#126 podcast: Couple embraces home tech business

#126: Couple embraces home tech business | RSS.com Valerie Antkowiak and Mark Pallone are retired Intel engineers, but they're still involved in their careers via a home-based business about home technology. The husband-wife team, who lives in El Dorado Hills, California, publishes the website AppMyHome.com. The site and their home is the testing ground for all things in the extended home technology field. Valerie Antkowiak of appmyhome.com discussing the technology in her new 2020 Hyundai Santa Fe. Antkowiak is our guest on episode No. 126 of The Weekly Driver Podcast. Co-hosts Bruce Aldrich and James Raia discuss talk with Antowiak about the couple's history with the site and their process for testing home technology equipment. The couple's home technology extends to the automobile industry, and we discuss that, too. We talk about navigation systems to the future of autonomous driving. Antkowiak and Pallone recently purchased a Hyundai Santa Fe, and they're impressed with varied and efficient technology functions the South Korean SUV features. Antkowiak narrates and Pallone produces a piece on the extensive features available on the Hyundai. It's among the many videos the couple has featured on their YouTube channel. Here's how Antkowiak and Pallone define their business: “Exploring technology and products available for the Smart Home, the Kitchen and Travel. We test and review products in our own home or occasionally, at our friends’ and relatives’ homes, and share our experience with stories and videos.” For more tech reviews, visit: www.appmyhome.com. Episode Transcript [00:00:00] James Raia: Welcome back to The Weekly Driver Podcast. My name is James Raya. I'm an automotive columnist for Bay Area News Group, and I edit and publish the website, the weekly driver.com. My friend and colleague is Bruce Aldrich, and today our guest is Valerie Ann Kak. Valerie and I met, at a meetup group several months ago, and we had a nice conversation after getting some expertise in, in the WordPress world in Sacramento. And Valerie was nice enough to contact me oh, a few weeks ago that she and her partner husband bought a. New Hyundai Santa Fe, and she let me know that we had talked about that and they drove it and they liked it and they thanked me for my recommendation, which was really nice of them. But more importantly is that Valerie in her world does great things with a wonderful app called app my home.com, and on that website. You guys just do everything in the wonderful world of how it technology relates to your home. And the video that you guys did on YouTube about the navigation system and other things in the Honda Santa Fe was very impressive. So that gets us to today, and we've reciprocating each other's expertise. And so you're our guest today to talk all about all the things that in the technology world with in your website that relate to the automobile, which is. Almost everything these days. So the long way of saying welcome to our show, and it's great to have you as a guest. [00:01:38] Valerie Antkowiak: Oh, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. [00:01:41] James Raia: Valerie, can you take us through a kind of a general overview of the site and how it began for the two of you and what what the mission statement is, if you will? Of, of at my home. Sure. [00:01:54] Valerie Antkowiak: So my husband and I started at my home in 2013. And we're both techies, we both work at, we worked at Intel and so we obviously love technology and we were playing around with all these smart home gadgets. And my husband Mark, he just kept bringing home all these different things to play with. First it was smart light bulbs, and then it was a smart garage door opener. And then and he just he would hook them up and he would put the app on his phone and put the app on my phone, and then he would tell everybody about it. Oh, I got this great smart light bulb. Let me show you how I can turn it on and off from my phone. And so after all of this, all this expense at the Apple store and a lot of stories, yes, I said to him, I said, Hey. I said hey, maybe we should start a blog and then instead of me hearing the same story 50 times, when you tell all of our friends, typical husband, wife, open the garage door. [00:02:44] James Raia: Yes. [00:02:45] Valerie Antkowiak: Yeah, I said, maybe we should start a blog and, I wanted to learn how to do blogs and learn how to do social media better. And I gave at first my feeling was I was gonna give Mark a platform to to talk about all this with everybody. So we started on Twitter and face. Book and we called the app from my home because at the time everybody was using apps on their phone to control everything. So that was really the only way you could control things in your house. You download an app and then all of a sudden you change the light bulb color from red to