Curt Schacker, VP, Connected Devices at EVRYTHNG, shows how smart home management products can be efficient and reliable in the IoT market:

What is the most important next step to engage consumers in smart home solutions, connected entertainment services, and/or value-added services like tech support and connected health?

As manufacturers and suppliers, we need to make the consumer experience far more seamless than it has been to date. The first rule of any consumer product is that it has to work. Consumers don’t see themselves buying IoT or even smart homes; rather, they think of buying products that add some value to their everyday lives. In the rush to market, there have been far too many products and solutions that fall short of acceptable reliability, and a simple, compelling consumer experience. 

What is the biggest challenge your company faces in 2015?

Like every supplier of an IoT platform, our challenge is to enable our customers to develop really compelling connected products. This is partly a technical challenge, but also partly a challenge to help customers to define use cases and value propositions that resonate with the market. I think the market’s progress has been very spotty in this regard.

What is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?

The biggest driver for connected products is those that address real problems: painkillers vs. vitamins, as they say. Lowering the temperature on my refrigerator is probably a vitamin, a nice-to-have. Getting a text message that my refrigerator door was left open and my food is going to spoil is a painkiller. We need to move from gimmicky value propositions to solutions for real problems.

What are the most important initiatives your company is taking in 2015?

We will continue to make major investments in the core scalability of our platform. We believe that very few platform vendors are taking the time to seriously determine whether their architectures will scale with the numbers of products and message traffic. We are reaching a point where a single customer at full deployment can easily outstrip the traffic of Twitter. Scale cannot be an afterthought.

We are also really excited about the potential for integrating connected appliances with tagged products that gain a digital identity through a smart tag like NFC or RFID. The future world will be one in which everything – literally – will be connected, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how to enable this through our platform.

Describe your vision for the smart home and entertainment markets in 2020.

By 2020, the ‘average’ person in the developed world will expect to control their entire life through their smart phone. It will be strange indeed to own a physical product – be it a microwave oven, bicycle, or pair of shoes – that does not have a digital interface that presents itself through one’s smart phone. The implications of this for industry are incredibly profound. Very few companies possess the wherewithal to effect this wholesale transformation in their businesses, but they need to be preparing now. Look at what Uber is doing to the taxi industry: that’s going to happen everywhere, and now is the time to determine which side of the equation you’ll be on.

Curt Schacker will be speaking on the panel “IoT and APIs: Extending Functionality for Connected Devices” on Tuesday, May 19, at 4:15 PM. Other panelists include representatives from Ayla Networks and Greenwave Systems.

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