We talk with Emmy Award-winning TV personality, consumer technology expert, and one of the leading women in the field of technology about technology in your home. You might be wondering how to manage your kids access to the internet or what is the future of technology in your home. She also brings up some great data from the 2021 Wifi Trends Report that gives us some insight of where we are now and where we are headed with home tech.

About Katie: As one of the most in-demand technology experts worldwide, Linendoll is recognized by a wide-range of audiences for her reporting and frequent appearances as a regular expert contributor for major media outlets including The Rachael Ray Show, Hallmark’s Home & Family, and numerous other outlets including The Weather Channel, CBS Sports Radio, Robert Irvine Magazine, and more.

In addition to frequent live, in-studio media appearances, Linendoll runs her own production company which allows her to shoot, produce, and edit her own tech news stories in some of the most exotic and extreme locations—ranging from a remote community in the Philippines in the wake of Super Typhoon Haiyan to NASA’s zero-gravity training lab 63-feet underwater off the coast of the Florida Keys. Linendoll’s cutting-edge technology stories have been featured as TV and digital segments and series on The Weather Channel, Popular Science, and Sports Illustrated to name a few.  

Linendoll is one of the first women in tech to make significant contributions to the industry, starting her career at the age of 12 when she began coding and earning networking certifications before graduating from high school. Linendoll went on to receive a degree in Information Technology New Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Following graduation, she began working behind-the-scenes in production for ESPN where she won an Emmy Award for her work on SportsCenter and later contributed more than 60 written and digital pieces as a sports tech expert. Following her work at ESPN, Linendoll was nominated for a second Emmy Award for her work as a co-host on A&E’s We Mean Business, a reality show designed to help revamp small businesses across the country. 

During her career, Linendoll has hosted more than a dozen shows and series focused on technology and innovation and has also been named a special correspondent at major tech conferences including Comic-Con, CES, E3, Toy Fair, and Maker Faire.

Linendoll is a Silicon Valley Visionary Award Recipient, which celebrates Silicon Valley leaders in technology, education, venture capital, and entrepreneurship. Alongside her two Emmy nominations, and one win, Linendoll also holds a Guinness World Record for the “Most High Fives in One Minute”.

Linendoll calls Boston home. She leads an active, faith-filled lifestyle as a runner, fitness enthusiast, musician, and avid traveler. She also devotes a large percentage of her time to select philanthropic causes in healthcare and technology notably the Batcole Foundation, Adolescent and Young Adult Survivorship Fund, Brooke’s Blossoming Hope and Bugles Across America.

For more about Katie: https://katielinendoll.com/

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[00:00:14] Katie Linendoll: , but moderately, recently I was on the weather channel. One of the shows that I contribute to often, and I was even speaking. I mean, it's not as high tech, but as important, I live in a very historic part of town and just having search protection. When our storms come in. It's like something people don't think about and you have all these devices that you're spending thousands of dollars on, but do you have, are you asleep, plugged into a surge protector?

[00:00:52] Katie Linendoll: If heaven forbid anything happens to any of their devices when it comes to.[00:01:00]

[00:01:13] Caroline Blazovsky: I'm doing well.

[00:01:23] Katie Linendoll: Oh, my goodness. Excited to be here. Thank you so much for having

[00:01:27] Eric Goranson: I love this and you are like the Katy of all trades. You have all this stuff going on

[00:01:43] Katie Linendoll: And so it's something like putting the spotlight on people that can do it all. You guys are Renaissance man, and a Renaissance lady.

[00:02:09] Eric Goranson: Every time I turn the TV on, it seems your icon on a new place. Let's talk about hometown.

[00:02:30] Katie Linendoll: But when are you really getting grained and get very, very hands-on into your own home, it gets like a whole new level of excitement, but it's so awesome to be part of. And they recently announced their new home wifi trends from 2021 report. And it was fascinating on the Homefront to see how much did we've just changed in terms of work in play and how much we rely in our homes on connected devices.

[00:03:19] Katie Linendoll: It's just, it's important for us to look at and say, wow, how are consumers changing? And how are we that are working in the home? You know, adapting to that. And what do we need to be thinking about?

[00:03:38] Eric Goranson: I look how much data I use and I I'll be honest, full disclosure. I'm an infinity customer. I've got, you know, 1.2. Uh, gigabit download speed at my house and I use all of it. That's

[00:03:57] Eric Goranson: Absolutely.

