It's 2017, Where is my Smart Home?
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This document summarizes a 25 minute presentation by Jeff Katz on smart homes. The presentation discusses how smart home technology has not lived up to expectations, outlines Katz's background in technology and engineering, and presents three big ideas for improving the smart home experience: interoperability and data stewardship, working together to build solutions, and consumer transparency and choice. The presentation concludes with a question and answer session.
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It's 2017, Where is my Smart Home?
- 1. It’s 2017. Where is my Smart Home? Jeff Katz Senior Practice Lead IT / Engineering Telefónica Germany NEXT GmbH
- 2. »Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced« Evelyn Leeper
- 3. Agenda – Relevant quote – Agenda – Speaker Info – The Glorious Retro-Future – It’s 2017, where is my smart home? – Kindergarten Lessons – Three big ideas! – What’s this Geeny stuff, anyway? ~25 minutes | english 3
- 4. Jeff Katz – American living in Germany for five years – Co-founded several companies in Finance, IT, Security – Founded hardware accelerator called HARDWARE.co – Background in Electrical Engineering and Embedded Development – Has designed and built consumer wearables – Currently working for Telefónica NEXT 4
- 7. Where is my Smart Home? 7
- 8. Where is my Smart Home? 8
- 9. Where is my Smart Home? 9
- 10. Where is my Smart Home? 10
- 11. So what’s Smart, then? 11 Using information available from all sources: • Home automatically adjusts to the occupants • Accommodates needs before they’re known or expressed Improvements are: • Better in some ways, worse in none • Evolutionary and Revolutionary • Don’t become obsoleted on short time frames
- 12. Things we learned in Kindergarten
- 13. The three big ideas: 13 Interoperability and Data Stewardship Working together to build compelling solutions Consumer Transparency and Choice
- 14. 14 (This is what I do for Telefonica)
- 15. Thank you. Questions? Jeff Katz Senior Practice Lead IT / Engineering Telefónica Germany NEXT GmbH jeff@geeny.io • jeff.katz@telefonica.com • @kraln https://developers.geeny.io join the Geeny developer community
Editor's Notes
- Hi Everyone. Before we really get going, I'd like to start with a quote. It's a bit of a reversal from the more famous one and I think it sets the tone for this talk really well. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. That means if you have to dig into its guts and understand how it works, it's not good enough yet. And that's kind of the point. Cars by and large just work. Your cellphone just works. You don't need to be a mechanical engineer to drive a car, or a RF engineer to use a cellphone. So what's going on in the smart home?
- Here's a bit of our agenda. I have 25 minutes today, which is more than enough time to really zero in on the topic and discuss it well. There's a bit about me at the front, to understand where I am coming from, then a bit of the past of smart homes. And then the core theme.
- So, me. Hi, my name is Jeff. I flew in last night from Berlin, where I have lived for the last five years. I am a serial entrepreneur, and I have founded several ecosystem initiatives in Berlin including HARDWARE.co, a meetup and accelerator for hardware startups. At my core I'm an engineer: Hardware, firmware, systems. I've built wearables, and, at the moment, I am working for Telefonica, the big Telecommunications company, but I'll get to that later.
- Let's talk about the past. The glorious retro future of our parents, our parent's parent's, and our parent's parent's parent's generation. The illustration imagines from the late 1800s the world in the year 2000, a kitchen completely automated and enabling a life of leisure. As we know, one of the most important innovations, and arguably the first smart home device of the 20th century was the washing machine, freeing up a huge amount of time for Women and making a dramatic impact on society. The pictures are from a smart home concept from the 1950s--buttons everywhere, but also some surprisingly modern technologies (Induction cooking.) For the better part of 100 years, we've been imagining ways to make our homes more useful and provide more value for us.
- But you don't have to go that far back. Here's a smart home system from 1990. Touch screen, smart lights and thermostat, security cameras. It's positively modern. In fact, most of what we consider to be essential parts of the smart home first started appearing in the 90's. Devices based on the X10 standard (invented in the 70s...), zigbee, etc. The concept of the "smart home" really took off in the 90s, with companies like Microsoft pushing their idea of the future. We really haven't progressed past that point.
- Here's the state of the art in smart light switches. In theory, it should be great: You can use the switches on your wall like you always have, and you can control the lights from your phone. It integrates with Alexa so you can turn your lights on and off from your voice. It integrates with Nest so that your lights can turn off when you're not home. It can be scheduled, it can connect with IFTTT, it can do so much. But you have to set it up. And sometimes it doesn't stay set up--firmware updates, wifi problems, connectivity and latency problems mean that this is still bleeding edge--if you use it, you have to be prepared to get hurt. That's not smart.
- Let's have a look at this notification. You're somewhere out-and-about, and you receive the notification that your handyman has unlocked your door. Nice, right? But is it? What can you actually do with this notification? If the handyman is supposed to be there, it's not a problem, and you don't need to take any action. If the handyman is not supposed to be there, you could call him, or call the police, but at this point he's in your house and doing whatever he's going to do. This sort of information overload doesn't really help--it pushes the decision making onto the end user--and it's not really smart.
- How many of you have a "smart" TV at home? How old is it? A big problem with a lot of these smart devices is support over their lifetimes. We see that big corporations are really good at bringing products to market, but they have very short attention spans and are always working on the next big thing. That means that customers who buy appliances which used to last for decades are now finding functionality disappearing after months. That's not smart, either.
- IFTTT is a web service which can be used to write simple rules. If (something) then (do something else). It’s basically programming, and that’s the problem. Sorry, if you're expecting your end consumers to program their house, you've completely left reality behind. This isn't smart, this is torture.
- I’ve done a lot of complaining about things that are not smart. What is smart, then? Smart is when you don’t have to make a decision or really be involved at all. Using available information, your house and the devices inside of it should adjust to your lifestyle, and add value to you. No programming, no mobile application, just simply better user experience. Do you have to adjust the fuel/air ratio on your car, or tell it to turn on the lights when it’s dark outside? A lot of the ”smart” devices are what are called ”verschlimmbesserung” in German—they are improvements that make the overall product worse. In order to create consumer value, you need to be better in every way, and worse in none—that includes failure scenarios, personal data, privacy, and security. Why is it that companies don’t seem to be able to bring smart devices to market? That would require some rudimentary education.
- The most important thing we learned in Kindergarten was sharing. Working together lets you accomplish so much more than you can by working alone. No one likes the kid who hordes all the toys at recess. We need to work together--and share--to fully enable exponential growth. How do these things translate to the smart home?
- A lot of the problems come from companies who want to own their customer experiences completely, for better or for worse. Your light bulbs aren't allowed to talk to your washing machine, because they're made by different manufacturers and connect to different IT systems. And you control them from different mobile apps. If you want to use your lightbulbs for anything that the manufacturer didn't intend, you're likely out of luck. Trapped in the imagination of a multi-national corporation (shudder.) I think there's a better way. If you separate the relationship between devices and applications, you enable companies to do what they’re best at. When you participate in an open ecosystem, everyone wins. When you give consumers the transparency to see what’s going on with their data, they will choose the applications and devices that give them the most value. What does this look like, in practice? We thought about this long and hard, and we came up with
- Geeny. This is what I am working on: a platform for consumer IoT devices that implements these concepts. Device manufacturers can bring their devices to the platform, and completely unrelated people can develop services and applications on top of these devices. Ultimately, it allows for truly intelligent smart home experiences.
- Thanks so much for your time, and now I hope you're able to go out there and make the future. Feel free to reach out and chat.