The home takeover of the Internet of Things is imminent. Late last week, Samsung officially announced its purchase of SmartThings, a move that pits Samsung against powerhouses Google and Apple in the smart home space.
SmartThings is a home automation startup that is rapidly making a name for itself, starting as a Kickstarter campaign and ultimately raising $15.5 million in venture capital funding. It connects simple household objects like fans and lights to a hub, which allows them to be controlled from anywhere via SmartThings’s smartphone app. The app allows users to conveniently control the security and energy use of their houses, adjusting lights and triggering various actions. It also can be set up to alert users when something unexpected happens, like when there is motion detected outside of the user’s house.
The idea of the smart home falls under the overarching umbrella of the Internet of Things, which is the idea that a network of smart devices can be interconnected for smart home systems and greater automation in all fields. You may recognize major commercial advancements in this concept in the form of smart thermostat systems or washer/dryers that utilize Wi-Fi for remote monitoring.
Not exactly a new concept, the Internet of Things has been a topic under discussion since the early 90’s. Mark Weiser, in “The Computer for the 21st Century,” put forth the idea of ubiquitous computing as the future of technology. He claimed that “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” While the article was more of a work of fiction at the time, each advancement in the Internet of Things seems to make the piece more and more prophetic.
In 1999, the concept of the interconnected network of devices began to solidify. Kevin Ashton, along with David Brock and Sanjay Sarma, founded Auto-ID Labs, which is a network of seven institutions responsible for the funding and development of RFID and other sensing technologies. Along with EPCGlobal, Auto-ID Labs was chosen to lay the groundwork for the Internet of Things. That year, Kevin Ashton coined the term “Internet of Things,” describing the linking of RFID in P&G’s supply chain to the Internet.
Further publicity for the idea came in 2000, when LG announced its plans to launch the first Internet refrigerator. The Internet refrigerator was capable of tracking the products stored inside of it through barcode or RFID scanning, and could determine when a particular food item was running low. Despite ultimately being commercially unsuccessful, LG’s investment in the Internet refrigerator symbolized the welcoming of the IoT into the common household.
“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.”
–Kevin Ashton, ‘That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing’, RFID Journal, July 22, 2009
From 2000 to 2009, further acknowledgment for the concept of the Internet of Things began popping up in media and across the world. The UN’s International Telecommunications Union published a report on the topic in 2005, and the first European IoT conference was held in 2008. Cisco IBSG (Internet Business Solutions Group) estimates that the number of devices connected to the Internet finally exceeded the world’s human population between 2008 and 2009, at which point the Internet of Things was “born.”
This Google Trends graph shows the gradual increase in the Internet of Things over a 10 year period, as well as its sharp increase in recent months.
Smart Homes Space
Fast-forward to the present. Earlier this year, Google announced its acquisition of Nest, famous producers of the Nest Learning Thermostat, as its (really big) step into the smart home space. In Apple’s corner, HomeKit was introduced during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, touting interoperability capabilities between locks, cameras, lights, etc. While these weren’t the only fighters in the smart home ring, they are certainly the biggest names.
At least, that is, until Samsung entered the ring with its $200 million acquisition of SmartThings. Samsung, which claims to have been thinking about the smart home space for a while, already sells an assortment of connected appliances. Adding SmartThings capabilities into the mix and allowing its connected appliances to sync up and talk to one another may be the critical step in realizing Samsung’s smart home dreams.
While the plan is to allow SmartThings to operate independently, SmartThings will be moving from Washington D.C. to Samsung’s Open Innovation Center in Palo Alto.
With all of these major players rushing to get into the smart home space, one can only hope that we’ll be able to maintain control of our houses.
