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Will the promise of the Smart Home finally be realised as standards converge?

We have already seen how the connected home market is overwhelmed by a morass of incompatible and competing standards, and products made by different manufacturers are unlikely to work together unless they use high-level APIs such as Google’s “Works with Nest”. In the dumb home, interoperability was taken for granted. An incandescent bulb would work with any switch and thermostats were readily interchangeable. The addition of complex app & web based interfaces, the foundation of ‘smart’ systems has created a multitude … Read more…

Connectivity in the Smart Home. Thread or Bluetooth Smart?

This blog has already explored the multitude of standards currently being used as the basis for connecting sensors, object and all sorts of things  to the Internet and to each other. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in the area of home automation, where the lack of widely adopted standards results in systems that don’t talk to each other, and worse, in systems that quickly become obsolete and cease to be supported by their manufacturers. The situation where the home … Read more…

The Internet of Things standards tussle – A phoney war?

  One thing that all commentators on the ‘connected everything’ space agree on is the need for common standards to allow a wide range of sensors, appliances and devices to talk to each other. This is nicely captured in an article in the Economist magazine, where the key problem is described as there being too many overlapping and conflicting initiatives. This is nothing new, and most new technologies which benefit from network effects, starting with the battle between direct and … Read more…