Skip to main content

Smart Homes Need Smart Communities


Home automation may not be described as life-altering just yet, but it is pretty cool to be able to control your lights from a smartphone app, change your music automatically as you walk into a room and enjoy a comfortable temperature without lifting a finger. Your home can customize itself to your habits, and save you money in the process. That’s all great, but does it really make the world a better place?  
To make home automation a world-changing concept, we need to think bigger. Technologists have been myopically focused on the benefits of individuals and families one home at a time, but there is an unexploited strength in numbers when it comes to connected homes. The benefit of home automation to a society could be so much more if smart homes were scaled into fully connected smart communities.
Consider the current drought in California. A homeowner can save 25 gallons of water— about the amount used for a five-minute shower — per day by purchasing an aftermarket smart irrigation system. That’s a great start, but 25 gallons barely amounts to a drop in the bucket when it comes to a drought like California is experiencing.
But what if all 500 homes in a connected community had built-in smart irrigation systems? That would scale to 12,500 gallons saved in a day. If we took it a step further and installed smart water systems into one-quarter of the new homes built in the U.S. last year — 125,000 — we could have saved more than 3 million gallons each day, and more than a billion gallons a year.

Building Tomorrow’s Connected Communities

Home builders and technologists both have the power to make incredible change. If they come together to shift the focus from home automation to community automation, the impact could be that much greater.
Imagine a community where everyone’s home is built to connect to a smart network the same way they connect to an electrical grid. The barriers to entry of adopting connected technologies would be nearly eliminated because the entire expense of the underpinning technology could be rolled into a mortgage, just the same as any other feature in a new home. And for the consumer, this beats the daunting process of making your existing home smart by buying a series of aftermarket “connected” devices that may not even be able to speak to one another.  
For the industry to not just grow organically but rapidly, tech giants and homebuilders alike must step up and design home automation to benefit communities as a whole.
In this world of community automation, a common platform would be installed throughout the entire neighborhood, and users would not have to grapple with today’s disparate home automation platforms. Installing one platform across all houses creates an instant network. While home automation is still in the early adoption stage, with only 6 percent of consumers feeling that the era of the smart home has already arrived, owners of existing homes without a pre-installed connected platform could be encouraged to retrofit their homes as the benefits of living in a smart community become clear, thus creating an even larger network.

The Network Effects Of The IoT

Once IoT infrastructure is in place throughout a community, usage will grow exponentially. People will see how others have benefitted from using connected technologies and will want to do the same. For example, applications that make the water usage of neighborhoods transparent to one another can motivate nearby families to take steps to meet their community average or goal. By gamifying the experience, the competitive nature of human beings can change the environmentalist narrative from “What can I do?” to “What are they doing that I’m not?”
The specific contexts of individual homes could be taken into consideration, as well. Having the ability to filter comparative homes by factors such as number of children and the cardinal direction (southern-facing homes would be warmer and require more energy to cool) will make it easier for homeowners to understand how their usage stands up to similar use cases in their community.
When an industry does rally around a big idea to benefit society, change can happen quickly.
With a clever app that runs on top of a connected platform, a homeowners’ association could run challenges and offer rewards and recognition. And you can amplify the message through social channels to encourage even more broad-scale social change. Imagine the next “ice bucket challenge” being entire communities or cities challenging each other with the “save water challenge.”
Government bodies that preside even higher than the homeowners’ association could use the quantitative insight to offer other incentives, such as tax breaks, much in the same way they do for green automobiles that consume only a fraction of an average home’s energy.
Municipalities have a vested interest in lowering water use because they are under severe restrictions set by state and federal governments. Yet they can only make their money from the tax dollars of the homes built in their jurisdiction. They desperatelyneed a solution that allows them to have their cake — new homes and new tax dollars — and eat it, too, by meeting the regulations for water usage.

