What Amazon Will Do With Ring

Rich DeMuro talks about a new Twitter bookmarking feature, an IRS withholding calculator and what Amazon will do with Ring Video Doorbell.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Twitter adds a useful bookmarking feature. Amrich jamiro This is
rich on Tech Daily. Twitter is adding a useful new
feature that lets you bookmark tweets to come back to later.
This is different than harding a tweet because that action
is public. Everyone can see it, but only you can
see your bookmarks, which are kept private. The feature is
available now. You can access it by pressing this share

(00:26):
icon under a tweet, then look for the ad tweet
to bookmarks. Option twenty eighteen is bringing some big tax
law changes. The IRS has a new tool to help
you figure out how they're going to affect you. The
government agency launched a new income tax withholding calculator so
you can see how much you should take out of
your paycheck under the new law. If you withhold too much,
you'll get a refund. If you don't take out enough,

(00:47):
you're going to owe at the end of the year
and possibly pay penalties. The new calculator walks you through
a series of questions so you can adjust your paycheck appropriately.
You can find the link at Richontech dot tv. To
say big congrats to a company called Ring. We first
told you about them three years ago when they were
building a y fi video doorbell out of their Santa

(01:07):
Monica offices. And of course we now know Amazon is
buying them for more than a billion dollars. Now, back
then they had just a handful of employees. At last count,
they had over two thousand offices around the world. And
I remember when I first visited with them, they had
just a small office in Santa Monica. The next time
I visited them, they had expanded to buy almost the
entire block. It was pretty crazy. Now. The company started

(01:30):
because its founder wanted to work out of the garage,
but see who was at the front door. And he
looked and looked and looked for a product that was
basically like a caller ID for his door, a little
video camera that would let him see who's there on
his phone. He couldn't find it, so he set out
to build it. And when we first interviewed founder Jamie Simonoff,
he said they had tens of thousands of these doorbells installed,

(01:50):
and recently when I interviewed him, he said they had
more than a million devices out there. Now Amazon is
going to put rings technology outside many, many more homes.
But there's a lot they can do here. First off,
They just recently bought another company called Blink. They're probably
going to combine some of their technology with Ring because
Blink they also make a video doorbell. But really, I

(02:11):
think Amazon's interested in their chip technology. And when I
interviewed them, they explain to me how amazing it is.
It's all this low power stuff that allows a video
camera to run no joke, two years on a set
of double A batteries. So imagine the implications for Ring.
They can put that in their popular doorbells and now
you can install them anywhere and not really have to
think about them for a while. They could also use

(02:34):
Ring to verify package deliveries. So right now Amazon takes
pictures of packages being delivered. Maybe they'll use Ring to
do that. And Amazon needs to cut down on theft
costs because it's a big part of their business right now.
They also can integrate it with Amazon Key. This is
Amazon's program that basically you install a smart door lock
on your door and a camera and this allows the

(02:57):
delivery person to open your door electronically, put the package inside,
It snaps a picture, and it sends it to you
and the person closes the door. They can't get back
in after that. Now, another thing that's really interesting here
is that Amazon has their own cloud connected camera and
they give you a day's worth of clips, so twenty
four hours worth of video clips from that camera for free.

(03:18):
You don't have to pay a dime, and for most
people that's gonna be enough. If something happens to your home,
you hopefully know about it within a day, so you
can go back and look at the clip. Now, Ring
only gives you live view of their camera, so you
can see who's at your door. But once that kind
of window closes a video, you can't go back and
access it unless you pay three dollars a month for

(03:39):
a service plan, and then you can go back and
access many more days worth of archive videos. So it
to be very interesting to see if Amazon changes the
way that's done on Ring, which would potentially save people
a lot of money if they give them some of
their video clips for free for like twenty four hours.
All Right, there you have it rich on tech dot
tv if you want links to anything I mentioned here.

(04:01):
Thanks so much for listening to the Daily podcast. The
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Dmiro that's going to do it for me today. See
you next time.