Tag: smart home devices

• Project connected home

  This week it was announced that Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance are joining forces to develop a new royalty-free connectivity standard for smart home products. The working group is called Project Connected Home over IP and the goal is to develop a “USB-like plug-and-play protocol for the home.” If successful, this standard would get applied to all smart home systems, including the Amazon, Apple, Google, and other “assistants” that you may already have in your home.

  The thing about smart home devices is that most of them are exactly that: a device. They’re something you buy and append to your home, as opposed to something that gets built into the core of your home. This, of course, makes sense, given how difficult it is to innovate within the real estate space. If you’re in the business of creating smart home products, you ideally want everyone to be able to buy it and quickly add it to what they already have. And as a consumer, you don’t want your permanent fixtures to become quickly outdated.

  But if/when a standard emerges, I wonder if that doesn’t make it easier to develop a more holistic approach to smart home products. That could be really interesting. If you’d like to learn more about the project, click here.

  2019.12.19

• Smart home market penetration in Canada and the US

  Here are the results of a Global Consumer Survey that was conducted in Canada this year (2019) and that asked respondents whether or not they own a smart home device. That is, a device that can be controlled via a smartphone / internet connection.

  

  Even with all of the concerns around privacy, virtual assistants (such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home) appear to be the most popular device with Canadians. Next are connected speakers and smart thermostats.

  The vast majority of respondents (68%) stated that they don’t own any smart home device. However, if you look at the trend lines for Canadian household penetration in the “smart home market,” this is naturally changing:

  

  Curiously, there appears to be a household penetration rate spread between Canada and the US, with the US exhibiting meaningfully higher numbers. Here is the US chart:

  

  Based on these charts, the lowest penetration rate appears to be for “energy management” devices, which would include anything that helps households reduce energy consumption. The rates are the lowest in the case of both Canada and the US.

  This is a bit unfortunate given that energy management is an important one. But it’s also one that isn’t best addressed with only a few smart devices. It should involve a more holistic approach to the way in which we design and build homes.

  All charts and data taken from Statista.

  2019.07.22