Creating Platforms With The Community In Mind

The need to better connect communities has now been recognized by the federal government, which this week launched the first-ever Smart Cities Week, in support of a National Smart Cities Initiative. As part of this initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF) committed nearly $40 million to help intelligently and effectively design, adapt and manage the smart and connected communities of the future.
With the government putting its stake in the ground to foster the development of connected communities, it is now up to technology companies to make this significant change a reality. Home automation platforms are competing and separate — see Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Brillo/Weave — and use cases are in their infancy and heavily geared toward the individual homeowner buying aftermarket equipment to retrofit their home. For the industry to not just grow organically but rapidly, tech giants and homebuilders alike must step up and design home automation to benefitcommunities as a whole.
The benefit of home automation to a society could be so much more if smart homes were scaled into fully connected smart communities.
Apple and Google should work with major homebuilders to help create these connected communities of the future — going so far as to offer to pay the full cost of adding this equipment to pilot communities. They should set a goal to bring online within the next two years dozens of new communities that are all wired from the start.
Google is rolling out its Fiber in select cities. But that’s not really adding the front-end technology — like smart lighting, irrigation, thermostats, security and the software that could drive these devices — that is necessary to transform the way communities work together to save money and use resources more effectively.
By helping to create connected communities, Google and Apple could show the world the true benefits of home automation — and that will jumpstart the whole rest of the aftermarket.
When an industry does rally around a big idea to benefit society, change can happen quickly. This will inevitably happen with home automation, but California could use a little extra water now. Let’s lay the groundwork today for a more connected future.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

Trump cites Facebook exec’s comments downplaying Russian ad influence on election

You’d be forgiven for missing Donald Trump’s multiple retweets of Facebook executive Rob Goldman over the weekend. Perhaps you were spending time with family, watching Black Panther or just attempting to forget politics for a moment by ignoring the manic flurry of social media updates from the leader of the free world. But in amongst a deluge of tweets that blamed Democrats for failing to preserve DACA, called out the FBI over the recent school shooting in Florida on the FBI and affectionately referred to a member of congress as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff, the leakin’ monster of no control,” the President cited Facebook’s VP of Ads as evidence against claims that his campaign colluded with Russia. “The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” Trump was citing Goldman’s own Twitter dump over the past week, responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian...

3D printing company New Matter is shutting down this month

Perhaps 2014 wasn’t the ideal time to get into the 3D printing game. After years of hype, the even the biggest names have been struggling to stay afloat. Pasadena startup New Matter is joining the growing list of companies who’ve unsuccessfully made a go at it, announcing that it will be closing up shop by the end of the month. It’s not for lacking of trying — and the company’s MOD-t printer was met with decent reviews when it launched in 2016. In his writeup, John praised the pricing ($300 or $400, depending on where you picked one up) and ease of use, though added cautiously, “you get what you pay for.” Initially funded on Indiegogo, the company went back to the crowdfunding well last year, this time taking to Kickstarter to pay for a Model 2. The project managed to exceed its goal in five days, but New Matter still pulled the plug. The company says it ultimately wanted to go back to the drawing board. “We have always strived to listen closely to our customers’ feedback, and...

Here’s how to keep track of Elon Musk’s Roadster and Starman in space

Elon Musk’s Starman, the mannequin driver of the Tesla Roadster SpaceX launched aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket, is taking a trip around our solar system, in a large elliptical orbit that will bring him relatively close to Mars, the Sun and other heavenly bodies. But how to track the trip, now that the Roadster’s onboard batteries are out of juice and no longer transmitting live footage? Thanks to the work of Ben Pearson, a SpaceX fan and electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, who created ‘Where is Roadster,’ a website that makes use of JPL Horizons data to track the progress of the Roadster and Starman through space, and to predict its path and let you know when it’ll come close to meeting up with various planets and the Sun. The website tells you the Roadster’s current position, too, as well as its speed and whether it’s moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at any given moment. It’s not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, but it is something Elon...