Home Control Center

Smartphone as home control center.  Ultimately linking purchasing decisions made room by room to online and in-store behavior?

GE Re-Imagines the Home

Always looking at the future of the home, we looked at the technology involved in the home and tracked their progress.  In particular in the area of appliances.   GE is promoting the idea with an ad campaign.  " ... "The kitchen space has been redefined as another living space. The lines have been blurred between living room and kitchen," said Tim Matis, director of advertising at GE Appliances, which just completed a $1 billion overhaul of the unit to better reflect how appliances fit into consumer's lives. The redo used consumer insights to make changes in everything from design to manufacturing and marketing, and the results will become clear Aug. 5 when GE breaks an aggressive new campaign themed "Reimagining Home." ... " 

Corning and Electronically Tinted Windows

In IEEE Spectrum:  An energy savings idea, but one that does increase the complexity of the smart home.  Visited Corning some years ago and enjoyed their approaches to innovation.

Networked Things

A good overview of the current state of the network of things.  Which points back to our own experiments with networked refrigerators, in that nexus of the modern home, the kitchen.   A talk by Bill Joy inspired us to take closer look.   Now it seems the future is very close.  " ... Well over a decade ago, Bill Joy was mocked for talking about a future that included network-enabled refrigerators. That was both unfair and unproductive, and since then, I’ve been interested in a related game: take the most unlikely household product you can and figure out what you could do if it were network-enabled. That might have been a futuristic exercise in 1998, but the future is here. Now. And there are few reasons we couldn’t have had that future back then, if we’d have the vision.... "