Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: smarthome

  • Heating up the smarthome race

    Heating up the smarthome race

    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.

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  • When the connection drops out, will your iKettle work?

    When the connection drops out, will your iKettle work?

    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.

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  • Smarthomes come of age

    Smarthomes come of age

    “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.

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  • Kickstarting the smarthome revolution

    Kickstarting the smarthome revolution

    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.

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  • LG and the smart vacuum cleaner

    LG and the smart vacuum cleaner

    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.

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