Welcome to this week’s Between the Bytes where we’re not as smart as your average nerd. I’m Arash Bakhshandehpour and this is Gary Arnold.
We’ll kick off our news this week we have some interesting news from Facebook, they are lowering the price of their Oculus Rift VR. This is the headset that people can use to play games, experience virtual reality scenarios and all kinds of different things. So they’re lowering the price from six hundred dollars of four hundred dollars to better complete would be compete with the PlayStation VR headset is being sold right now the playstation headset they’ve sold over nine hundred and twenty five thousand units and so okay so it’s probably feeling the heat a little bit and decided to lower the price to be more accessible to more people here’s your reminder time to start between the night let’s say you’re late we already started we started without you you’re late don’t sleep in next time.
Another big news is the Audi A8 has announced its level three autonomous car. This thing can stop, it will steer, it will accelerate, and it’ll basically do everything driverless for you up to 37 miles per hour. Obviously local laws dictate the level of autonomy your car can function at but this car is the future. It’s really cool. Save up for that.
We also have some exciting news locally here, Eric Montague from Executech was featured in the Utah Business podcast this week. He was interviewed by Lisa Christensen and they talked about some concerns that small businesses might have with their cybersecurity. Eric gave a ton of great tips on that podcast. It’s available online and we’ll post that link in the description. Some of the basic tips that he gave of course were keeping regular backups of your data and also having protection in place such as firewalls and things like that. It’s an interesting podcast so make sure you take a look.
Another piece of Facebook news that came out last week which we thought was really interesting this Facebook has announced plans to build a village. They purchased not too long ago a 56 acre plot of land across from their headquarters in California for 400 million dollars. They now have plans to develop that land. It would be over 1500 units of housing for their employees and other people. It will also be mixed retail space and they’re calling it a village. Employees can work and live and do everything. So Facebooktown brought to you by Facebook who is basically taking over the world one things at a time.
Then lastly if you missed it, yesterday was Prime Da. There were some awesome deals going on for Amazon’s big day. You could have gotten an echo for $90 a Kindle fire for a $65 or even a Roomba for $250. So at least set a reminder for yourself next year.
This week’s product demo is going to be the Nest thermostat. The nest thermostat can be used at home or in your office which we have here. At the Executech office we have three of these. I also have it at my house. We wanted to demo a few of the features that they have. This thermostat it’s obviously a really cool design. It’s really easy to use and to change the temperature all you have to do is just turn it up or down. To see more features you click it in and you can go through and adjust all the different settings, calendars, and you can check your energy usage and see how much your air conditioning or heater is running per hour. You can see how many Leafs you’ve earned. The leaf is the way the Nest indicates that you are in an energy-saving temperature or mode so the more leaves you earn in a month the more you can see that you are saving energy at your home or at your business. Some other things you can set with the Nest thermostat is home away assist which means when you are not around and it does not detect motion – it is motion detecting, when it doesn’t detect motion it will go into a warmer or cooler mode with depending on the time of the year. You can save energy by not heating or cooling your home when nobody is at home. Another cool feature is the app. Here we will view this office which is our CEO’s office and you can see that we can change it here and set the thermostat lower and it changes dynamically on the thermostat.
The app also has all the features that the thermostat itself. You can see the outside temperature right now you can also see the history of this particular thermostat, when it’s come on during different times of the day, and so forth. You can adjust whether it cools or heats during the springtime or fall when things are a little more temperamental. You can set it to heat up to a certain point and then cool down to a certain point so both can be on at the same time. The Nest thermostat is a smart thermostat so will learn your habits. For example, if you are turning your thermostat down to 72 degrees before you go to bed at night and you know every time at 10 o’clock. It will automatically set it down for you and you won’t have to do that every night. It learns your habits and helps you save energy. The nest thermostat is usually two hundred and fifty dollars but they’re often doing promotions for fifty dollars off. It’s a great addition to any home or office.
BtB
This week on between the bytes our featured guest has Ben Rees. Ben is a team lead here with the Executech. Would you mind telling us your background and what you do for Executech?
Rees
Yeah of course, I’ve been doing IT for 13 years now. I was a sys admin in my previous company and then came here. I’ve been here for about three years. I am the South One team lead currently so I take care of my clients and then have my guys on my team that that I take care.
BtB
So you handle your own clients as well as your team. How long have you been doing that?
Rees
I’ve been in that role for a little over a year now.
BtB
Are you seeing any specific tech trends or any anything that you would recommend to companies that are working out there right now.
Rees
Yeah, backups obviously are a big thing for a company. With ransomware it’s always good to have backups. We push backups a lot. Also the latest thing is Teams. It’s a Microsoft product where users can collaborate. They can be in groups and then communicate between the different groups. It’s kind of a chat app for businesses.
BtB
We like to learn a little more about you specifically. What of what kind of apps are you using?
Rees
So the latest app that I found for my phone it’s called Arrow Launcher. It’s just a different launcher that you can put on your phone. It has your apps and then it also has a section where it will show contacts, text messages all on the one screen. There’s different widgets so you can bounce back and forth so it’s easier to manage.
BtB
Lastly Ben just to end things here, are there any TV shows, podcasts, or movies that you recently saw?
Rees
Lately it’s been all about NBA app. Then I’ve also been reading a book called The Four Agreements. Which is good. It’s a short easy book but it’s a kind of good stuff.
BtB
Okay that’s awesome thanks again Ben. And that should wrap it up for this week’s feature in Between the Bytes.
Hey we’re back here at the not-studio of Between the Bytes. We’re here to sign off with our tech tip of the week. This week we found out a cool little feature you can do if you’re finding a song that you really love and you want to just put it on repeat and jam out to it on YouTube. You can go to the URL and just add the word “repeat” after YouTube. So add repeat to whatever the URL was for that video and you can listen to it on repeat. We know a lot of the fans have been asking for this to watch Between the Bytes over and over again and so this is for you.
Then you close things off let’s let’s have Alexa take us out of here. Alexa can you beatbox please? See you next week.
