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Talk to me – The role of Voice Control in the Smart Home

A recent Smart Home report on what features are most desired by users showed that in addition to self-adjusting thermostats, remote locking of burglar alarms and other such staples, one of the features that users really want is a master remote for all services. This is an expression of the frustration with the morass of incompatibility between smart devices.  Very few systems talk to each other in a meaningful way and it is clear that the fragmentation of standards and systems continues to cause … Read more…

Google OnHub – the router is now cylindrical

Following Amazon’s echo media device, Google have just unveiled an equally-cylindrical device, their all-singing, all-dancing WiFi router, built by home networking specialists TP-Link. Now I am a bit confused about this. Designed to be attractive and pretty enough placed anywhere in the home, Google seem to have forgotten that the location of WiFi routers are dictated by where the Internet cable enters the home. However, Google make big claims about its wireless performance, apparently sporting 13 antennas, emphasising the speed and range benefits it … Read more…

Comparing the Cloud giants – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure

Last month saw a number of number of the tech giants provide their most recent quarterly earnings. For both Amazon and Microsoft, their cloud activities gained a lot of headlines and column-inches in both the technical and business press. Although adopting different growth and technology strategy, their cloud computing offerings represent a significant engine of growth going forward, and is becoming an area of ever-more intense competition. Here we take a brief look at how they compare and what the … Read more…

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…

Wired: Who cares what OS your car runs?

Excellent article on how a new front in the smartphone Operating Systems war – the car. Ford neatly summarises the auto manufacturers’ positions: ““We don’t want the customer to base the choice of a $40,000 car on the $300 phone that they carry in their pocket,” The article however misses the point that it is by no means a foregone conclusion that either Apple or Google will dominate the dashboard – don’t forget that the useful lifetime of a car (13 … Read more…

British Gas acquires AlertMe – A smart home leader

AlertMe, the Cambridge-based company behind the technology that powers the Hive Active Heating system sold by British Gas has just been acquired by British Gas itself. Originally holding an investment of around 20%, British Gas has now bought the entire outfit for around $100m. As AlertMe only has two large customers, British Gas itself and Lowe, in the US, it is unclear whether British Gas aims to use the platform and technology for its own energy customer base. However in a press release, Mary … Read more…

Digital Health Platforms – A look at Apple HealthKit’s early lead

A Reuters report last week claimed that Apple’s HealthKit is being trialled by more hospitals in the US than Google Fit. Fourteen out of twenty-three ‘top’ (no info on how they were selected) hospitals contacted had already rolled out a pilot programme with Apple, way ahead of where they are with other significant personal health platforms. This clearly indicates that the convergence between personal devices and real medical healthcare, is beginning to move beyond the somewhat narcissistic counting of steps, fitness goals etc, … Read more…

Google in talks to buy SoftCard

SoftCard, the struggling mobile payments joint venture in the US between AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile is apparently in the eyes of Google as it seeks to counter the success of Apple Pay in the US. Be interesting to see what this means for other carrier payment joint-ventures, such as Weve in the UK. The Wall Street Journey covers the essentials of this story well. Google Is in Talks to Buy Mobile-Payments Service Softcard null  

Big data predictions in the online and physical world

One piece of news that hit the headlines this week was the revelation from researchers from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University that Facebook may be a better judge of personalities than spouses or friends. Apart from the obvious hype value this is particularly significant as it shows the power of machine learning in scenarios which we intuitively feel should be difficult for algorithms to handle. Instead it turns out the the inherent lack of subjective bias and prejudice … 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…

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