Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, explored CES 2025 in Las Vegas in January. In this third CES 2025 podcast, they highlight some of the most interesting personal technologies they saw at the conference.
- Watch or listen to the CES 2025 Overview podcast at https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/154712
- Watch or listen to the CES 2025 Meeting Tech podcast at https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/154822
- Check out Randy’s column about CES 2025 at https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/154312
Watch the video, or listen to the audio podcast below (transcript below):
Or use the below podcast player to listen:
Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:11
welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host Brian Tankersley, we spent together week together at CES, and we’d like to talk to you about personal technology that we saw now, when we pick off personal technology, it’s kind of business oriented and kind of not, you know, we are so intermingled in our business and personal lives. We know a lot of personal technology becomes technology that you use for business. One example of that is the grand pad. Now, the grand pad is an interesting design concept. The goal here is to be able to support elderly parents or clients that you’re trying to protect their identity, if you will. And it turns out that the grandpa concept, I think, is going to be useful for a long time now. The founder, Scott lean, who is the CEO, formally worked at Intuit in their banking division, and he was concerned about the quality, sorry, the security and the ease of use of devices, and so they have created a product that can do restricted cell phone calls, secured email restricted and protected websites, private video calls to zoom and teams and other approaches that has a secure camera and more, and it has additional live support. Now the tablet, I think, could be used as the only device by the target audience here, and the target, by the way, they said, was 75 years old and above. And they claimed that they had one user that had been 116 years old using the product. It also has a cell phone application so you can actually interact with the users the product itself 449, the subscription costs are 65 to $95 a month live. People US based are taking the calls and so forth. So Brian, that’s kind of my quick run on it. Now,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:32
the 65 to 95 some of you are going, I don’t think so, but remember that this the $95 a month plan. And I think maybe the $95 a month plan, as I recall, also includes unlimited 4g cellular. So this is really a tablet replacement for a cell phone, and it’s designed to be locked down such that you can only you can call certain people, and you can lock it down to where you can only call certain people if you want, you know with it. And so it’s a, you know, think of it as kind of a walled garden approach to to computing for folks, you know. I, you know, I my, I lost both of my parents over the last five or years, five years or so, and I remember in their late years, they really struggled to deal with technology, and they were very much subject to suggestion one of my friends, one of my friends. Late father actually spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars, lost hundreds of 1000s of dollars to scammers who said they were going to post pictures of him accessing accessing porn on the web to his family and to publicly and everything. And, you know, it was very embarrassing for him. And so he just, he just paid it unfortunately that that meant that he pretty much, he pretty much ran out of money around the end of his life. And so it was really, really a sad tale, because he, he spent mid six figures on on this, on these scams. And so the idea of protecting people from this, the idea of making things easier, you know, I think about the the work I did 25 years ago, helping, helping some local, some people use basic computers back then that were, that were significant clients of the firm. And, you know, I think, I think this is something that comes in with the advisory, the advisory piece that we have in that we’re doing things that are not traditional tax and accounting. We’re protecting these people. We’re making their lives better, and sometimes it means we step out and do weird things. Like, you know, the guy I knew that was a managing partner that used to help a lady buy cat new Cadillac every year. You know, it wasn’t in his job description, but the client was thrilled to have the assistance, and he actually owned a minority interest in a car dealership, and so he was quite successful at it. So he’d say, if you take it this is in that same vein,
Randy Johnston 04:51
