The Accounting Technology Lab Podcast: Personal Tech at CES 2024

Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

SPEAKERS

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston

Randy Johnston  00:03

Hey, welcome to Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnson with my co host, Brian Tanksley. We’re coming to you live from Las Vegas. We’ve been attending the Consumer Electronics Show this week, and wanted you to get an update on personal technology that might make a difference for you. So some of the pieces that we’re going to talk about include some of the developments in television. For example, micro LEDs were common for both Samsung and competitor, LG. And the micro LEDs, as far as the TV goes, were quite brilliant, quite black in their background. So Brian, what did you think of those particular new televisions?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:48

Well, they’re pretty impressive. Now, the thing you got to know the things different about them is most of your traditional, most of your traditional displays that you’re using today, have a they actually have in the background behind it some kind of lighting. So it actually has a, it actually has a fluorescent lighting in the background. Now the thing about the quantum the IB, excuse me about the about the new LEDs, is that they they actually the micro LEDs had don’t will show up more black, they actually don’t have that light that backlighting in there. And so by not having that backlighting, it makes it much easier for the blacks to be really, really dark black. And so the the fidelity of the colors is really a little bit stronger. You know, we don’t we’re not looking at them, or we have a black, that’s really kind of a gray. It is it is really looks much sharper with the contrast.

Randy Johnston  01:47

Yeah, that is kind of interesting in terms of what it’s done. And, you know, there were some other things that I would just call out that I thought were impressive in the TVs, for example, the 137 inch foldable TV, it actually looked like it would go down into a space that make it livable in many of the living rooms or conference rooms that you might use and so forth. And it would fold up into a component box that was, you know, small the hinges and all the things that related to it seem small enough, I didn’t take a measurement, I guess we should have talked about that, Brian, but I would guess it was about seven foot long, by about 18 inches high by about 18 inches deep kind of a square shape. But it would all fold up into just a single component that you could look at on the screen. Well, and it was clear, it was a prototype.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  02:44

And it didn’t look like anything that would be ready to be a production thing any anytime soon. But it gave you basically a huge massive LED display that you could use for all kinds of things.

Randy Johnston  02:58

So and the other thing that we saw, but both of us just kind of shook our heads and say, Well, I understand why you can build these, but I don’t understand the purpose of it. And that’s the translucent TV displays. Again, multiple vendors had these on display. And the only practical place I saw usefulness was in a front for a display case. But all the other applications, it was just like, Yeah, I can’t see that I would want to use it in that situation. And as I thought about it, I really, maybe I’m just missing it all figured out after this podcast is done. But as of today, I couldn’t quite get it.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  03:39

Well, I will say that if you had a LED glass led like that in on your office wall and you’re having a meeting with someone that was a nonconfidential meeting. I think they can almost show up like the Force ghosts worthy holograms that you have in Star Wars. And I think that would that could be helpful. Because it could make somebody more life size as it were in a virtual meeting. But realistically, you know, if you think about if you think about, you know, the micro led step forward, and the increase in contrast, you lose so much contrast when you go to the see through and so it’s just very difficult to get excited about seeing it there. Well,

Randy Johnston  04:24

you know, the other thing that could be you know, I’ve been in many CPA firms where in industry businesses where there’s glass walls on their meeting rooms, and I could see that could be used for advertising type of things but you know, boy had been expensive wall to build that may be cheaper than etching, but I doubt it. Well, you know, another thing that was, I’d say newer, but we’ve seen before like the Samsung Freestar projector, a number of the vendors now had recreational projectors. Most of them would do HD forte projection, they get up to 120 inches or so, most of them were not all that bright, 500 lumens. But I think their assumption is that you’re going to use them outside, that they’ll need to run off a battery power for extended periods of time and so forth. So a number of the vendors had the Samsung and LG and others had these recreational projectors. This was the first year though I think in years, that we have not seen a breakthrough on regular projection. Now, we did see, you know, a laptop that used glasses. And,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:39

and there was no there was no screen on this. So it basically was a keyboard, you put on the glasses, the glasses had inserts available for your for your prescription. In fact, the this the person that was the tech demonstrating, it actually asked me what my glasses prescription was. And I you know, they eventually put it on without my glasses prescription, but it was still pretty good. But it was a little bit a little bit blurry. But without my glasses, I’m a little bit blurry

Randy Johnston  06:09

too. Yeah, and for my experience with it is actually quite clear and quite good. And, you know, they claimed it was the equivalent of 120 inch screen, I believe it was, but you could have six or seven displays run at the same time. Conceptually, we’ve talked about that before with you. And I think this probably is a real deal. When it comes to that,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  06:31

well, it actually tracks your head position. And so it would change what was being displayed to you. And it overlaid it on top. So it’s augmented reality, it actually overlaid the display on top of what you were actually seeing in the real world.

