"home automation" articles

John Driver, CEO of Lynx Technology will be speaking at Parks Associates 22nd-annual CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference in San Francisco. He kindly provided the analyst team with insights the future of the smart home.  John will be paritipcating on the  Connected Ecosystems: Entertainment and Smart Home panel on Wednesday, May 23, at 4 PM. When will clever homes become smart homes? Let’s face it: smart homes aren’t really all that “smart”....

Bill Loesch, CEO, LeakSentinel spoke with the Parks Associates’ analyst team prior to the 22nd-annual CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference to discuss how companies can capitalize on consumer interest in a home insurance-smart home connection. Bill will be speaking on the Insurance and Home Services: Being a Trusted Advisor panel at 1:30 PM, Thursday, May 24, in San Frncisco. He will be joined by the following speakers: Yuval Harry, Head of...

Every year, Google hosts its I/O conference to bring together developers and showcase its up-and-coming products/features.  This year, Google hosted its conference on May 8th in Mountain View, California. The 2018 conference had a specific focus on artificial intelligence (AI), and Google announced a number of updates coming to its software across its product line. Key announcements from yesterday’s opening keynote include the following: Google Assistant becomes...

Colin Barceloux, CEO, Axius will be speaking at Parks Associates 22nd-annual CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference  in San Francisco.  He kindly provided the analyst team with insights on consumer security concerns in the smart home.  Colin will be participating on the Tech Support & Privacy: Creating Consumer Confidence session at CONNECTIONS.  This session will be held Wednesday, May 23, at 1:15 PM, and will also feature the following...

The next major evolution in computing is here – voice technology dominates CES. Voice assistants are here to stay. At the beginning of 2017, half of U.S. broadband households were using a personal assistant through an application or dedicated device. Market leaders such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and more recently Samsung continue to announce new product enhancements and expanded roadmaps. The competition among these giants was evident at CES with a plethora of...

The smart home today is not really all that smart. It is obedient and does what it is told to do, but has limited capability of making decisions on its own. Decision making requires first, an understanding of the situation, and then a method to make a decision based on the situation. The smart home industry must focus on understanding what is happening in and around the home, and the first step in understanding that context is gathering data. The sensors embedded in...

The smart home is a comprised of a collection of products and services that serve the needs of consumers using either a centralized or a distributed control architecture. In a distributed control architecture individual products perform specific jobs for consumers, but those products also benefit from collaboration with other products. A loose collaboration between autonomous products is sufficient for many jobs; however, some tasks may be better served by if they were coordinated as a...

  One of the most exciting topics at this year's Consumer Electronics Show was voice assistants. Amazon and Google are competing head-to-head in this space, with Samsung beginning to roll out Bixby to more devices. Amazon is well in the lead with well over 40M Echo sales to date according to Parks Associates' estimates, but Google's efforts in conversational AI and deep integration with search is helping to make Google Home a compelling value...