Google's acquisition of Nest Labs, a smart home device company, for $ 3.2 billion, has made smart homes the focus of attention.
But this acquisition is just a tipping point, before this, many home appliance companies and entrepreneurs have seen this trend. The opportunity for smart homes is that in the past, people's understanding of the Internet mostly stayed on computers and mobile devices, while smart homes can bring the Internet to various household appliances.
The PC Internet market has long been proven by various Internet companies, and people generally believe that mobile Internet will create a larger market. Then, when the Internet really enters people's living rooms, there will be more and greater opportunities.
However, smart home is not just smart home appliances, the former means more people's entire family life including the intelligentization of living room entertainment, while smart home appliances often only refer to the intelligentization of a single home appliance product.
For traditional home appliance companies, they have already had a good exploration of smart home appliances. What they lack is an understanding of the Internet and an open mind; for Internet companies, the direct aim is the smart home, making everything smart Technology, but what is lacking is hardware production and manufacturing capabilities.
However, with the deepening of the concept of smart homes, home appliance companies are also trying to use the Internet, and Internet companies have begun to try hardware, which can be said to be the same.
Although it is difficult to say who will eventually become the big winner in the smart home market, the collision between home appliance companies and Internet companies has already occurred. When consumers are still ignorant of the future, these companies are working hard to create the future.
Home appliance companies: an open mind and standard setting is the key
The basis of smart home is all kinds of home appliances, so the exploration of smart home also comes from home appliance companies. In fact, some home appliance companies can now customize a variety of home appliances for high-end users, partially meeting their needs for smart homes.
But this kind of customization only belongs to the high-end crowd. For ordinary users, it is still a variety of smart home appliances that are more experienced now. From a rice cooker that can be turned on regularly to a refrigerator with a network function, these home appliances are intelligent to some extent, making people's lives easier and more convenient.
From an Internet perspective, smart appliances can bring people a better user experience than ordinary appliances. In response to an email interview with Tencent Technology, Sony China also said that at present, home appliance manufacturers have realized that user experience is more important than concept. Value and emotional experience. "
However, the improvement of user experience brought by a single product is still relatively limited, so some home appliance companies have also proposed the concept of an open platform. Haier launched the "Smart Life Open Platform" and opened an experience store in Shanghai. More than one-third of the products in the store did not come from Haier, but from Haier's partners.
Wang Ye, general manager of advanced technology research and development at Haier, told Tencent Technology that smart homes should integrate three platforms of hardware, software and services, and they need to have their own ecology. Haier hopes to build its own platform so that developers can use this platform to generate hardware or software ideas.
"At present, Haier's 300 million stock equipment is reserved for interfaces, and it will be fully activated and opened in the future." Wang Ye said. This means that once the time is right, these Haier products can become part of the smart home. Connecting these devices and playing new words through various interfaces is likely to become one of the motivations for attracting developers.
However, to build a smart home platform, the standard problem must still be overcome. Different companies now use different standards, and different household equipment may also use different standards.
For example, most of these systems, such as lighting systems, curtain systems, security systems, HVAC control systems, and home appliance control systems, are incompatible. This requires home appliances companies to have an open spirit, unified standards and interfaces, so that different brands and different products can be connected to each other and generate greater value.
A person in charge of the China Research Institute of a multinational appliance giant introduced to Tencent Technology that, historically, industrial games firstly explored the needs of future customers by various manufacturers; then peddled their concepts and products to customers; the third step was the addition of more manufacturers Distribute the ranks of cakes; finally set international standards. He said that this process will not change because it is a company or a few, open or closed.
At the same time, some people in the smart home industry pointed out that the development of smart homes needs to change the existing methods, and making consumer electronics is the best way out. To some extent, this requires home appliance companies to make their products no longer look cold, and to narrow the distance between products and consumers. Under this premise, smart services will be easier for consumers to accept.
Internet companies: Leveraging hardware to do cloud computing and big data
To realize a smart home, networking is a necessary function. Only after the device is connected to the network can it generate greater value through data collection and analysis.
Both Nest Labs products have a strong "learning" function, this learning ability is actually a high-level customization. For example, the intelligent indoor thermostat it produces can determine the user's most suitable room temperature through user adjustment, and automatically help the user adjust to such a temperature in the future. In addition, by judging whether there are people in the room, the intelligent indoor thermostat can also condition the temperature to achieve energy saving.
In fact, the smart indoor thermostat has completed two customizations. One is to customize the room temperature for the user when there are people in the room, and the other is to customize the energy saving plan for the user when there is no one in the room. And this kind of customization only requires very little user participation, and it will learn the user's usage habits.
The reason why this intelligent indoor thermostat can achieve learning and customization mainly depends on various sensors and data analysis. This requires a networking function to transfer data to the server, through server calculation analysis and planning the best plan.
Data analysis and big data processing are the strengths of Internet companies, but in the smart home, the first step is to obtain data. Obtaining data often requires the support of hardware devices, and the electronic hardware in people's homes is home appliances.
For Internet companies, producing home appliances is not easy (Nest Labs actually bypassed home appliances and turned their attention to thermostats and smoke detectors). However, it is difficult to obtain life-related data without hardware equipment, and it will fall into the situation of "smart women can't cook without rice".
Of course, the best solution is to cooperate with Internet companies and home appliance companies, but these two industries are somewhat mutually exclusive. This is also evident in the Chinese market. Last year ’s eloquent demonstration by Xiaomi ’s CEO Lei Jun (Weibo) and Gree Electric ’s chairman and president Dong Mingzhu at the 2013 China Economic Person of the Year Award Ceremony.
There are also some Internet entrepreneurs seeing opportunities in smart homes, and Google ’s acquisition of Nest Labs has also given these entrepreneurs hope.
Nest Labs was founded 4 years ago. It can be said that it has a long-term layout in the field of smart home, and its two co-founders have rich experience in hardware and software products, and have also developed successful products. This is not available for many entrepreneurs. A well-known long-term Google observer in the United States said that the worst case of Google's acquisition may be to make the entrepreneur think that the toaster is connected to the Internet, and its company is worth 3 billion US dollars.
But this does not mean that there is no opportunity for entrepreneurship in the field of smart home. Domestic companies already produce smart sockets, smart remote controls, smart air monitors, etc. These products seem to be far from realizing people's dreams of smart homes, but may be the first step for entrepreneurs to move toward smart homes.
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