Randy Johnston  06:46

So you know, for a sub $2,000 computer, not a bad deal. But you know, the next one that in prayer CES is we’ve always noticed a theme. In some years, it’s been iPhone assessories and others it’s been batteries. And this year’s theme Brian was

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:07

pets, oh my goodness, so many pet things, you know, the, the birth rate is clearly down in the United States. So I have, you know, I’m seeing many and many 20 and 30 Somethings now. And I’m I’m in my 50s but I think I think generally, you know, when I’m looking at when I’m looking at 20s and 30s they seem to be having fewer children than then some previous generations. However, there are many, many more things for dogs. So I’m guessing that we had, we had drinks with dogs, because there were so many AI tools. There was you know, there were there were things that would use AI to diagnose your dog there were pet beds, that would take your dog’s pulse and temperature and look at its threat look at it his or her respiration rate. There were electronic feeders and waterers. And they even there even was a screen that had a subscription for it for dog TV and dog and dog Spotify with things that dogs would like on that. Okay, so it was it was very clear to me you know and then that’s in addition to the fluent pet tools and some of the other things where you can teach your pet to press buttons when they want to say certain words and to communicate back and forth with you. So it was just overwhelming you know, it was it was very clear that there was a stupid amount of money that was that they expected to get spent on all things pet this time. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  08:48

and the pet things were far beyond you know the GPS as they would track a pet being lost or any of that it was petting health and pet

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:59

nurse Beatty there was even some stuff to help your pets mental health. And I I’m convinced that the people that did that are the people that used to run the psychic friends network because he if you can somehow divine what my pet is thinking you know from from looking at a picture of it, you know, come off.

Randy Johnston  09:19

Well let’s leave the pets behind this for just a minute and maybe cut over T Evie electric everything is maybe another theme that we saw surface this time around. And my Eevee everything. I just want to name a few things that we saw. Because I believe that if you consider the number of products that had batteries that were behind them, the scooters, the weed whips, the mowers, the snow blowers, the boat motors, the II,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  10:01

chain saws and bicycles and motorcycles and you know, just everything you could imagine. I mean, it was it was like, it was like we went to lithium ion town. And they were just batteries for everything. You know, it was it was absolutely amazing golf carts and wireless charging for golf carts. And there was a as I recall, there was even a self driving electric. There were a number of self driving electric work trucks. You know, it was just, it was a salted.

Randy Johnston  10:39

Yeah. So as it turns out, you know, we did see charger stations of a variety, including the Lincoln welders, you were so excited about seeing something that was welding and all of a sudden, it was a charger, which well,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  10:52

my son just graduated from welding school. And so I was all excited thinking I was gonna get something from the Lincoln Electric Company for for his, you know, to give him that there was some swag. But you know, we went up to it. And it was it was like, basically they said, Oh, well, if we can take DC and make it for TIG welding, guess what we can take DC and make it for charging to?

Randy Johnston  11:14

Yeah, so not that there’s anything out of the ordinary of this, there was just lots of it, I think is the best way to think about it. Now, I’m going to take our attention, though, next to something that I think is more interesting. Now, through the last four to five years when we’ve taught our home automation technology. We talked about a product called Tableau now. Or K to instruct your Mac McClellan, my spell self, both Ron tableaus and our home. This

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  11:48

is spelled ta B. L. O, it’s not the it’s not the the business analytics tool. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  11:54

so the tableau unit, I have enjoyed. And I knew that in November of 23, a new generation of Tableau had come out. And the Tablo captures broadcast television off the air, functions as a DVR and will remove ads, so does ad skipping for you, but

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:17

it’s network attached. So you basically will get a you will hook up an antenna to the to pick up your local signals. And then you can hook up a hard drive, it has some built in storage, but you can hook up a hard drive to it too. But then you also have a wired network connection that you can use. So you can serve it up to just about anything, and time shift and do all those things.

