Tag: smarthome

Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

Samsung’s launch of a Smart Things home hub is a step forward for the company looking to pivot from the smartphone market

South Korean industrial giant Samsung is struggling, in the last year its smartphone division reported a 75% drop in revenues while their handsets, while still the world’s most popular, lost ten percentage points of market share.

The company’s smartphone division is stuck because mobile carriers in the western world are abandoning subsidies for handsets, with most developed markets now at saturation point for cellphone adoption there’s little point in chasing market growth for all but the most desperate telco.

For Samsung that’s been a problem as their premium model strategy has been based upon western consumers ordering a new phone every 18 to 24 months as their mobile contracts were renewed, now those deals are not so common a key sales channel for the Korean conglomerate has been lost.

This leaves Samsung looking for the next market and at this week’s IFA consumer technology event in Berlin, the company unveiled its Smart Things hub, a cylindrical device that connects with your TV, air conditioning, music system, and other home appliances.

Smart Things was an acquisition Samsung made last year to improve its IoT product line and the company has an open platform for connecting household devices with over 200 already certified.

For Samsung with its range of domestic equipment this may well mark the future for the business. The interesting thing though is the smartphone is still integral in today’s vision of the connected home, so we won’t see Samsung leaving the handset market soon.

How to make the IoT pay

Keeping things simple for the home and selling efficiencies to big business are the way to make money from the IoT

How do companies sell the internet of things to consumers? This was the question at the opening panel of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco this morning.

Belkin’s Chief Technology Officer Brian van Harlingen took the lead in the panel stating that the opportunity lies in making sense out of the IoT’s complexity. “With data comes complexity, we have to make it simple for the end user,” said Van Harlingen

Van Harlingen’s view was backed up by Verizon’s Chief Data Scientist, Ashok Srivastava, who understandably sees the challenge of managing the information generated by masses of devices as being an opportunity for his company and data scientists in general.

That masses of data is being generated isn’t surprising seeing the other member of the morning’s panel was Jason Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of  smart lock maker August. That the ordinary door lock may be generating masses of data indicates just how much information might be churning around the average smart home in the near future.

Cut out the complexity

It may well be that all of this data and complexity isn’t necessary as Joe Dada, the CEO and founder of smarthome company Insteon, point out. “Leave the network as quiet as you can,” is his advice. “People over-estimate the amount of data that needs to be pushed across the network.”

Dada, a twenty-five year veteran of the smarthome industry, sees the over-complication of the IoT as being a weakness in many of the products and business models being touted today with his company selling their products on being convenient, safe and fun.

While Dada has a successful business model, many of the other business don’t and exactly how to make money from the IoT wasn’t really answered by the panel.

Capturing efficiencies

It may well be that for many the answer lies in making existing products better, in talking to Cisco’s Brad Bechtold who runs the networking giant’s Oil and Gas Industry Transformation division estimates that there could be operational savings of up to 11% for the sector through implementing IoT technologies.

With estimates of the oil and gas industry’s size being around four trillion dollars a year, that represents an opportunity of over a hundred billion dollars a year in the one sector alone.

Selling the IoT

So it may be that the way to sell the Internet of Things into the industrial sector is to point out the operational savings available. Should the promise of substantial cost reductions be realised then it may even trigger a new wave of capital investment as businesses decide it’s easier to upgrade equipment than retrofit it.

The analytics and management aspect will turn out to be lucrative for many businesses as well, however the key to success is going to be demonstrating how these services add value for customers.

For the consumer market however the key probably lies in Joe Dada’s advice – keep it easy, convenient, safe and fun.

A series of weak links

Security continues to be a challenge for Internet of Things vendors

One of the ongoing discussions in the world of the Internet of Things are the security weaknesses in many devices that leave networks vulnerable to rogue devices or malicious hackers.

A good example of this is Craig Hockenberry’s post on his Furbo.org site on how bugs in Apple’s Bonjour software messes with networks.

While Apple won’t say what causes this issue – an ominous point in itself – Hockenberry surmises it’s due to older software in some devices that no longer have updates available, which is another problem facing the IoT.

On top of Hockenberry’s story, a piece in Threat Post reports the Open Smart Grid Protocol has serious security issues.

The writers of the package that’s installed on more than four million smart meters and similar devices worldwide decided to write their own encryption algorithm that has proved easy to break.

So the smart home which might feature both a slew of Apple devices and one of these exposed smart meters has a range of security holes that the occupier has no idea about. This hardly breeds confidence.