it is. And if you take it like this with perhaps high net wealth clients who could be scammed, you know, providing this and then helping the. Family members connect might be good now, the $65 a month plan, by the way, you’re correct. It includes the 4g E, llte, data, all of their apps, which is voice and video calling, email, photo, the camera, the calendar, the internet browser and the companion app for you to use on your cell phone, as well as the regular updates, and they’ll do a warranty replacement on the device if there’s any downtime. So on their website, they actually list all of those things and more, including emergency 911, calling and phone number portability, and this idea of 24 by seven by 365, live customer support being designed for seniors with no spam or scam calls. And they also have volunteer people. They they gave it a name. I’ve forgotten the name today to just ambassadors. Thank you. Just to talk with people again, a pretty interesting doggone design. Well,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:04
the, the one thing I’ll say about it too, is that, you know, my observation for the last three years of my father’s life, when he was in, he was in a assisted living facility and then a memory care facility, Dad was extremely lonely, and I feel, I feel so bad about it, because he had to. He had to get away from his home. He had to give up all his tools. He had to give up his pets. He had to move to this new place with new people that he didn’t know, and he was not in a place where he was absorbing new tricks very well. And so it’s, I’m I think this giving people community and resources and ways to communicate with people, including doing video chat, which is, you know, not the simplest things for people to pick up. I think this is a really powerful tool that that can make a big difference in the lives of your of your high net wealth clients. And I you know that one thing that they actually talked about, that they’re planning on doing in the future is setting up a setup where you can have an icon for yourself or for somebody at your firm. You can have an approved icon for somebody that is a trusted contact, so that they can contact you when they have questions. And so it’s a it’s an interesting, real interesting offering. I think it
Randy Johnston 07:18
is. Well, besides grandpa, there was also evolution in the ATSC three Oh technologies. Now that technology is 4k free streaming of TV content. There were new devices. One in particular that caught our attention was called My velo, which allows the integration of paid services like Netflix and YouTube and Prime Video Disney plus and more. But the device is $100 and the device is supposed to get a 4g extension and Wi Fi for another $100 the person that explained this to us indicated that you could run a VPN from your home to your vacation home to your office and so forth to run this video content in multiple places. And the 4k free streaming services on ATSC are good. Now, we were surprised that not more of the country got covered during this past year. Last year, 75% of the country has covered this year with 76% of the country. So to me, that’s not a lot of movement. But the last year, I actually had recommended the ATSC three Oh products, and wound up buying a number of these, including the one from freecast, which did two ATS c3, oh ports and two ATSC, one oh ports. And freecast also has a little bit of this type of streaming technology, but not at this low price point. The freecast was $200 whereas this one’s only $100 so Brian, I hope I captured that fairly correctly. Other things that you might mention about the ATSC three, oh, or these devices, no,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:23
I think you got it right. I think what’s happening here is that, is that the over the air component is something that’s kind of coming back, you know, for many years, you know, in the in the 90s and 2000s we we only had cable, we didn’t have an tenants. And now what we’re finding is that the a lot of the content, especially live sports, that’s on network television, is is harder to stream over, over the wire, and so in many cases, we can get a lot of free content, including a DVR in that content, which is one of the things I. Been doing quite a bit lately. I’m building my own library, DVR, ing, that content onto onto a box. And so it’s a it’s kind of nice because I don’t have to have the streaming subscription for things. And frankly, many of the things that I like to watch haven’t been available to stream, you know, things from my childhood and so forth. And so it’s, it’s nice to, it’s nice to be able to to go in and and again, to access all of that content that’s available on all of these different channels. Because, you know, even though you think of, you think of Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live, which, back in the day, had had basically four or five channels, you know, you had the ABC, NBC, CBS, and then you had a PBS station and then maybe an independent so maybe five, five channels here in town. But now there’s no less than 25 channels because of all these other the my TVs, the antenna TVs, the you know, there’s even shopping networks that have, like jewelry TV, that have have broadcast stations in here. Now I don’t expect to DVR and watch much jewelry TV, but it’s a it’s it’s interesting, nonetheless, that the amount of free content that’s available just for the price of hanging up an antenna and and cut and getting it,