Randy Johnston  12:39

Yeah, and the product is available in mass merchandisers about $109 for the unit with the antenna. And I’ve recommended that some of our family members already, but there was a new generation product that really caught my attention, called free cast. Now, this particular unit, in effect, guarantees that it will pull off the air programming. And then they claim that they would have another 500,000 movies and other free content all in a single uniform device.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  13:13

Now you need to understand here that their definition of content is a little more expansive than you and I would think of okay, so they include to the sea and home shopping network as content in their, in their definition, as well as some of the some of the free networks out there, that that you’re used to that are ad supported, where you can watch older shows or other things like that.

Randy Johnston  13:37

But you know, bottom line here is a very small unit that had no subscription charges. So the I think they’re attuned to the concept that you are subscribing to lots of streaming services, and where people began cutting the cord trying to reduce their expenditures. But they began subscribing to lots of different services, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, on and on and on. And they realized that by the time they summed up all the subscription services, they were spending more than they were with the cord. And the

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  14:16

problem is that if you’re trying to watch live sports or live events, aggregating all of those shows in the in one thing so you can look at what’s available on what’s you know, what’s what’s streaming on all these different networks, plus all of the all of the live things like events and news and you know, your YouTube TV and your Apple TV plus and all those other things, so that you can just search in there and find all of the things to which you subscribe, and then access them directly through their free caste is again a very interesting application. And I think it’s I’ve actually got it installed on my phone. I’m looking forward to testing it out. You know, Randy, that I’ve been working at hours a day since we hit the ground here Monday afternoon. And it’s now Thursday night. And you know, we’ve, we’ve hit it hard to what is it 23 miles, we walked through the Las Vegas Convention Center. And, you know, it’s naproxen has been my daily friend. But but it’s, it’s, it’s been a lot of fun. And we’ve had a nice time seeing a lot of new and innovative technologies, and talking to people from around the world about what they’re doing with it. And

Randy Johnston  15:29

with free cast, they also will help you manage the subscriptions that you might want to have. So again, you’re going to one place. Now there’s one other key technology that we want you to be aware of, at es si ATSC. Now, particularly if you’re in more rural locations around the United States, this new standard for streaming services. Now this is ATSC 3.0. Many of us already have, you’ve already got ATSC two, but this is ATSC. Three, that’s the next evolution of it. And it is very significant in terms of quality, flexibility, and so forth. It has been used around the world. And I might just suggest that this will become the next gen of streaming. And I’ve been patiently watching this for its release. And by the time you’re listening to this, I believe you’ll find that ATSC is released in most US markets but not all there’s still you know, pockets where there’s not coverage.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  16:37

Yeah, so So where I live in Knoxville, so like Randy, or he lives in Wichita, Kansas, near Wichita, Kansas. He has ATSC 3.0 coverage, but I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, and they’ve not brought us there yet. Okay, but Nashville has it. Chattanooga is going to have it Atlanta has it. So it’s you know, in most of your eastern seaboard has it. But it’s really going to be a difference maker for a lot of us in flyover country, simply because simply because it’s going to take a lot of that content and make it easier for us to, to use it on these devices. You know, we used to be we had, we had things that we had devices that were that were first tethered to cable, and then we did streaming on top of that, and it’s streaming has taken over, This now makes these makes these broadcasts with DVRs, and so forth, work more like streaming. And so the idea here is that we’re really transitioning from a broadcast receptor as a TV. And now it’s really a monitor that connects up to a streaming box or streaming stick are one of these devices. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  17:45

and the the ATSC, three o boxes, generally about $100. And you can add them to your existing technology. So that is certainly one that is worth noting.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  17:56

So I’m looking at the Zapper box here, and it is, you know, he has single and dual tuner versions and starts at 249 95. It was actually one of the most expensive, more expensive ones over there. But they had probably a half dozen different items there. And the thing to know about this is that this is really going to take your TV experience and make it easier for you to take advantage of the stuff that’s being broadcast around you. But also treat it more like something that you’re streaming.

