Home Automation! This concept has sprung several times in history right from as early as 1940’s and then resurfaced around the time PCs hit mainstream market. The noise and buzz around home automation in the last couple of years have been unparalleled. And hence one of the questions that I keep hearing often from investors, industry experts and news reporters is: How is the current home automation market different from others? Why do I believe that now is the time when the home automation market will hit the inflexion point?
In this blog post, I intend to clarify these basic questions that shall give a lot of clarity about the current home automation market:
Productization: All technological products in their initial years hit the market with a ‘solutions’ approach where they get customized for every new user. Soon the technology picks up and reaches a commoditization or productization stage. This is the mode where the product actually starts hitting mass market. This has held true for every product right from T.Vs, Computers to telephones. Home Automation until now has been in the ‘Solutions’ mode. But that is now rapidly changing. Companies like Nest, Dropcam and Lockitron have established that path of productization for the home automation products. Each of these products just do their part well and sit nicely in your home. This is a generational leap over the prior hardwired custom solutions that can’t take advantage of economies of scale.
Wi-Fi Presence: The single largest reason behind the success of both Nest and Dropcam is the continuous access to the Internet. This is a change that has happened in last decade. Before that most homes didn’t have wireless routers. So the only way devices could connect to Internet was by having a wire connected to a modem. This situation has completely changed now. Homes now have Wi-Fi, which is still not being taken advantage of by current automation solutions. Players like Nest & Dropcam are still an exception instead of being commonplace.
Cheap Wi-Fi & MCU units: The arduino & raspberry pi did to hardware what the Internet had done to software. They made hardware hackable that has led to a lot of outsiders getting into the hardware trying to build simple solutions that solve smart problems. On top of that, newer microcontroller chips like Electric Imp, Spark & TI’s CC3200 have made lives really simple by providing chips that contain Wi-Fi and MCU combined together. The most important aspect of this is that these units are super-affordable.
Smartphones: Presence of remotes was a necessity in older solutions because of lack of any other solution. The emergence of the pocket super-computers has altered this completely. There’s no longer a need to have an extra remote with an appliance. More importantly, the smartphone is a good source to find a lot of other important data about users because of it’s closeness to people. It’s now really easy to figure out what time a person may reach home by writing a few lines of code.
Apart from the above four reasons, there are several other factors that are pushing the current home automation towards the inflexion point. Some of the other ones are cheap cloud storage and appearance of big data solutions like MongoDB & Hadoop that allow you to store and process huge amounts of data seamlessly. This has resulted in quick implementation of complex learning algorithms. All in all, Home Automation today has everything that it needs from technology to become a reality. All it’s waiting for is smart product people who can come up with brilliant products. I hope this gives you enough points as a home automation enthusiast to defend yourself in the next party discussion! :-)
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Tarkeshwar
CEO & Co-Founder, Lumos Automation
