Ask any firefighter to name the most important thing a person can do to prevent their house from burning to the ground, and he or she will tell you, “Install smoke alarms.”
Author Archive: Jennifer Tuohy
Smart, wireless lighting is clearly the future of illuminating our homes and businesses. However, there are two distinct paths one can choose to automate lighting: smart light bulbs or smart switches.
Despite the growing competition, Philips Hue light bulbs are still the kings of all smart, Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs. These color-changing wonders will literally transform your home, and all you need to do is screw in a light bulb.
IMAGE 2 AppsPart of the success of Hue lies in Philips’ early decision to provide a Software Development Kit (SDK), meaning there are now over 200 third-party iOS, Android, and even a few Windows Phone, apps that control your lighting in ways you never dreamed possible.
You’ve tinkered with a NEST, installed a couple of Philips Hue light bulbs, and now you’re hooked on home automation. What’s the next step? To truly make your home “smart,” you need a home automation hub (also known as a smart home hub).
Here, we’ll detail the different options on the market and help you decide which hub will work best for your home.
If you keep a smartphone or tablet long enough, it loses resale value to the point that it may eventually end up sitting in a drawer somewhere, gathering dust (try selling an iPhone 3 on Craigslist these days…). Technology advances so quickly that within a couple years, many of these devices are pretty much useless for their original purpose.
There is little doubt that the combination of sensors, smarts and systems that is the Internet of Things is on course to change every element of our daily lives. From fixing everyday problems to solving global issues, the Internet of Things has enormous potential. But the ability to add sensors to everyday products, connect unusual items to the Internet and lend a little something extra to the ordinary can also be, well, fun.
Christmas morning probably saw more than a few gift recipients searching fruitlessly for just one more HDMI port behind the television. High-Definition Multimedia Interface cables have quickly become the standard for connecting all audio/visual equipment to our televisions, but with everything from your cable box to your PlayStation to your BluRay player to that new streaming media device you found under the tree all vying for one of those precious ports, how do you deal with a lack of them?
The smart home may be angling for the mainstream, but right now it’s stuck swimming in a niche. Turning lights on automatically and setting thermostats from a smartphone is the stuff geeks revel in now, but for the smart home to reach flooding point, it must transform, not augment, the domestic realm — and it needs to start in the kitchen.
Technology used to be about sending people to the moon. Now it’s about figuring out how many eggs are in your fridge when you’re at the store. The democratization of tech impacts our daily lives in many more ways than that trip to the moon ever will. Today, we all walk around with super computers in our pockets. Technology is literally in the hands of the masses.