As the Internet of Things is rolled out, security is going to have to be at the front of developers’ and vendors’ minds. The stakes are too high for shoddy and ill thought out compromises or for vendors like Apple who rate secrecy over their customers’ security.

Google moves deeper into the smarthome

Google Nest’s acquisition of Revolv is about further locking in the smarthome market

Since Google bought smart smoke detector company Nest earlier this year it’s become apparent that the search engine giant sees the smarthome as one of its big marketplaces in the near future.

Nest’s acquisition of smarthome automation company Revolv yesterday illustrates this and shows that Nest is Google’s smarthome division.

As the smarthome becomes more common, the value of controlling the systems that run the connected home’s devices becomes greater. So the positions being taken by Apple, Google and Samsung are going to be important as the marketplace develops.

The latter relationship — Google and Samsung — is particularly fascinating as Samsung’s smartphones and tablets are locked into the Google Android system which makes it harder for the Korean industrial giant to strike off in an independent path.

All of this of course is based upon homeowners being happy with having their smarthomes locked into one vendor’s platform. We may yet see the market rebel against the internet giant’s ambitions to carve up the connected world.

Jailbreaking the Internet of Things

Jailbreaking the smarthome opens some complications for the Internet of Things

The news that hackers have turned their attention to Nest thermostats raises some delicious possibilities for the Internet of Things.

Jailbreaking smartphones has been normal for years as people circumvent restrictions to add features or software and there’s no reason that this can’t be done to smart thermostats, light bulbs or kettles.

Almost all the smart devices being deployed have processors and capabilities far greater than what’s needed to carry out their designed purpose, so an imaginative hacker can do some interesting things with a jailbroken home automation system.

Using your kettle to control your lights or fridge to open your garage door is a bit of gimmick but there’s plenty of potential for doing some cool, and mischievous, things.

While hacking the smart home for kicks might be relatively harmless, tinkering with industrial devices could have unintended and disastrous consequences. It’s another example why security is one of the top concerns as the Internet of Things is rolled out.

Heating up the smarthome race

Proving that incumbents can strike back, Honeywell takes on Google’s Nest smart thermostat

Last week Apple sent a big message to the smarthome industry with their announcement of the Homekit, this week industrial control giant Honeywell has released its answer to the Google owned Nest smart thermostat with the Lyric.

The Lyric smart thermostat system is quite an impressive package; along with the smart thermostat, it includes a smartphone app and cloud service that lets users control their home heating remotely.

Other features are maintenance alerts, personalised heating settings and geolocation services for turning systems off and on when occupants are approaching or leaving home. To boot, Honeywell claim the Lyric can save households $200 a year.

The big incumbent

It’s a strong push into the smarthome market which Honeywell has been part of since the concept began thirty years ago and it shows incumbents don’t always sit back and wait for disrupters to steal their markets.

The Lyric’s strength is Honeywell’s massive installed base and its army of experienced contractors; the likely way the smarthome market will evolve is that most installations are going to be carried out while homes are being built or refurbished which gives the incumbents even more strength.

Open standards

What’s missing in the media releases and review is whether the Lyric’s cloud services will offer open APIs to other developers and what format household data will be available in. If it’s a relatively open system then it will have a big advantage over Google’s Nest which all indications show is going to be closed to other providers.

No doubt we’ll also be seeing compatible air conditioning units and heaters entering the market soon as well which will drive a standard of some sort to develop in the HVAC field, again the question of how open those protocols will be remains to be seen.

The next move is Google’s, it will be interesting to see how the company will react to the incumbents fighting back and Apple’s strong positioning to dominate the market.

When the connection drops out, will your iKettle work?

If the Internet of Things is to be trusted by households and industry, it’s essential that systems work when they’re disconnected.

During the dark days of the Tech Wreck, the poster product for the heady excesses of the Dot Com era was the connected fridge.

Today it could be the iKettle that marks the height of the Internet of Things craze, a kettle you can control from your smartphone.

While the app doesn’t automatically fill the kettle; it does allow you to turn it on, schedule times and control the water temperatures.

The problem though is what happens when your kettle or phone can’t connect to the internet?

Burning data centres

Over the weekend, Samsung customers learned what happens when a connected device can’t connect when a fire in a South Korean data centre triggered an outage that prevented the company’s smart TV, Blu-Ray player and phone customers from properly using their equipment.

It would be really irritating if you couldn’t boil a kettle because your internet was down, however the more serious question is what happens when your home’s smoke detectors can’t connect? Or when your smarthome or connected car can’t authenticate your identity and locks you out?

