home automation

Connected, automated homes are the new frontier for big consumer electronics companies

12 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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Home automation, powered by cloud-based artificial intelligence, is now a mainstream product category, taking center stage at the major consumer electronics companies’ booths at CES. The huge 4K and 8K screens that dominated Samsung’s display the past few years were stuck in a back corner, while the main aisles were lined with home appliances with voice recognition systems and driven by artificial intelligence.
LG led its press conference with artificial intelligence, via both its in-house platform and Google Assistant.… More

Simpler hubs evolve as smart home ecosystem gets more complex

7 January 2017 by Steve Blum
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Doesn’t look complicated.

Smart home hubs made a bit of a comeback at CES this year, with several companies showing second generation products. One company, Wink, leaned in to the self install market with a relatively inexpensive new device that’s intended to be simple and seamless to set up, and incorporates lesson learned from its first generation. Another company, Carrier, rebranded an existing hub as “Cor” and leveraged its existing distribution channel to go after the big system sale end of the market.… More

Google makes stupid move with smart home product

23 April 2016 by Steve Blum
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The lost hubs of Easter Island.

If you bought a home automation hub from Revolv, sorry, it’s about to be bricked. Google bought Nest, which in turn bought Revolv, and then decided to turn off the servers that make its gizmos work…

So we’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making. Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.

… More

The IoT hub is dead and Stringify killed it

6 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Simple solution for home automation chaos.

Stringify has mixed the glue that will bind home automation and the other gizmos and platforms of the Internet of Things together. Two weeks ago, the Los Gatos, California-based startup launched its server-based and mobile centric meta-platform that allows consumers to control 200 products and services offered by dozens of companies via a single smartphone app.

It’s a brilliantly simple proposition: instead of using a dozen different apps to control a dozen different products, a consumer installs one app that talks to a server that talks to a dozen different servers – cloud to cloud, if you like – and makes them all work together.… More

Lowes leans on AllJoyn, mobile app for updated smart home platform

4 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Smartphones loom large in Lowes’ plans.

Lowes is rebooting its Iris home automation platform. There are two big differences: the new system is mobile-centric and it was developed in-house with support for Qualcomm’s open source AllJoyn protocols, according to a company spokesman at CES Unveiled this evening.

The platform, which currently supports about 70 products ranging from light switches to thermostats to hot water heaters, is now controlled primarily via an app that’s available for both the iOS and Android operating systems.… More

Home automation company faces the and now what hurdle

14 June 2015 by Steve Blum
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Not much new.

Ring – the company formally known as DoorBot – is still keeping it simple and growing slowly. It produces a camera with a motion sensor that attaches to your front door and lets you see who’s there – whether you’re at home or justing looking in from somewhere out on the interwebs via Ring’s Android or iOS app, or a browser. For a fee – $3 per month or $30 for an entire year – it’ll also store six months worth of high definition video.… More

Wearables flood in, home hubs back out from CES Unveiled

4 January 2015 by Steve Blum
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The pot calls the kettle back.

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show will be about networked wristbands and coffee pots, if CES Unveiled – the opening press group grope – is anything to judge by. Wearables and home automation – products that lived in a geek ghetto only a couple of years ago – are the hot new categories this year.

Contenders in the wearable fitness tracker category seem to be following a common path: cram some sensors and a Bluetooth module into a sleek looking wristband, write iOS and Android apps to talk to it, then beef it up with some server-side analysis.… More

Google positioned to set standards for smart homes


Nest is in good hands with Google.

The quest for a mass market business model for home automation products and services took a new turn this week, when Google announced it’s buying Nest, which makes networked thermostats and smoke detectors. Since it’s unlikely that Google is going to drop $3.2 billion just to make pretty gadgets, the working assumption has to be that it’s developing an online platform to support networked products. Just as it developed the Android operating system, then bought Motorola’s mobile phone manufacturing business as a development tool and to lock down valuable patents.… More

Lowe's Iris home automation service goes national

11 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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Point of sale.

“We made the investment to go national”, said Kevin Meagher, vice president and general manager for home automation at Lowes. “We’re pleased with progress to date, we have confidence in the huge potential for the market”.

He was talking about Iris, Lowe’s home automation control platform that was introduced at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, amid predictions that it was doomed to failure. Instead, as Meagher explained at this year’s show, it’s grown to include about thirty devices from more than a dozen manufacturers.… More

App-centric approach to home automation previewed at Pepcom


No need to worry when a ‘bot has your back.

Home automation is taking a step back from integration and interoperability. Judging by the the companies previewing products at the Pepcom Holiday Spectacular in San Francisco last week, the latest, shopper-friendly strategy is to turn smart phones into home control centers simply by crowding single-purpose apps together on a screen.

Three companies – DoorBot, Dropcam and Honeywell – were showing smart phone-networked home automation devices and a fourth – Kevo – takes the direct route to iPhones via Bluetooth.… More