New trend of smart home design: open API facilitates secondary development

At present, with Microsoft, Logitech and Apple competing to acquire R2Studios, SmartThings won a seed venture capital of 3 million US dollars. The author's judgment is that the smart home market will usher in major changes this year. As a veteran practitioner in this industry, I would like to analyze the trend of this industry in 2013 from the perspective of this year's smart home.

What is the traditional smart home

From the practical application of the market, the main product of smart home is intelligent control. There are many large companies engaged in the development of the smart home market internationally. Their common characteristic is that they are relatively good at comprehensiveness and have a wide range of products, which can provide intelligent control needs in various environments such as commercial and home use. In this regard, the representative companies in the US market such as Creston, Control4 and other comprehensive companies, in addition, there are more professional companies such as Lutron, Sonos, Insteon in lighting, audio, security, remote control lights, in the technology There are advantages in the program and core products.

These traditional smart home brands have a problem on the same field. Due to the diverse user needs, local agents are usually required to design solutions based on user needs, and then send installers to the site for construction and wiring installation, which results in a lot of costs. The improvement has made the threshold of user experience very high, invisiblely blocking a large number of potential customers from the door. In order to ensure profits, manufacturers and agents have to oversell a large number of useless functions to users. Some immature technologies and applications have also hitchhiked into the installation package, making the entire system extremely bloated and expensive. Nowhere to talk.

Therefore, when the new generation of user experience represented by Apple revolutionized the interactive experience of mobile phones, some smart home application developers have figured out from the complicated buttons and controllers, and have begun to redesign the interaction method and interact around the iPhone Become mainstream. APP engineers have replaced the original role of GUI design engineers, and the intelligent control system has really begun to make people use it without learning.

New development models and processes

The technical barriers to smart home products in the traditional sense have been gradually opened. As the popularity of the iPhone becomes easier to design, the design of the interactive system becomes easier to implement, and the hardware system verification also can be tested with open source hardware without major efforts. New communication solutions and sensing and control systems, and open cloud platforms (such as Cosm, IFTTT, thingspeak, and iobridge) allow the company to try to connect local devices to the Internet and conduct various social network services without immediately introducing server engineers Unicom. In this way, even an elite development team with only a few people can complete the demo development work of the large-scale development of dozens of people in the traditional sense.

In fact, due to the appearance of fund-raising platforms such as Kickstarter, the completion of the development of the product Demo has reached some of the goals. Single-function intelligent control products such as Lifx, SmartThings, Lockitron have successfully obtained the concept and Demo. Millions of dollars in financing. These funds are enough to ensure that the team completes the first round of product development and delivery.

This novel product concept definition and fund-raising method, one is to avoid blind investment in research and development energy, you can know whether the product is welcomed by consumers at the beginning, and in product development, effective interaction can also make Some of the actual user experience is directly fed back to the product definition and R & D team. In the interactive development, more energy can be invested in the function that the user wants to pay the most. The development and maintenance of such good R & D and user interaction can also enable users to become the best product improvement program providers in the life cycle and contribute to long-term product development. What can be seen is that this single-function product must inevitably start the market from fast online sales. For a long time, the ground channel will certainly not be a force in promoting this product with relatively lower profit than traditional products. of.

In the new generation of single-function intelligent control products, we can also see a tendency for small projects to grow together. For example, the door control system Lockitron can interact with the video camera on the door of Doorbot. After confirming the visitor through Doorbot, the user can use Lockitron to open the door; SmartThings can also be used with the products of Withings or Lifx smart LED lights of the old APP hardware manufacturer. interactive……

how about it? Do you feel the era when the gadgets in the UNIX era pass links to each other to enhance functionality? There is no clear distinction between the application platform and the application, but each product has completed a tacit understanding of the product function combination by opening APIs to each other. Having a few years of meetings, and then formulating an industry standard that people outsiders can't figure out is not a model for this round of innovative companies.

Therefore, future smart home products will become more and more like the development of mobile Internet. APPs are inherently easy to upgrade, so after the products are sold out, smart home developers and users are no longer in contact with each other. Can they help users generate a long-term experience upgrade experience through APPs and platforms? The key to being able to hold users and facilitate secondary sales. At present, there are no smart home manufacturers ready for the APP team and operation and maintenance, and it is time to speed up the preparation.

This industry looks like a typical case of "disruptive innovation". The products of traditional companies are big and stupid. The products of emerging companies are simple and light. The traditional companies cannot put down the lucrative old products, and the emerging companies have no burden at all. The initial product has a single function, but after a few rounds of trial and error, the later iteration of the product will form an overwhelming advantage over traditional products with a destructive trend.

Summary of features

Finally, summarize some characteristics of the new generation of home intelligent control products:

1. Simple hardware system and plug and play

2. UI interaction based on smartphones such as iPhone

3. Cloud background service (or open Internet of Things platform) to connect various Internet services

4. Hardware open API interface facilitates secondary development and integration

From the current development perspective, I personally optimistic about the development of SmartThings products in the country after one to two years. Considering the current domestic innovative hardware fundraising environment, some domestically developed lightweight products will first succeed in North America, and then After half a year to a year back to the country to start. Different from traditional TMT innovation, the characteristics of being close to the hardware industry chain have given Chinese innovation companies a special advantage in this round of innovation. Let us wait and see how domestic products can seize this opportunity.

Teacher Laptop

Could you share which points you care more when choose a teacher laptop? Size, cpu, storage, memory, battery, screen, fingerprint or backlight? As one of the top laptops for teachers in 2022, this 15.6 inch celeron N5095 or J4125 online teaching laptop is of the special necessary features a laptop for online teaching has. For example, high quality 1080P screen, bigger battery, updated storage and memory, mid-level cpu, etc. So many clients choose this model as laptop for teachers malaysia or laptops for teachers program.

Of course, there are other type Education Laptop, like 14 inch windows 10 64 gb Student Laptop, 15 inch 10th good laptops for university students, 16.1 inch i7 9th hq 4gb video graphic laptop, etc.

If you have other type device interest, just let us know since we also customize android or windows tablet, Mini PC and All In One PC.

Believe always have a right one meeting your special demand, no matter for student project, business tender, academic institution or reselling.

Teacher Laptop,Online Teaching Laptop,Top Laptops For Teachers,Laptop For Teachers Malaysia,Laptops For Teachers Program

Henan Shuyi Electronics Co., Ltd. , https://www.shuyielectronics.com