[00:04:00] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. I think what fascinates me about you, Katie, is that I'm in the health and wellness space. And so all my residential customers, they want to know how to become healthy or, and that with COVID-19 sort of pushed it to the forefront. It was already there and we saw.

[00:04:25] Katie Linendoll: Oh, my goodness. And I love that you brought that up because, um, I guess I'm an interesting blend of I'm health obsessed and a fitness nerd, and also just a nerd in these worlds fuse together.

[00:05:10] Katie Linendoll: And I was like, this is blowing. It makes sense, because I think we can all think of either ourselves or our friends or family or colleagues that are really just using smartwatches or have a connected exercise device. And it is really just taking matters into your own hands to be more healthy, to be more fit, but also knowing like I could put that in my house and it's really cool.

[00:05:51] Katie Linendoll: And of course you need great wifi to do that. We're seeing also that this trend is going to be increasing and not going anywhere over the [00:06:00] next 12 months. And it's inspected 20 times more, 20% more individuals are beginning a connected home exercise equipment. So it's not going away and probably rightfully so, because it's easy to do to put it in your home.

[00:06:19] Caroline Blazovsky: and you know, one thing is our body, right? What we're doing, but our homes have a whole different plethora of data that they could provide to us that Eric and I need, like your humidity level, what's your particulates.

[00:06:46] Katie Linendoll: Yeah, you're spot on. And I think what's amazing now. And I think in the past two years, people have been more inclined to think more about that and to just think about home air purifiers, and to get that data right at your fingertips and so easy to [00:07:00] use, and to look at that IOT, internet of things, devices that are connected in our homes, easy to use, but can give you so much in terms of metrics, but they're connected devices at the end of the day.

[00:07:15] Eric Goranson: It's great. And we're starting to see with connectivity out there, smart home things that are actually smart, that I don't have to sit there and grab my phone and look for the app and turn off and on.

[00:07:51] Eric Goranson: You need more light. You want more light? It'll give it to me and I'm not playing with it at all. It's just automatically doing it. So that [00:08:00] interconnectivity as stuff is starting to get really huge. Which relies on what you're talking about, Katie, because now we're going to have so many more things moving forward, talking to each other, versus just talking to their apps.

[00:08:16] Katie Linendoll: few. Yes. And the, and the demand on wifi, we would be friends by the way, because I just installed comparable. I have smart lighting up in my studio that not only plays music, but also, you know, you can switch to millions of different colors.

[00:08:47] Katie Linendoll: Those go. And Carolyn of course too, it's like, those conversations are two years old, but I think like for the everyday consumer, these, those are going to be coming even hotter and hotter, but the connected devices, just the rate of growth from the streaming to the [00:09:00] gaming, to the we're talking internet of things, smart, light bulbs, connectivity, and also just fitness and health.

[00:09:29] Eric Goranson: We had a funny thing that happened at the house yesterday, Julie, my wife was sitting there cooking something and she had the Alexa timer set. And then she didn't realize that I had hooked on a couple other smart switches and actually had enabled the Alexa. She was running around the house trying to figure which light switch cause I have three or four different brands have the timer on it.

[00:10:00] Katie Linendoll: 'cause sometimes like, you know when you're, so hyper-connected like, I'll be like, what's beeping. What is beeping right now? Oh, it's my smart

[00:10:17] Eric Goranson: So, and then, then, uh, Caroline and I had, I think it was right when she came on the show, we had a complaint that I was talking about how you could order a pizza using that same service. And I'm not going to mention it because we had somebody complained that I had ordered a pizza and it showed up at their house.

[00:10:39] Katie Linendoll: I've been at speaking events where I say, Hey, the name and everybody's phone goes off

[00:10:52] Katie Linendoll: It's amazing what you can do on, on live air. So we won't say any

[00:11:01] Caroline Blazovsky: for Katie. So. What you know, this is always, and I ask Eric this the same thing, and I'll kind of throw it back to both of you. What is your favorite technology gadget right now? Like in the moment, if you have to name one, which is your favorite,

[00:11:30] Katie Linendoll: And like the mainstream, I guess, is the word I'm looking for. And the reason why I've been looking at it, so intrigued with it is actually for a very different reason. Um, my feelings on the Metta versa side, I've actually been introducing it to pediatric cancer as a distraction technology. And I work as a volunteer in that space for many, many years, 7, 8, 9 years.

