posted on Apr 02
We want to thank everyone who attended our first Tech Spotlight. The technology that was spotlighted was Mozy by Berkeley Data Systems. I am personally a user of mozy, and loving it. What is it? Well, imagine you could take 30 seconds, download a program, install it on your computer, and it would just run silently in the background from then on, making sure that a secure backup of your files gets stored by Mozy every time you make any changes.
This stuff is just cool. Basically, it takes the folders and files you specify, and replicates any changes. Cooler if than than, it does block level incrementals (copies only the bits that have changed… even from large files like video or databases). It Can handle open or locked files. It is all encrypted. Up to 2 gig for FREE! It even stores 30 days snapshots, so if you accidentally corrupt a file, get a virus, etc. Just pull the version from 30 days ago.
Drop your laptop? Get a virus? Remove files you didn’t mean to? No sweat.
If I don’t sound entirely objective about this product, forgive me. But after running it a few days, the peace of mind was so awesome I logged on and bought it.ÂÂ
Want to know more?  Check out the podcast, or subscribe to the podcast with 30 minutes of Q & A with the folks that make Mozy happen.
Have questions or comment? Chime in here and Mozy will be happy to respond.
Thanks again to all who attended, and to Josh Coates for such a great presentation. We will have pictures up within the next day or two as well.ÂÂ
