Smart technology has seen some major advancements in recent years, and that’s provided quite a bit of convenience via devices that are much, well, smarter than their predecessors.

These days, we can control many aspects of our lives and homes with these new smart devices by way of an app, input, or even just our voices. And while this offers a lot in the way of efficiency, it often comes with a significant price tag attached.

If you’re looking to add some smart features to your home but can’t afford a complete overhaul, don’t worry. There are plenty of smart home devices on the market at a variety of prices, whether you’re looking for a single smart plug or need to outfit an entire room. And if you’re looking for the best smart home deals, now’s a great time to start shopping as early Black Friday sales have already begun at several retailers.

You don’t have to scour every website on your own for discounts. We can help you build the smart home of your dreams for less.

Best Smart Plug Deals

Smart plugs can be used for a number of tasks, including automating lights, small appliances and more.

TP-Link

Kasa is a trusted brand in the smart home space that makes some of the best smart plugs on the market. These small plugs can be stacked in the same receptacle or used elsewhere around your house. Using the free Kasa app, you can automate the plugs by setting a

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving.

For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow.

At the recent Creative Technologist conference organized by venture capital fund Baukunst, Salguero shared that the company has seen $600 million worth of revenue without taking a penny of external investment and talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way.

A rocky start

ButcherBox isn’t Salguero’s first rodeo. His first company was CustomMade.com, which raised $30 million in venture capital from First Round Capital, Google and Atlas Ventures in a series of funding rounds.

But in spite of all the money it raised, the company wasn’t successful. “My experience was really bad. We lost everyone’s money, which I felt a lot of shame about,” Salguero recalls. “At the very end, I had diluted myself so much, I owned just 5.5% of the company. The business failed, and we ended up going bankrupt, losing everyone’s money.”

After that, Salguero decided to walk a very different path with his next company, which he started after being confronted with a very personal problem. His wife has a thyroid condition,

Foxconn’s chairman and CEO Liu Young-way hopes to one day be in a position to produce electric cars for Tesla as the iPhone assembler expands into transportation. Liu made the comments at the unveiling of two new Foxconn electric car prototypes — the Model B crossover and Model V pickup truck — which the contract manufacturer hopes will serve as reference designs for companies who want to outsource manufacturing of their own EVs.

“Foxconn is not in the business of selling its own EV brand,” Liu said at its annual tech day, in comments reported by the Financial Times. “I hope one day we can do Tesla cars for Tesla,” he added.

The company has ambitious targets for its fledgling EV business. “Based on our past records for the PC and cellphone markets … we’re at about 40-45% of the overall market share,” the CEO said in comments reported by Reuters. “So, ambitions-wise, hopefully we are able to achieve the same kind of achievement like in the ICT (information and communications technology) industry, but we will start small, which is about 5% in 2025.”

The announcement of the two designs come a year after Foxconn showed off three prototype electric vehicles — a Model C SUV, a Model E sedan, and a Model T bus. Taiwanese automaker Yulon plans to sell the Model C next year, when it will be branded as the Luxgen N7, The Associated Press reports. Reuters notes that electric buses produced by the

One thing I didn’t expect to do this week was laugh my head off at a video of a rare lemur picking its nose. But here we are. Even if you’re a bit grossed out, it’s worth sticking around to learn why scientists were so shocked over the lemur’s nose-picking ability.

An aye-aye (an endangered lemur that lives in Madagascar) is the star of a new study published this week in the Journal of Zoology titled “A review of nose picking in primates with new evidence of its occurrence in Daubentonia madagascariensis.” Daubentonia madagascariensis is the scientific name for aye-ayes.

The research team says a video of a captive aye-aye named Kali at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina represents the first time an aye-aye has been recorded picking its nose and eating the snot. Lead study author Anne-Claire Fabrea biologit with the University of Bern, captured the footage, which you really must see to believe.

Here’s the recap: Kali sticks her 3-inch-long (8 centimeters) third finger into her nasal cavity. The finger pretty much disappears before she pulls it back out and cleans it off with her mouth. Aye-ayes have six digits on each hand.

Fabre called the nose-picking “impressive” in a statement from the Natural History Museum in the UK on Thursday.

Aye-ayes typically use that long middle finger to dig out food from trees, but it seems to work quite well for digging into the depths of its own head. The nose-picking evidence adds aye-ayes