[00:12:19] Katie Linendoll: With stingrays and turtles and to be on roller coasters, to have them be distracted in an environment at the time that they need it most, I think the capabilities to me like this was so many years ago when I got my hands on and started doing beta programs, I was blown away. And now. Live the software and the hardware has really caught up.

[00:12:48] Eric Goranson: That is exciting. And I love VR. I've been using VR for about four years now. I was using it on the interior design side. So I'm an interior designer, 30 years.

[00:13:08] Katie Linendoll: So that's a category I love like you've taken it outside of the obvious energy. And again, our entertainment space is great, but like to use it in a way that you do is so interesting to me.

[00:13:38] Eric Goranson: Yeah, it's, it's shocking. But then again, that's, what's gonna help us, you know, I mean, it's one of those things that we're going to be able to use it for so many things like that. And I think as of like this year, there's more VR headsets out there than people with Netflix subscriptions.

[00:13:57] Katie Linendoll: Eric's

[00:14:06] Katie Linendoll: I love I'll be calling you up. I'll get you on speed down.

[00:14:15] Katie Linendoll: you better have connectivity.

[00:14:37] Katie Linendoll: So you have to be again, having, making sure you have a great signal.

[00:14:58] Eric Goranson: We shot it in AK to [00:15:00] have fun with it, but holy smokes go into eight K. And how much data that took to, for, to upload.

[00:15:25] Katie Linendoll: it's going to be available for that at this moment. But what a world, like we're, we're at the 4k point where at the APA.

[00:15:39] Katie Linendoll: TV's

[00:15:39] Eric Goranson: expensive enough. But it's cool. So what other, what other tech stuff do you see out there that a you're really enjoying?

[00:16:00] Katie Linendoll: And I, I it's the best part because I get to sugar them all up and then they leave and I'm like have fun, but they always know that I have like the coolest technology and connected devices. I'd like the cool aunt. I hopefully I can never retain that title as, as long as possible, but what's really interesting to me.

[00:16:38] Katie Linendoll: So I think this is like, we know that there's so much great connected. Internet access. I mean, even kids with schooling over the past two years, you need that good connectivity, but also you have that control as a parent to say, Hey, you know what? If I need to pause and unpause wifi, we saw three of the biggest categories or two of the biggest categories, homework and dinner time were off the charts in terms of [00:17:00] pausing it and positive black eye.

[00:17:18] Katie Linendoll: And I, I think, you know, and hearing and listening to parents always ask me questions. I think this is so cool to see the data and to see the options that you have at your home.

[00:17:37] Eric Goranson: But during the years that they were in the house, it was something that I realized I'm like, where is all my internet bandwidth going? Or who's using this up. I didn't realize that both girls were at night going to sleep to 4k videos on YouTube. And high Def stuff. And I'm like, I don't. And I went on my Xfinity app.

[00:18:15] Eric Goranson: A 4:00 AM. You guys are now in the dark zone because you should have it done.

[00:18:26] Caroline Blazovsky: I just having Eric

[00:18:30] Caroline Blazovsky: pulling wool over their eyes. I'm just

[00:18:37] Eric Goranson: See, that was the worst part with my daughter because, you know, she's an adult now, but she was trying all the same things that I did when I was a troubled teenager and I was catching her before she was doing it. And I'm like, you know, I'm going to look for that. Right. And I'm going to check for that.

[00:19:12] Eric Goranson: I mean, I probably have 50 or 60 devices in my small house.

[00:19:31] Eric Goranson: Yeah, and it's, it's huge, but I also love them. I've got cameras, I've got doorbells and powered locks and I've got what, four different brands of light switches, because this ends up being like a big test bed in here. It's not like one old big system I'm trying it all out, but, uh, but have. You have to, Hey, let's talk about your music for a minute there.

[00:19:54] Katie Linendoll: ya? I do. Yes. Oh my goodness. A thank you. I am a single called Renaissance lady. I am the country [00:20:00] music space and, uh, it's a. It's so humbling and it's such a blessing, you know, my dad's a drummer, so I grew up very musically inclined. I've taken voice since I was for 20 years now.

[00:20:30] Katie Linendoll: It's like, God is so good. Like it's, it's amazing to see this process unfold. But I also have to say, because. Probably not something I would typically go to in terms of conversation around music. But in the past two years, I've had to, you know, given that studios were closed, I actually had to self engineer, my own vocal sessions out of my home studio.

