Somewhere on the spectrum between hype and hope and “it’ll never happen” lies the future of the Internet of Things.
In electronics design, the ecosystem is driving hard toward delivering devices, software and tools to enable this vast and vague application nirvana to take off. For retailers it could be huge...or not. They’re trying to figure it out as intensely as we are.
So kudos to Target for creating a permanent space in its downtown location here dedicated to the connected home. The 3,500-square-foot display opened last week, and when dblaza and I arrived at midday, it was thronged with consumers.
David Newman, leader of Target’s Enterprise Growth Initiatives Team, chatted with us for a few minutes as families and folks poked at touch screens, bounced a digitally-connected basketball and marveled at myriad technologies—all of which you could buy right there.
In short, he said Target is nurturing both its customer community and its vendor community through the Home Smart Home project, which may expand over time to other locations. (Target’s not alone in its effort to seed and educate the market: Lowe’s, Home Depot, Best Buy and others are pushing into home automation.)
Customers get to see the possibilities and feed back ideas to Target and Target gets to share some data with vendors about what was interesting to guests.
He also said he was keen to connect with silicon providers who might want to engage in the promotion. We could easily see a semiconductor open house event at this location, couldn’t you?
Here’s a sampling of the 35 products on display:
Petnet: Alas ole Buddy passed on from our family last year, but I might have bought this for him. The Petnet SmartFeeder is a sensor equipped, Internet-connected food feeder for animals. You can control portions and timing from your and when you’re running low on kibble it’ll order you a new batch for delivery. I like it and so do investors who have swarmed around the technology. And I’d like the robotic pooper scooper, please, to complement this (someone's got to be working on this at this very moment!).
A related product, the Whistle pet collar-tracker, I could have used in the 1980s when I had a dog who managed to escape the back yard 25 times.
Tile: The smart object-locator device has already caught fire in consumer minds. (And among crowd-funding investors, who ponied up $2.5 million to help the $20 devices come to market).
Mimo: This baby-monitoring technology created by MIT alumni and dropouts aims to keep track of an infant’s respiration, pressure, moisture and temperature. Sensors push the data into the cloud where parents/caregivers can monitor. The idea is to keep an eye out for potentially unhealthy sleep patterns or fatal issues such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Next up on Mimo’s roadmap? A smart bottle warmer that ties into the monitor and sleep-prediction data to be ready by baby stirs.
Wink: The connected home solution provider had a hub on display and a demo showing how to connect and control various application devices (connected doors, locks, lights and so forth).
One Wink-connected device, Rachio, is an automated sprinkler-control system.
You get the idea. Whatever you think about the various applications in this--the first--generation of connected devices, the Internet of Things, its creativity and its communities are stepping up to the innovation challenge. It’s really no different than the mid-1990s when we were first building web pages and trying to figure out how to make use of the Internet.
So, what would buy? What you design for this marketplace to be on display at places like Target?