Randy Johnston 11:12
yeah, and I’m anxious to see what you write about in your home networking course this year, and how that evolves, because, You know, the tableau TV that I use for DVR purposes has a new version as well. And, you know, I think people are getting somewhat exhausted of so many subscriptions, paid for subscriptions and
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:34
so, and having to switch between the inputs on most TVs is not a lot of fun when you have to have these external devices, and so it’s nice to have one that will do it all. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 11:45
Now another thing that both of us got to try, and we made an appointment to do this, was the lumen glass. It’s a assistive device for blind. It’s built on the concept of a self driving car, and has a lot of the same processing technology in the headset. Now the headset supposed to run for two to three hours. And, you know, part of the issue was the expense of maintaining guide dogs was high. You know, we have a lot of the training cost related to a guide dog, not to mention the ongoing care. So
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:27
they they stated that that over the lifetime of a guide dog, it was about 10 years of service and about $200,000 and that’s that’s simply not scalable for 3 million blind people, and
Randy Johnston 12:40
right now, only about 2000 guide dogs are being trained trying to service 300 million blind people. Now it turns out the founder here was, well, most of his family have visual disabilities, so that was part of his motivation, but I found that I learned how to walk with this fairly quickly, and I think a blind person can, and the goal is that through charitable gifts and perhaps governmental purchases, that they’ll be able to supply these headsets globally. They are already doing it in Europe, with about 400 users. So we wanted you to be aware of this haptic, you know, guide piece, which I thought was pretty cool.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:25
Now, don’t get too excited about this. Yet it still feels like a 1.0 in fact, I think some of the case was, was actually 3d printed, as opposed to being created in injection molding and so forth and and so it still is not quite as robust as I would hope it would be for something that somebody was going to live and die by and can, frankly, drop quite often. And so it’s a, it’s an interesting 1.0 device, and I think it’s, I think this is one to definitely stay tuned for. And if you’re willing to be a bleeding edge person, and potentially, you know, I think you can make a big difference for somebody that in your life that has visual impairment,
Randy Johnston 14:05
absolutely
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:09
okay. Next we have this hydrogen power storage tool. You know, one of the big problems with hydrogen storage is that it tends to make metal containers brittle, and it really, it really causes significant damage for that damage to them, you know, again, the hydrogen ions are just pretty brutal. And so this is a, this is a to a device called high viva, and what it’s designed for is if you have solar panels or if you have some other way of generating electricity, this is a way of storing that electricity for times when you can’t, you don’t have that. You know, I think about the snowstorm that we’re in the middle of, the snowpocalypse that’s taking place right now outside in my home as we record this on January 10. And you know, it strikes me that this could be almost like some of those. Home backup batteries that we’ve seen show up other places. So it’s a, you know, it is containerized and modularized. So you can, you can stack different levels of these things into in for you. So, like, if you look at this device, in this one you have a you have, I don’t know what the top part does. I think it’s the part that stores and retrieves. But then on the bottom, you have three levels of of of these cylinders that are actually containing the the hydrogen in it. And the hydrogen, interestingly enough, is stored in solid form, as opposed to in in gas or liquid or any other kind of form. And so it’s a it’s a very, very interesting approach that they’re taking. And I think it’s, you know, again, I think as we try to explore and make alternative energy much more successful, and we try to exploit all of these things, so we don’t necessarily have to build the biggest, the biggest future power grids because of these little micro cells like this. This actually looks pretty interesting.
