Gadgetory


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Arnold Goetzke's Smart Cord

2012-02-03
so we're going to see Arnold jet ski he's going to talk to us a little bit about his experience here as a small presenter so the sky is from Ann Arbor Michigan he graduated from the University of Wisconsin he's got a degree in math he was working for Chrysler for a while when Daimler bought the company you know instead of the global economy coming to the rescue of Chrysler I saw it as a loss squeeze on our suppliers cost squeeze on the engineers as poss squeeze on everybody within the corporation and what was a fun job became a screw turning job you know I just felt like I was no longer part of the solution for Detroit and the economy in America as a whole and I was part of the problem so he hit on the idea of this Z moat is what it's called it's just an extension cord with a Bluetooth module in it so he's got a prototype here you want to go in here and he's trying to get people interested in picking it up retailers mostly here's our iPhone app so we have two lights that are off over here so when I function the app on the iPhone the lights go on he basically decided he was gonna come here in December his sister makes these mood lights for lowes and she said well you need marketing for this this product you need to get the word out he didn't really know how to do that she said well there's this big consumer electronic show in january and he kind of just decided he was going to go didn't really know anything about it got here was totally overwhelmed it's an overwhelming show you know I you know I got to my little booth you know ten by ten booth after walking by some 100 by 100 boots and I've got you know the people behind me they spend a million a half dollars and so I walked by all this fantastic technology and people showcasing their products and I get here to this nice little 10 by 10 that I found after 10 minutes is walking up and down the aisle and I say okay well so here I am here they are hopefully someone will stop by on the way so it was a little overwhelming and intimidating you know I got my list of things to do better next time finding a place to park anticipating the length of time I'm going to be standing all day walking here and figuring out where I'm going to get something to drink finding out that I only have one outlet to work with so I got to get a power strip to put everything in ok well I better go get one of those so I'm smelling this smell and i'm pretty sure wasn't coming from me trying to get the cards and we got this card reader to scan a badge some people don't want their badges scan oh no I don't do that so I walked out in the hallway I went downstairs and it just got worse the further you went into the hotel building I lost my credit card the headache nice little shoe repair issue they were working i can't tell you how many times people said ok can i staple this together and i would have to say whoo no you can't i don't have one of those ran out of little info sheets for the product so i had to get somebody to be here at the booth well I ran over to officemax to download my file from the internet and have them print out a hundred copies so i can drive back you know more people asking for staplers that i don't have a ship the nice 60-pound two-piece water fountain here had to fill it up that's probably the only one in the whole event here with a trash can in the bathroom filling up with water coming back out here dumping it in spilling it all over the place despite all the best intentions of having everything ready and getting here two hours early those little things pop up at the last minute and we're not spending a million and a half on your boots I guess that's what you're going to find we're all pretty much trying to do the same thing it's just some people have more money than others to do that with and hopefully next year I'll be one of those people with a little more do you want to take a quick break I think this guy wants oh sure sorry that's right I just came by and you were here your sister yeah filming for yesterday and had an absolutely fantastic time talk she'll be here I'll see if she wants to go my cousin I found the onion the what is apparently the Mexican food restaurant for the whole area and it's walking distance oh yeah i mean if not during the show i'm sure she'd be have any hook up with the afternoon show would absolutely love that i got a part of you it's not only mr. alright i'll be able to do yeah i'll let her know that you're specifically looking for part of the struggle is getting people to notice us and have a reaction frankly but when they do stop i explain what the product is and give them a demonstration it's been a 99 out of a hundred wow that's a neat product you know i haven't seen that before perhaps craftsman good they got a crash through does it use bluetooth and there's a work with any phone is it on a Wi-Fi network or is it direct one-on-one see all the above I didn't see a blue sea daddy you can put your garage right see if your garage doors up yeah alright so i guess it was probably the middle of the day that I get back from one of my runs to get something we ran out of that I didn't think we needed and this company stopped by and I don't know if you can see this but it's a little gaming controller and I looked at it and I said okay that's interesting i looked at the name and it says z motes needless to say ze emote is pretty similar to z modes so he asked me well how do you say the name of your company and I well I said Z motes he said well that's funny that's how we say the name of our company I said well why would you spell a company ze emotes all right Zemo was there it was available we did our trademark search we did our web search we got the website did an internet search Zemo nobody uses emotes so of all the trademarks and patents and things that i've been working on the last year Zemo seemed like the safest of anything that i was working on so to have this president of Zemo located out of Illinois come in and show me his product and a copy of a letter that his lawyer wrote to me that he sent via email saying hey cease and desist that was yeah that was pretty interesting I guess I block that out of my memory because i forgot that i have a lamp TV a fan plugged into it as long as it adds up to 1,200 watts you turn it on and off so it's a one device at a time things it's like an extension cord with the switch well it could Detroit and you know even if celani where I'm located it's usually on the top 10 lists of many lists and a lot of times majority of those times it's not a good list to be on whether its unemployment crime jobs and so when I put down Ypsilanti you know under what city are you from here at the CES you know I did that in hopes of being able to have a product that I can go back and say you know what it's going to add value to our economy because it's a new products it would be new jobs it would be new opportunities to you know take a warehouse that's sitting empty right now and start putting people in it and product in it so you know we talked about I guess the alternate measure of success you know if I had that happen and I didn't come to another CES show but you know we started selling our product and I started hiring people and I started saying you know here's how I'm adding value to a local economy and I'm not just opening a restaurant on one corner and closing another restaurant and I'm not just opening a casino to siphon money off of people I'm trying to add value to an economy did you get that on film we're all right we're all right there was okay it's the last day okay so what happened was I walked by this shelf and apparently touched it enough to to make this shelf collapse I'll get that don't worry about no I got it all right I knocked it down low yeah get some more people that stop by yep it's a lot I don't know how that happened Frank oh that was awesome I got to change the name of the company I lost my credit card you know what's gonna happen now so hopefully my flight will make it tonight and I'll get home without any problem you know hopefully there will be a next time but that's yeah it's been a definitely been a learning experience the first time here
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