After google PowerMeter a couple of months ago, it’s not Microsoft’s turn to unveil his home automation / monitoring middleware. Called “hohm”, it all focuses around energy-savings. As US is all about the Smart Power Grigs buzz, this is yet another ecosystem with its own SDK to support. Good thing is that this now means you’ll see in the next future plenty of cheap connected devices making their way in your home and giving you those beautiful dashboards we geeks love.

An amazin piece of geek tech : a wifi flying drone that you can control with your iphone accelerometers while watching the embedded camera stream on the display.
One can wonder what Parrot is doing on those geek grounds since their core business is bluetooth hands-free systems for cars.
Another connected device “Made in France”.

WaveStorm since 2003. I’ve been a very strong advocate of the connected devices space through

2008 and 2009 have been such exciting times with amazing new devices being released (Chumby, Spykee, Rovio, Nabaztag…) yet when you look at the big picture none of those devices really turned into a mass market success (my definition of a success in consumer electronics starts somewhere between 250k/500k units shipped – usually CE projects try to be break even at 100k units).

All those devices are amazing, their internals are beauty, the level of complexity to come up with such a level of integration is amazing, and those babies can really do anything and go way beyond what they were initially aimed at. And this basically is the key concern : what are they aimed at and who needs this ?
Disregarding the fact that setting up a connected devices is a real pain (WiFi pairing really isn’t a one-step process) few strong use cases have really emerged in the market as of today.

The main ideas that have been kinda working are:

• Home surveillance (WiFi cams, Spykee…) : probably the most realistic use case of the connected devices but still nothing really exciting
• Widget screen (Chumby, Ki’i Frame, Tabbee…) : nice gizmo but quite useless at the end of the day
• Interactive toy (Nabaztag) : annoying after a few hours….
• Home automation : been around for a few decades, and it’s taking forever to take off – market super fragmented
• Sensors (RFID reader, weight scales…) : seducing potential but weak gain in your daily life

So let’s face it, creating a connected devices is still quite expensive and at a 150/300 USD price range the use cases of connected devices are far from obvious and the value of those functions v.s. price point seem a non-match thus leaving this gadgets to be aimed only at the geek community.

The mistake everyone is currently making is to try and make “universal” connected devices thus buying expensive hardware to ensure some future potential. And even the customer gets fooled buying a device while projecting himself into potential use-cases he imagines but that will probably never happen.
The consequence of this universal design is naturally a higher price point.
Marketers should really try and do their job defining the core features, and narrowing as much as possible the product around those so this price point gets within the 50-100USD range and the use case gets more clear to the end user.
Also the software on those devices has always been the week side. A lot of effort is put into building the device to put in a box, but the software being kinda intangible gets often left behind or not polished enough.

If we can see cheaper hardware, more focused devices aimed at niche markets and better software in 2010, we may see this Internet of Things coming true.
To be honest I don’t think 2010 will be the year, we probably need another 5 years for the market and the technologies to mature so that connected devices could really be used by my mom at a price she would be willing to pay.

The Power management space is definitely getting super-hot lately. Another day another announce with PowerZoa introducingtheir line of “cubes” which are:

Powerzoa cube is a smart plug that fits between your appliances and wall outlets. The cubes measure your energy usage and sends data to a personalized website where you can schedule appliances to turn on and off automatically, saving electricity, lowering energy costs and helping the environment.

While the website is hideous, it’s quite remarkable they had bot a power meter and a BPL chip fit into such a tiny package. We’re finally getting to what we were foreseeing with WaveStorm in 2007.

This was definitely the revelation at this morning’s SFR Player innovation exhibition : a holographic pyramid to stage your prototype devices. the magic is right there and it took us a few minutes to figure out the trick – yet the effect is quite striking!

As I was leaving SFR Player presentation this morning, something caught my eye in SFR’s flagship store : a small little weird mechanical insect. The Hexbug has ingenious sensors letting him sense chocks and change direction accordingly – baby loved it ! 14.99 and more fun than an expensive Rolly or Pleo. Gotta try it on the cat now…

Just stumbled upon this old screenshot of what we had been developing at WaveStorm in 2007, still feels very actual when you think about Google PowerMeter initiatives.

I’m doing daily (if not more) conf’calla through skype, and since I moved to PC I must confess the quality of those drastically dropped (why-tf did Dell put the microphone next to the fan !?). Just bought this gizmo and the sound is stunning, it’s very compact (and the USB chord folds nicely in the back cover) and the sound both in output and input is diamond-clear just like the big well-known Polycom squid.

Just realized NeuroSky MindSet is finally out. For those who remember, it reads brainwaves and uses them to have you interact with the game. The demo is quite cool, can’t wait to use it combined with a head tracker to enhance my aim accuracy in Quake!

@yazzgoth showed me the Livescribe pen a couple of weeks ago, and I must confess it’s really an amazing toy. To keep it short this smart pen understands your handwriting, stores it and syncs it with the sounds he also records, recognizes it and lets you process it on the go. The most amazing demo is the language translation where you write a word and hit a function button on a hot corner of your page and the pen start saying the same word in chinese or any other language you choose.
Now apparently we’ll get even more cool apps to fill this thing making it even more appealing. I’ll try to be strong and not to buy one (since my handwriting is the worse…).