Randy Johnston 16:04
And, you know, we talked about the hydrogen cells being used in aircraft out of Australia in the past year, and also in the past year. Talked about the echo flow system, and those people were also at CES this year. But these concepts, you know are important, I think, because we just don’t have the wherewithal to rebuild our grid right now. So Brian, I think that gets us to kind of the next thing that I know you got excited about, but I understand why. Because, you know, the ability to have small businesses doing specialty work is important. You know, we’ve seen a lot of this makers type of world. But one product, you said, Oh, we got to go look at the x tool. And I said, Okay, Brian, we’ll go. Oh, yeah, Brian, you were right. We should have looked at this.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:59
Well, the cool the cool thing about this, they have, it’s about a 2000 you know, they have different levels of devices, but this is a at its core. The device that I’m looking at is about $2,000 and it’s a it will do the the same kind of cutting and and shaping and printing as a cricket. So it will print. It will cut labels. It will go in and do laser engraving. It will also do laser cutting of wood and light materials and and including engraving and metal. And so it was, it was quite interesting to see these devices, because I think about, you know, my wife’s in sales, and she works with realtors who are also in sales. And I think about this, this ability to mass customize with small lots and these, these tools, like x tool, are quite interesting for that, just because there are, you know, there’s so many places where it’d be nice to be able to to make this or make that, or make something that looks a little more professional than something that just got printed out on Avery labels that you stuck on on some kind of device. And this really struck me as something for for both the the maker slash hobbyist, as well as somebody that’s in some kind of branding where they could, they could actually create all kinds of amazing things with it. The new, interesting part about these is that they have some new AI based software that will help you create custom art to go on these things. And so it’s a, it’s a very, it’s, it’s, it’s a very interesting set of devices. And again, the concept of having a device that can, that can do ink jet printing, that can do that can cut labels and and can can do laser engraving, as well as laser cutting of wood. Becomes very, very interesting in a very short period of time in a $2,000 device,
Randy Johnston 18:50
yeah. And with AI make, you know, there’s software that drives all that. It’s pretty interesting what can be done. And they’re, you know, trying to scale it up with belt feeds and other pieces. But, you know, many of the other competitive tools that we’d seen at prior CES, and they were still there this year, are $10,000 or more per unit. And here at two or 4000 you know, you got a deal that the do it yourself, enthusiasts can actually build a business and, you know, sell custom things
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:19
well, and that’s, that’s the thing is, that is that it’s a, you know, for some people, it is kind of a gamble, and a $2,000 gamble, you know, the the hurdle you have to have to make a $2,000 gamble work is quite different than the hurdle you have to have for a $10,000 gamble. So, it looks, it looked very, very interesting. It looked like something if you had somebody that, you know, if you had a couple, where maybe they they wanted to do some woodworking, and then she also wanted to do some scrapbooking and crafting kind of things. It strikes me that they could both use this and make great use of it in a huge different, huge amount of different ways. Absolutely. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 20:00
Well, this one’s this one’s a sad one to talk about, because, you know, again, as Brian said earlier, we’re recording this on January 10, and we discovered a product called the del fire wildfire detection unit, which is designed to detect wildfires at a 10 mile range. Now we said, oh my, wouldn’t these be great to install in places like California and Hawaii and so forth, but that was before the massive fire that’s been, you know, that destroyed so much. There was there
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:38
we we literally saw it on Tuesday of this week, which was the during the day. And we said, well, maybe this isn’t going to be very valuable. And then Tuesday night aren’t Tuesday night. Suddenly, California caught on fire and and, you know, Pacific Palisades and Hollywood just had this, this, this catastrophic, apocalyptic fire. I mean, it’s crazy.
Randy Johnston 21:02
So again, our sympathy and concern goes out for that. We did have dinner with people who were from Southern Cal and they were taking calls during the dinner and and so forth. But you know, these types of devices, Internet of Things, devices that can provide us some safety, makes sense. And we’ve seen them on all sorts of frameworks, not only this wildfire detection, and I read about another one on the flight out to CES this year that I mentioned to Brian. But you know, bottom line here is we’re going to see not only fire detection, but also noise and and other pieces as well. Okay, now last year,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 21:47
this is one that’s near and dear to your heart, because
Randy Johnston 21:51
last year I discovered the Tonys, a small cube that will actually play music and read stories and so forth to young children and and the I met the founder this year. Last year I didn’t get to meet the founder, but you know, they have added new Tony’s, new types of storylines and others that can go with this. And so just be aware that the Tonys are still doing well. And you know, one of my grandchildren is the proud owner of a Tony. And you know, this is probably going to be a can of worms, of putting Pandora’s box I shouldn’t have opened, but some of the new pieces include Thomas the Tank Engine lines and and many others. So again, if you’re not familiar with the Tony’s t o, n, i, e s is a wonderful gift for small children.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:44
