Chances are, if you’ve started to hear or read about “The Smart Home”, you’ve learned something about controlling your thermostat or unlocking your house from a smartphone. But what you probably haven’t been exposed to, is the idea that you can interact with your entire home. The technology already exists to enable your smart home devices to react based on which occupant has arrived home or an input received from sensors and detectors. Actions such as opening a gate or garage door, unlocking the entry door, turning on the lights to a pre-set level, playing their favorite music and setting the temperature to their preference are trivial when compared with what is possible today.

One problem; Only hobbyist and the manufacturers for luxury markets have expertise to bring all this together at the moment. The standards needed to help foster smart market growth don’t exist yet, but that’s truly an over-simplification of the complex barriers the so-called “Internet of Things” industry is trying to solve. 

Today, consumers exploring smart home products in their local Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes or on Amazon are presented with a confusing range of devices that often do not play well together, if at all. Strangely, industry members are addressing this issue by creating consortiums, formed of members holding patents for opposing connected-device communications technologies. At first glance, someone looking to make their home “smart” may not realize they need to choose a team.

Let's say you shell out $249 for a WiFi connected Nest thermostat. Not only is it great for family members with Android phones, it works with iPhones and a host of other products, all thanks to the “Works with Nest” developer program. Great! Now the iPhone users in the house may have also heard about Apple’s HomeKit project, where Apple will attempt to work with several companies to bring this fractured industry of smart home startups and established manufacturers together. 

Works with Nest right? NO

With Google having purchased Nest in 2014, it is of no surprise they are not invited to hang with HomeKit. So if you want to crash this house party, you're going to need to bring someone who knows and gets along with both of them.

Enter the “Hub”

A hub is a box that connects to your WiFi network and bridges the gap between the various technologies. Increasingly, it also connects to the cloud so you can more securely access your smart hub from anywhere. To date there is only one company capable of merging Apple’s vision of the smart home with Google. At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, Insteon, a 10 year veteran in the smart home industry announced their $149 Hub Pro that supports Apple HomeKit. Since the current Insteon Hub already supports control of the Nest Learning Thermostat, it's a reasonable assumption that the Apple HomeKit version will too, however Insteon declined to comment on the capabilities of their yet to be released Hub Pro, beyond the official press release.

With the soon to be available Apple Watch, Apple also has a new
tool that adds interesting possibilities for owners of HomeKit compatible iOS devices and a HomeKit compatible Insteon Pro Hub.  From your wrist, you could use voice activation, geo-fencing location services, and touch control to interact with your smart home from a single, secure interface. This could potentially simplify and secure two-way interaction with door locks, lights, thermostats, gate and garage openers, cameras, sensors and alarm systems from anywhere in the world.

Apple is not the only company trying to bridge the divide. Samsung also purchased smart home startup SmartThings, a hub manufacture that tries to bridge several communication types. Staples, though a partnership with D-Link, has the Connect hub which, similar to SmartThings, connects multiple device types. Google also purchased the intellectual property from startup Revolv under the Nest brand, which until they closed down operations, had one of the most intriguing hubs around, promising control of multiple vendor smart devices with no less than eight different communications types from a single box.

Security

Unfortunately, when technology is built as quickly as possible, for the lowest price possible, security is not at the forefront. Good security is hard to get right, and many vendors try to patch it in after the fact. According to sources, security has been a cornerstone of Apple HomeKit from the start, which is good news if you’re an iOS user. Devices compatible with Apple HomeKit require special silicon chips to make them compliant with Apple's security requirements. But what if you have an Android phone, is the secure smart home possible? Turns out there’s both good news and no news.

Next time I’ll go into more detail about the security issues, the current progress, what’s still missing and steps you should take to protect your privacy as the Internet of Everything starts to enter your home.

Interested in joining the discussion? Leave me a comment or send me a tweet @dougkrug. I'd love to hear your perspective about what you think this smart future should look like.