Randy Johnston  18:30

So turns out many of the technologies were solid, we’re off the grid now, my friend Brian’s turned in quite the beekeeper and has a bee set of hives out in the middle of the sticks. And you know, through the past year or so we’ve helped him acquire a satellite receiver for that location and whatnot. But he put recently weather stations at his home and it is B location. And the weather station folks also announced during this CES, a relationship with AccuWeather So Brian, would you like to talk to the weather stations for just sure

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  19:09

so so what’s what you know, again, when you when you do things that you have outdoor hobbies, whether it’s hiking or you know, you like to like to garden or maybe you grow your own vegetables or maybe you do ornamental, ornamental gardening or flowers, you know, or you do something like bees like I do, the weather has a direct impact on it. And and so being able to measure and know what the actual temperature is see the problem I’ve got with the with the remote location and many of you probably have a cabin or a lake house or someplace like that. I never it was far enough from civilization that I didn’t know what the actual temperature was. So I couldn’t make the good decisions about what what I needed to do and so forth. And so now that I’ve got data coming in from up there I can know, for example, that it rained three inches the other day, and it was the winds were gusting at 40 miles an hour. And so now that tells me that I need to strip down the hives and do other things like that. So what it does is it really lets me make much better decisions about how I need to respond to it. And it also makes the forecast significantly better by feeding in additional data points into AccuWeather, and other places like that.

Randy Johnston  20:28

Yep, so the stations, which again, we’d recommend, I’m gonna get the model numbers wrong probably by 2902,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  20:36

I have a WS 2902. And it’s about a $300 station, that’s the one I have at home. It comes with about a seven inch LCD that tells you the weather in real time. And you there it will also allow you to have an indoor temperature sensor and put that on that screen too. Now on the other, the less expensive one that I set up on the on the remote site, because there is no electricity there other than the solar and the batteries that I’ve put up there, the solar system I installed up there. So that device is a WS 1965. And it’s about $179 or something like that. And the nice thing about it is it does draw very much current. So I can run a MiFi plus the weather station plus a few cameras, plus some BT beehive temperature monitors off of that off of a small set of, of solar solar panels, again, that are sitting as sitting out there in the middle of nowhere with you know, hooked up to a pelican box that has all of the electronics in

Randy Johnston  21:47

it. So the net here is if you would like to just know the weather inside, outside in a couple of locations, these type of weather stations can be very helpful to you. And I noticed even just watching Brian, while we were working to see yes, and of course we were seeing weather events around the country that he was able to monitor the situation at his home and his remote be are very effectively. So off the grid means a lot to him, but it meant a lot to a lot of the other technologies we saw here at CES. Now there were some other on the grid things that we saw, for example, the ability to cook we wanted to smokers, if you will, the brisket, I think was the name of it BRS

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  22:34

k.it, I think it was but it was a it’s similar to the current generation of some of the Trager and some of the some of the Camp Chef higher in smokers. This is one that had an LCD on the side it had an app and it had an auger so it would feed the it would feed the pellets, the smoker pellets into the into the smoker as they were needed to hold things at temperature. One of the things that I’ve picked up since COVID is I now enjoy smoking barbecue. And so I’ve done brisket said and pork shoulders and ribs and all kinds of things like that. And I will tell you that the ability to monitor things remotely, whether it’s with the computer, you know, with the Bluetooth and Wi Fi attached smokers, that will keep things at a constant temperature, or whether it’s with the with the four, the four thermometer, a Bluetooth device I use, so that when my when my smoker gets outside of the range, it makes a loud noise so that I can get up and go put more chips into it or more pellets into it. It really was a game it’s really a game changer. It takes barbecue from being something where you have to spend hours and hours shoveling, shoveling, you know coals underneath there, monitoring the temperature and then just paying paying fastidious attention to it to now it’s the ultimate lazy guys thing. I mean, you load up the you load up the pellets, you you put the rub or the or you know whatever you’re going to put on the meat. You put it in like the thing it gets up to 200 something degrees puts up the smoke and then you look like a hero 10 hours later. And you know as long as as long as you just stay close and can monitor it the technology does all the cooking for you. Now speaking of technology that does the cooking one of the things one of the we we actually had dinner with some people that that also are associated with the accounting profession. Roman kept chick and Dave see slack and David Prime’s, you know, and they like us follow a lot of these technologies. One of the technologies Dave sees like called to ar 10 Chip was a new su V EAD device. Now, if you’re not familiar su V, this is where we cook things at about 130 140 degrees with water. So we have a circuit we put the put the food in a bag, we then circulate warm water over it, or I guess hot water, I guess it is. And, and at a very low temperature, and then so cooks low and slow, the same way you cook barbecue. But the cool thing about this new Suvi device is that it will chill the food, and then start cooking when it needs to start cooking. So you know, just like you’re just like our parents went through and put a bunch of food in the crock pot, you know, before they went to bed or before they went to work. And then you came and there was you know stew at the end of you know, when they came home from work the next day, and they didn’t have to cook it, the SU VI will actually kick on, let’s say mid morning, it will bring the lobster or the steak or whatever it is you’re eating up to temperature. And then it will it will set it so that it is at the exact right temperature and perfectly cooked at the time you want it to be cooked. And so that was a game changer. Yeah. And