Securing the IoT supply chain

For industry, the problems are even more pressing; in the not too distant future a truck carrying perishable goods may well have its deliveries refused by a customer if the cargo has lost connectivity.

In life or mission critical applications, relying on connections that may not be dependable could have disastrous consequences.

While the iKettle might be a bit of gimmick, it raises some important issues of what happens should your internet connection go down.

If the Internet of Things is to be trusted by households and industry, it’s essential that systems are robust and maintain operations when they’re disconnected.

Smarthomes come of age

The internet of things isn’t new, it’s just the technology has become more accessible

“After four decades the smartphone comes of age,” proclaims Micheal Wolf in Forbes Magazine.

Wolf is right to a point but he misses the key reason why the smarthome, or the entire internet of things, has become accessible – the technology has simply become affordable.

It was possible to build a smarthome two decades ago, but it was fiendishly expensive and only a few rich people could afford the technology. Today that technology is cheap and easy to install.

This is the common factor with all aspect of the Internet of Things, connecting devices has been possible since before the internet became common but it was expensive and cumbersome so only the highest value equipment – such as oil rigs – was connected.

Now it’s inexpensive and simple to connect things, people are doing it more and that is why there’s a range of security and privacy issues which weren’t so pressing when it was only a few obscure industrial devices that were wired up.

We aren’t inventing the wheel with technologies like the internet of things or big data, they already existed – they are just more accessible and that’s what’s changing business.

Kickstarting the smarthome revolution

The latest Decoding the New Economy video interviews Daniel Friedman of Sydney startup Ninja Blocks.

The latest Decoding the New Economy clip is up with an interview with Daniel Friedman of Sydney startup Ninja Blocks.

Ninja Blocks focuses on controlling smarthomes with basic “if, then” rules where house holders can set basic instructions like “if the garage door opens after 5pm then turn on the kettle.”

It’s an interesting interview that covers Ninja Blocks’ vision along with the challenges of selling electronic devices globally and how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign for a hardware startup.

LG and the smart vacuum cleaner

The LG Home-Bot Square is the first in a wave of connected smarthome devices we will see in 2014

The theme for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas appears to be the internet of things as vendors start peppering journalists with media releases showcasing the of the smart devices they’ll be showing off at the event.

One of the early starter is appliance manufacturer LG showing off their range of smart appliances that are controlled though the Line messaging app that’s best known for its manga like emoticons.

LG are particularly proud of their robot vacuum cleaner, the somewhat clunkily named Home-Bot Square that has a form factor similar to the Chinese made Win-Bot window washer.

LG_SMARTHOME1

Through the Line app, the Home Bot Square and other LG smart devices can be programmed with natural language, initially Korean and English, commands.

Ahead of the CES show on January 7, the next few weeks will see more announcements like LG’s. There’s going to be no shortage of smart home devices to write about over the next few months.

Smart homes come of age

Smart devices are going to change our homes as much as our offices.

For years we’ve been predicting the arrival of the smart home, this week the Chicago Tribune reports that the connected household may be becoming a reality.

The Chicago Tribune describes Raffi Kajberounihi’s Santa Clarita home where his doors and his home automation systems are all controlled by his smartphone.

Most of the technology in Raffi’s house isn’t new, it was just unaffordable for most people until recently.

“It had always been an upscale-type business: Unless you were in the top 5% of income levels, you didn’t have access to this type of connectivity,” said Randy Light, merchant of home automation for Home Depot.

Wireless Internet and the widespread proliferation of smartphones are making smart home technologies more sophisticated — and affordable.

“This used to be something out of ‘The Jetsons’ or limited to the super-rich,” said Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity. But as smart home technology has improved and costs have come down, “it’s becoming more mainstream.”

While much of the focus on the smart home has been around the consumer applications, much of the real potential lies in the machine to machine possibilities.

The Nest smoke detector is a good example of how smart devices are evolving, it doubles as a nightlight and is intelligent enough to spot the difference between burning toast at 7am and a smoldering electric blanket at 11pm.

The next wave of air conditioners could be checking the weather forecast and adjusting settings before a cold change hits, similarly a smart alarm clock may well check transit and traffic information to adjust wake up times when the trip into work is unusually congested.

For all the benefits though there are risks; as we saw with the Foscam baby monitor, security remains a real concern that isn’t as built into devices as it should be.

Over time, we’ll find these smart technologies are changing our households. With that will come advantages and risks that we’ll have to manage.