[00:21:14] Katie Linendoll: So I'm tracking all of my music by myself, engineering, my session, working off of logic, and then turning it over to my team that does all the fancy bells and whistles stuff. It makes it more amazing than I could have ever imagined, but I was like, thank goodness. I'm such a nerd. And that like technology, like I've been, so my producer said that he's like, I would never do this with anybody else because it's just too much to pick up and too much to throw at us.

[00:21:58] Katie Linendoll: And I'm just so grateful to [00:22:00] have the capability that I do and be able to. From my home studios to put out this music it's wild. Like I literally am taking my tracks and a live band is a Nashville tracking everything down like that is credible, that we can be able to have that connection.

[00:22:29] Eric Goranson: a bass player. So yeah, I played in two different Seattle rock bands up there in the, in the two thousands and lived in Seattle in the nineties. So it was fun to be up there during that whole music, good friends up there, but, uh, it was fun, but I tell you what I do not miss the 2:00 AM. Waiting at the club for the check at the end of the night on a Saturday night.

[00:23:04] Eric Goranson: And now it's all

[00:23:24] Katie Linendoll: And it's so funny because now. We're going back and putting filters on to make it sound like you're on a tube. So it's probably full circle. It may be a little easier in terms of processing and exporting, but we love that sound. Don't we? So it's, it's such a, it's so interesting to talk about, but I wouldn't trade it for the world to appreciate where we're at with.

[00:24:08] Eric Goranson: She goes, I was running as a director. I was running tapes of the airport and back cause they were going on the next flight out.

[00:24:24] Katie Linendoll: Whoever had the tape, like if you had the show, the game of that, You, it was like covenant material. So you start hoarding my car and be like full of. Like it was so bizarre. So bizarre. Now we just have 50,000 external hard drives.

[00:24:50] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It's amazing. The other thing that I think on connectivity that's cool is there's a company that I've started working with and I'm gonna bring them back on our show here in the next few weeks again, but there's [00:25:00] some new safety stuff out there. Absolutely love. And I was talking about it at the, at the builder show again.

[00:25:25] Eric Goranson: You need to get a fixed.

[00:25:45] Katie Linendoll: When our storms come in, it's like something people don't think about. And you have all these devices that you're spending thousands of dollars. But do you have, are they plugged into a surge protector? Heaven forbid a storm comes through. And I don't think a lot of people even realize too, there's insurance and there's [00:26:00] warranties.

[00:26:18] Katie Linendoll: We're all so busy. You don't, you're not, you're not thinking about. 20 bucks. It's so worth prog plugging that laptop. And especially if you know, something's coming through, but also on the security front, you know, something that I found fascinating and this, the report, they connected devices themselves are so under attack.

[00:27:05] Katie Linendoll: To know that you as a consumer are protected, you turn on the advanced security and you've got that protection. I think that's a lot of peace of mind because every time. We're starting to see these cyber attacks come through more and more and more, and it's just unsettling and big businesses are getting hit with them.

[00:27:24] Eric Goranson: Um, man, our local radio station here that we're affiliated with, they got taken down for two weeks because they had total ransomware attack. Yeah. So, I mean, they didn't lose off air, but they was like, they went back to 1960s for two weeks. It was brutal.

[00:27:44] Katie Linendoll: Sorry. No,

[00:28:03] Caroline Blazovsky: Technology is wonderful, but then you've got to protect yourself whether it's the passcode and Eric will tell you too, um, there's a passcode system that you can use, which I love that helps you automatically initiate a passcode so that you don't have. Breakable or easily accessed.

[00:28:23] Eric Goranson: Yeah, there's passwords. You just, that's your weakest point of the whole thing. And so many people go, oh, password, oh one, that's my password. And it's like, okay, that's the first thing we were going to say. You have to

[00:28:45] Katie Linendoll: No matter how high tech the conferences I'm going to is passwords. And I'm like, I start to kind of do the zone out because I'm like, we all know that passwords, but then I had a friend sitting next to me on one of the recent conferences we were at very high level, uh, former, uh, I think it was a [00:29:00] department of defense individual doing a presentation.

[00:29:33] Katie Linendoll: Couple more seconds of our time. I know we're all busy, just making smarter decisions for cybersecurity and also taking advantage of things like the advanced security that you might already have baked into your gateway. Do it, do it because that moment comes. It's like the worst thing ever.