Randy Johnston  26:17

I thought David’s comment about he will never have lobster anyway. But Suvi given a choice ever again, was insightful? Well, these cooking technologies were interesting, because there was also a robotic stir fry setup. And you know, it was interesting to watch that occur because literally this spinning pot with fluids that were pumped into the pot and so forth, pretty much would do a one off stir fry of various dishes, the recipes were automatically fed in, it was an interesting thing

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  26:53

to watch. Yeah, it really looked like a pot that had an auger in it an auger shaped thing, kind of a spiral. And it was sitting there rotating, and it would rotate vertically that would get at a 45 degree angle and rotate, you would hear all the snapping and crackling and everything that was going on with it. And it said it would cook what 120 meals in a eight hour shift or something like that, something

Randy Johnston  27:20

like that. And for you know, less than $4.80 was another claim. I thought a bit more like a cement mixer, but I’m not sure how many of

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  27:27

Yeah, I think of cement MC Yeah, I think you’d probably use a cement mixer. That’s that’s probably a better analogy than at all.

Randy Johnston  27:33

Yeah, and as it turns out, I’m watching this thing thinking that’s actually pretty cool technology for cooking, you know, for a large volume of very specific one off. So this is kind of the ultimate, one off customization. But there’s another technology that we spoke to John and John out of Palo Alto, California, they had a bunch of safety equipment, which we would recommend that you chase down and we’ll try to identify all that for you. But basically, there they were remote lights, if you will. And as Kitaen

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  28:07

was the name of the company eto in and basically

Randy Johnston  28:11

the key with that, Brian, because in effect, they had these shortwave am FM radios that could be run off of power, solar hand crank batteries, and so forth. And

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  28:24

they do the weather, the weather forecast radio that you do with that you do with NOAA, and you had shortwave and you, and you could, you could you could run them off of solar, you could crank them, and they would also do the weather alerts. So I know I’ve got a I’ve got a, we had a we had a tornado, we’ve had tornadoes run through my part of the world, quite often. And so I actually have a weather radio and in the, in the middle of the night, there is a tornado warning, it will be and wake me up so that I know that I need to get up I need to get you know, lower lower down from the second floor to the first floor. But this eat these eaten devices, they’ve actually partnered with the Red Cross for a number of years. And they, you know, again, they’re just emergency devices that you can use. And they will, again, they do you know, they’re designed for people that are working, that are that are again in remote locations. But you know, and again, four off the grid so that way if the power goes out, like happened at your home the other day, during a snowstorm or if you know a tornado goes through Tennessee and I want to know if I want to know that my family has the stuff they need to be wanting to be worn out when I’m away. And and so they there was actually a number of a number of devices. The journey the Odyssey and the quest are the three models and they actually include lights. They have cranks to crank them. And again they have different kinds of radios in there and so they’re a little are expensive. But that’s because they’ve also got the they’ve got batteries as well as electric generation, or you can plug them

Randy Johnston  30:06

in another tool that they had was a combination light. So think like a safety light at night where you know, you might have one in your hallways a nightlight if you want to think of it that way. But if the power goes out, that becomes a chore fully charged flashlight. So from a safety perspective in your offices or your home, the the light unit was one of those like, that’s such a good idea. Why wouldn’t we almost recommend those everywhere like we do smoke detectors or carbon monoxide detectors? That just seems like a standard piece of safety equipment that should be in every office in every home?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  30:47

Well, you and I have our phones if our phones are with us when the power goes out. But what about small children? And what about our pets? You know, the nice thing about these little lights is that even though they run off of the they run off of the electricity, when the power goes out, it gives you another light source so you can see and hopefully don’t trip and hurt yourself.