And for those of us that have Asperger’s children, like like mine, you know, it’s he’s, he’s 22 now, but I remember how endeared he was with Thomas the Tank Engine back in the day. We have to acknowledge the passing of Brit alcroft, the the lady who really developed the Thomas the Tank Engine series, and probably got the gross national product of India out of my family when my son was small. So interesting, interesting times. Well,
Randy Johnston 23:11
one other projector that, you know, I observed and thought it was a fine product. It took very little space. Came from xgi Mi. It was a pop up projector. You could literally, you know, put this at the end of an office or the end of a family room, and literally pop it up, and the projector created a fine, 4k image. And rather than having a big screen on the wall all the time, or whatever. I thought this was a better solution than many of the other pop up monitors that I’d seen in the past. So just be aware that there’s still going to continue to be many different options for viewing images in your homes and in your offices. Let’s face it, many of our offices have big screen TVs instead of projectors today, and we know that personal technology often winds up becoming business technologies. Let’s see, can you say smartphone as an example? And we see many, many more to come.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 24:18
Now this is one that I’m putting in here, just because my wife, super banker, is, is my, my true north when it comes to, will people actually use this technology? She has been, she has for a long time, wanted a VW bus, and so this is a, we actually saw two of these very close to each other. This is an electric self driving VW van, and it was close. It had the round on the front like the bus. It wasn’t nearly as boxy as the busses from the 1960s but I thought this was particularly apropos. This would be particularly apropos because I could, I could use it. I could use it in the pro in the for profit part of my business, to. Get me from place to place, and then I could also use it in my schedule, F with my B’s, because of the hexagons on the side of it. So it was a very interesting thing, but, but it also I want you, I want to call out here, because when you look at this device, you can see some of the different device, some of the different ports and cameras and LIDAR devices and lasers and and radar, radar pods and everything else on these, on these devices, you know, these self driving cars. You know, it’s been a while, they’re still out there. They’re they’re doing okay, but, but again, I think about the snow that I have going on right now, and I, you know, based on every all of my understanding of it, that would the snow would pretty much shut down a self driving car in here. So we still have significant challenges to overcome with those. But so we haven’t given up on self driving cars, but I can tell you that that my wife was quite excited about the concept of getting shuttled the 30 minutes each way it is to work to her, as opposed to her having to drive. Then I told her the price would probably be mid six figures. And she said, Well, maybe not this year. So it’s, you know, the self driving cars. You know, we couldn’t talk about personal without, without, at least addressing self driving cars. And you know, I’m glad that we did, but it, but it’s a, it’s a not quite yet, I guess is the way it says.
Randy Johnston 26:28
But we did enjoy the self driving tractor from John Deere, which could be used in Grove work. And, of course, the big, big boy tractors and cats and everything else that we used
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:40
to say they had, they had this 830 horse tractor that was, it looked more like a moving electric power plant or something. It was, it was based on, I believe, I don’t believe it was, it was electric, but it was, it was just a absolute loss. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 27:00
we were basically told that you could farm straight up mountains with it. It had so much horsepower, which was being used in Canada for that very purpose. Well, you can tell that Brian and I do enjoy reporting for you the major breakthroughs of CES. Hopefully, these personal items give you a little bit of insight of what’s happening on that side as well. And Brian, any parting thoughts on ces for 2025
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 27:28
you know, I think we’re gonna have to wait and see. You know, as we said in the in the previous podcast, I thought this year was kind of a ho hum. I again, I kind of referred to it as as a science fair that was run by kids who didn’t do their homework, because there wasn’t a whole lot of new innovation in it. This year, I said, you know, I subsequently learned that that Samsung and many of the others are running their own standalone, standalone events here in the next few weeks. I suspect they’re trying to compensate for the the uncertainty surrounding the political situation in the US and in the other countries that had significant elections over the last over the last year or so, and the potential impact on supply chains of those things. But it’s a it’s an interesting time and again. Technology keeps advancing, and they keep blowing us away with some of the things that they do
Randy Johnston 28:24
that is absolutely the case. We appreciate you listening in and we’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 28:35 Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
= END =
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
Tags: Accounting, Technology