[00:29:52] Eric Goranson: I think that's number two outside of. Of not having the right password, the biggest mistakes that a homeowner makes is not using [00:30:00] the equipment in the security features they already have around

[00:30:16] Katie Linendoll: And it's like, we were talking about TVs. It's like, you know, 4k content, but do you have a 4k capable TV? It's not gonna work. You know, it's having the best hardware at your fingertips and utilizing it. And if you don't know what that is, like, we can be sitting here and talking very techie lingo. Ask her, ask him, just ask like, Hey, am I up to date?

[00:30:50] Eric Goranson: And when you're, after you're using comes on and says, do you want to enable to two factor authentication don't hit and remind me later.[00:31:00]

[00:31:10] Eric Goranson: Yeah, it's amazing. And you know, Caroline here too is America's healthy home expert, the space out there that we're seeing now, as far as creating healthy homes is really cool too. And, and, uh, I tell you what, I've been putting some stuff in my house as well.

[00:31:39] Katie Linendoll: the next couple of years.

[00:31:59] Eric Goranson: Yeah, [00:32:00] it's, it's amazing.

[00:32:19] Eric Goranson: You've got going on. So there's so many cool things out there that's happening. And, um, we've been talking about it a lot, but it's, uh, interconnectivity is going to be the word of the, of the next two years, I think. And

[00:32:38] Caroline Blazovsky: I can't rely that my homeowner's going to change their filter. They're not going to change their vent fan. They're not going to turn their vent fan on. They're not going to be cooking with their vent fan. So those are things that really protected. Exponentially on health. So for example, if you are using a HEPA filter in your home, we know you can increase your cardiovascular function by 8%.

[00:33:10] Katie Linendoll: In your experience, you know, and then just becoming, uh, a new homeowner. I think one thing that I found very interesting and I'd love to get your perspective is you can also get rebates and kickbacks, like when I put in more efficient, um, heating systems and then also was putting in a more efficient water tank, you can actually, and I think a lot of people aren't aware of this and you probably know this all too well, but I mean, I love to hear it from experts like yourself, take advantage like thousands of dollars back for being more efficient and saving myself more than.

[00:33:40] Caroline Blazovsky: Eric tiller about a heat pump. Tell her about the heat pump water heaters that we love so much.

[00:34:00] Eric Goranson: Now I put in the new electric heat pump water heater, and that costs me about $110. A year to run because it runs, it uses only 550 Watts of electricity to heat water. So it is awesome. And the rebates on them are ridiculous, you know? And it's cool. So it's like a heat pump. So it's like a heat pump in your house.

[00:34:42] Katie Linendoll: the money, so worth exploring.

[00:35:03] Katie Linendoll: That we don't know anything about when I'm like, okay. I'm clearly adulting this new homeowner and did a whole other world.

[00:35:15] Katie Linendoll: good.

[00:35:22] Caroline Blazovsky: How, why is it so important for us to all be talking about home improvement and ways that you can save money? And DIY yourself is because a lot of these millennials coming up, which, which, you know, or the younger generations behind them, they have no experience in home improvement. They didn't have the classes, they didn't have any kind of trade training, you know, back when Eric and I went to school, they stuck us in, we had.

[00:36:04] Caroline Blazovsky: Cause you can't afford to do it and pay someone all the time to do these projects. It's.

[00:36:22] Katie Linendoll: And it's so important and it's such awesome skills to have. I mean, I was running a pro a school. You'll be learning every single trade possible just to get into the certain level. Right.

[00:36:50] Eric Goranson: And

[00:37:02] Caroline Blazovsky: it's amazing. I think that you can do it both too, right? I mean, I look at it from my perspective, I have an advanced medical degree, but I also think it's fascinating to know how to fix things and do things like it's, it's sorta like it doesn't have to be one or the other.

[00:37:20] Katie Linendoll: and be more Renaissance. People came into that.

[00:37:32] Katie Linendoll: Oh, my goodness. That was such a, I feel like I could talk to you guys for hours and then come over and hang out in your garage.

[00:37:38] Caroline Blazovsky: oh my God. You guys are like twinning. Two of you are twinning. They're

[00:38:04] Katie Linendoll: And, um, I'd love for you to check out the.

[00:38:15] Katie Linendoll: there. You could check me out all my handles my socials, if you will, or at Katie liminal.

[00:38:25] Eric Goranson: All right, Katie. Fabulous. Thanks for coming on today. This has been great.

[00:38:39] Eric Goranson: I'm Eric G and I'm Caroline B and you've been listening to