Randy Johnston  31:08

And where we bought been through really bad storms, the hurricanes and so forth, where the power goes out for a long period of time, all of a sudden, you don’t have power for your phones anymore. And you know, in this particular case, you’ve actually got those in there quite interesting. So we you know, one other piece of technology we just want to call out that might be personal as a personal translator. Now, you know that you can use like Google Translate to translate from one language to another. But we saw a handheld device that’s now in its second generation that will allow you to speak in one language and translates to another and

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  31:50

there were no less than a half dozen of these there were different themes and variations on looked, it looked like some of them looked like a Dictation Box, just a small, a small little device. Other ones had earphones and would work with your phone to do the translation. And you know this, I think the one that we were looking at was from time kettle. But the idea behind these things was that you had a device that would connect it would translate to five languages I think it was and it made it possible for for some of these people who were did not speak English to actually have decent conversations with us in English, even though they are their native languages were Chinese or French or some other language like that

Randy Johnston  32:37

in many of the units had earphones so you could actually almost like an air pod, me able to speak and hear in different languages. So think like un translators on the fly. Now, again, many personal technologies were available at CES. You may have seen some of the other reporting on this. You know, the one piece that my wife very specifically told me she’d seen on the news while we’re in CES was the helix air transport an ET Pol. And Brian took a picture of me next to that same one that was reported on national news. We do know that in New York City and in several European countries that these electronic vehicles are being certified for air transport, there is a single rider type of I call it electronic flying motorbike that I’ve reported on so we didn’t see as many of those but we did see that particular unit here in Las Vegas at CES this year. So we would just mention that Now one final piece that may be is not quite so personal but just a funny he’s 30 years we follow the heavy equipment guys, the John dears and the

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  34:02

Hyundai and case and you know all of the all of the folks that caterpillar all the folks that make big iron, heavy duty things that that Tonka makes, you know that look like Tonka Trucks that look like that look like excavators and tractors and all kinds of things like that. So

Randy Johnston  34:23

with John Deere over the last two to three years, we’ve talked about seeing spray away to fertilize precision, weed kill and so forth. And this year, they announced a new specialized planting drill. And the the well as Brian said, you just can’t make this stuff up. Their new drill for planting weed is called furrow

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  34:48

vision. And, you know, save what you will about the products but it would it actually it actually works in driverless driverless tractors. And this thing would actually go through and perfectly space to see the seeds that you’re putting in, whether it’s for corn, or wheat, or Milo or some other kind of some other kind of crop. And so it was, it was pretty amazing the things they had. Now I’m sure that this device, you know, with all of the different fruit vision drills that were on there, I’m sure it costs the gross national product of the of a major European country, okay. But it was a an amazing piece of technology. And just a reminder here that, you know, as much as we want to think about Silicon Valley is where a lot of the a lot of the technology is taking place, there’s quite a bit taking place on the farm that you may not be thinking about, you know, your former partner will Fleener actually has a system for tracking his cows that looks at the movement they have. And if the cows don’t move enough, they will pull them out in and start to change their treatment up so that they can keep them organic the whole time.

Randy Johnston  36:05

Yeah, and then we’ll talk about maybe some of the other AIS and things like that were that were in the innovation labs in another session with your the tech lab, but I’m just going to close up with the AI that was used in so many different areas, including pit GPT, some of the pit chatting, and you know, going back to your dogs there, Brian, it was like how many different ways can we take care of our pets with these consumer electronics?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  36:37

You know, I love my dogs, Lucy Sammy Theo are all wonderful pups. But I have to tell you that it is very clear that there are people that clearly have more money than sense when it comes to their pets. And and so there were just an obscene amount of things. I mean, things that said that they could read your pets thoughts and and and other things like this now, I believe them about as much as I believe, you know, the horoscope when I read it, okay. You know, again, and if you believe those things, God bless you live your life and be happy. Okay. But it was clear that some of the stuff was made up. But there were there were, again, wearable AI tools, there were GPS trackers, there was a color that we looked at, there was $100, that did some detract a bunch of stats on your pets, but it was $8 a month for the subscription to work with it. You know, there were cat boxes. And, you know, again, just it was just dumbfounding. The, the sheer number of different different offerings in there. In fact, I actually am going to be making for our tech conferences, a video with just the pictures of the pet things. And we’re going to layer layer some music in the background and run in let it run. Because I’ll bet we’ve got 75 to 100 pictures of all these different pet devices that we actually had there. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  38:11

but you know, I guess thinking about the AI piece to the AI coffee making machine was another one of those like hall or the coffee roasting machine and so forth. interesting ideas. Many of the ideas that we see at CES don’t make it to the light of day that many of them are game changing, and that’s part of the reason we want to report to you. So this is Randy and Brian signing off from CES and we hope that you got an idea or two that you can use today.

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