green to blue, or you can open and close your garage door. You can lock and unlock the door. So that's how we got started. So it started off as fun we would. We would put some things on there. We got the very first video doorbell that one of the very first ones that came out called the SkyBell. And Mark would write little pieces. He would basically email them to the WordPress site and we'd put them up there. And after, maybe 10 or so of those little blogs, I said, Hey, how about you install the technology and I'll do the writing and maybe that'll work out a little better. Yes. So I, I have a background in journalism and I was a product manager and a software engineering manager, but I wasn't getting a lot of opportunity to write. So it was a great partnership for both of us. I could do some writing and he could tinker with the electronics in the house. And our first goal was, it was a hobby. And I thought, maybe if we get some free stuff out of this, it will help us pay for the website hosting. Sure. And we won't be spending $60 on a light bulb at Apple Store all the time. So that's how we got started. Back in 2013, the smart home technology market was different. I would say it's still not mature, but it's evolved a lot over the years and we've had a lot of fun. We go to the Consumer Electronics Show every year and look at all the new gadgets and write about it and shoot videos and we're, we're at the point in our, on our website. Companies really enjoy working with us and we have no problem getting free gadgets to test. That keeps us really busy and achieved my first goal of getting the free stuff. We really like it because we. We're both technology people. We like working with a new technology. We like, especially working with the small companies that are really trying to make a difference. And our policy is that, if you send us a product and we test it we know we keep it in our house, we'll do a video or a story. But if we don't like it and we don't think it works very well, we're not gonna do a negative story. It's just not our, it's not in our personality. It's not what we'd like to do. We think everyone's really trying hard to make these products work, and we don't see the point of doing a negative review. So in that case, we would just send the product back, and that's happened a couple times and not very often. Most of these products now are really good and they, we can always find something good to say about them, even if it's not the exact thing we would recommend. [00:05:27] James Raia: Yeah, I would say similar to that in the automotive world is people sometimes will ask Bruce's more of an expert in automobiles than I am, but they'll ask, what kind of car should, what would you consider? And I would say something along the lines every car's got something good to offer and. I'm not of the mindset to rip cars either, because they're all, in my opinion, they're all pretty good. They're just degrees of better than, some are better than others. But yeah I understand and agree with your point is that there's something, why be a doom and gloom or there's something positive or there's some balance. If there's a fault or a weakness in the product that you review, that's okay, but there's no reason to go after stuff on purpose like that. So in take moving forward, you've had the site for almost a decade now. And I'm not asking specifically, but it's turned in, it sounds like it's turned into a good business for the two of you. You have Amazon affiliate, you have other relationships, and how are the two of you finding the business world of owning a website? Is it, something that you could work 24 7 and still work on it, or do you, have you found some balance that, we're turning off the laptops, now it's time to do something else. [00:06:37] Valerie Antkowiak: I think that we're in a situation in our lives where, we can drive how much we wanna work or not. [00:06:42] James Raia: Yes. [00:06:42] Valerie Antkowiak: Yeah, we both retired from Intel. Mark did it in 2016 and I left in 2018. And we just, we, we, we we're able to make some. Some money from the Amazon affiliates. Affiliate marketing is challenging. [00:06:55] James Raia: Yes. As [00:06:55] Valerie Antkowiak: probably everybody knows. But, so we're make, we're able to make some money and we're able, especially with YouTube, everything is going to YouTube nowadays, so we're really focusing on getting more videos onto YouTube because we get a lot more traction, all of that. So it's going well for us and it's. We love to travel and so it gives us the opportunity to do it from wherever we are. And the nice thing about traveling is that you, when you have smart home technology, you can keep an eye on your house while you're away. So that makes it a nice, [00:07:23] James Raia: that's really good. Yes. [00:07:25] Valerie Antkowiak: A nice benefit. It's and we drive how much we wanna work or not.