Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs, a smart home equipment company, has made smart home a focus of attention.
But this acquisition is only a tipping point, and many home appliance companies and entrepreneurs have seen this trend before. 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 could bring the Internet into various home appliances.
The market for PC Internet has long been proven by various Internet companies, and it is widely believed that mobile Internet will create a bigger market. Then, when the Internet really enters people's living rooms, there will be more and greater opportunities.
However, smart homes are not just smart home appliances. The former means more people's family life, including the intelligentization of living room entertainment, while smart home appliances often only refer to the intelligence of individual home appliances.
For traditional home appliance companies, they have already had a good exploration in smart home appliances. The lack of understanding of the Internet and the open mindset; for Internet companies, the direct aim is smart home, so that everything is smart The lack of hardware production and manufacturing capabilities.
However, with the deepening of the concept of smart home, 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 taken place. When consumers are still ignorant about the future, these companies are working hard to create the future.
Home appliance companies: open mindset and standard setting are key
The foundation of smart home is all kinds of home appliances, so the exploration of smart homes 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.
However, this customization is only for the high-end people. For ordinary users, more intelligent home appliances are now being experienced. From rice cookers that can be turned on regularly to refrigerators with networking functions, these home appliances are intelligent to some extent, making people's lives easier and more convenient.
From the perspective of the Internet, smart home appliances bring better user experience than ordinary home appliances. In an email interview with Tencent Technology, Sony China also said that home appliance manufacturers have realized that user experience is more important than concept. "Smart home is good, the former digital home is good, mainly depends on what kind of user can bring Value and emotional experience."
However, the user experience improvement 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 "Intelligent Life Open Platform" and opened an experience store in Shanghai. More than one-third of the products in the store are not from Haier, but from Haier's partners.
Wang Hao, general manager of Haier's advanced technology research and development, 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 a platform for developers to use this platform to generate hardware or software ideas.
"At present, Haier's 300 million stock devices are reserved interfaces, and will be fully activated in the future." Wang Wei said. This means that once the time is right, Haier's products can be part of smart homes. Connecting these devices and playing new words through various interfaces is likely to be one of the driving forces for developers to enter.
However, to build a smart home platform, it is still necessary to overcome the standard problem. Different companies now use different standards, and different household equipment may use different standards.
For example, lighting systems, curtain systems, security systems, HVAC control systems, and home appliance control systems are mostly incompatible. This requires the home appliance enterprise to have an open spirit, unified standards and interfaces, in order to enable different brands and different products to connect with each other and generate greater value.
The head of a multinational home appliance giant China Research Institute introduced Tencent Technology. Historically, industrial games are first and foremost for individual manufacturers to tap into future customer needs; then they sell their own concepts and products to customers; the third step is to join more vendors. Dividing the ranks of cakes; finally establishing international standards. He said that this process will not change because it is a company or a few, open or not open.
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, making consumer electronics the best way out. To some extent, this requires the home appliance company to make the product no longer appear cold and close the distance between the product and the consumer. Under this premise, the intelligent service will be more acceptable to consumers.
Internet companies: leveraging hardware to do cloud computing and big data
To achieve smart home, networking is a must-have feature. Only when the device is connected to the Internet can data generation and analysis be used to generate greater value.
Nest Labs' two products have a strong "learning" feature, which is an advanced customization. For example, the intelligent indoor thermostat produced by the user can determine the most suitable room temperature of the user through the adjustment of the user, and automatically assist the user to adjust to such temperature in the future. In addition, by judging whether there is someone in the room, the smart room thermostat can also achieve the energy saving effect by the conditional temperature.
Here, in fact, the smart room thermostat has completed two customizations. One is to customize the room temperature for the user when there is someone indoors, and the other is to customize the energy saving plan for the user when there is no one indoors. And this customization requires only minimal user involvement, and it allows you to learn the user's usage habits.
The reason why this kind of intelligent indoor thermostat can learn and customize depends on various sensors and data analysis. This requires networking capabilities to transfer data to the server, analyze and plan the best solution through the server.
Data analysis and big data processing are the strengths of Internet companies, but in smart homes, the first step is to get 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 an easy task (Nest Labs has actually bypassed home appliances and turned its 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 that “the woman is difficult to be without the riceâ€.
Of course, the best solution is for Internet companies and home appliance companies to cooperate, but these two industries still have some mutual exclusion. This is also evident in the Chinese market. Last year, Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun (microblogging) and Gree Electric’s chairman and president, Dong Mingzhu, exemplified this at the 2013 China Economic Year Awards Ceremony.
There are also some Internet entrepreneurs who have seen the opportunity of smart home, and Google's acquisition of Nest Labs has also made these entrepreneurs see hope.
Nest Labs was founded 4 years ago and can be said to have been in the smart home field, and its two co-founders have extensive experience in hardware and software products and have developed successful products. This is not available to many entrepreneurs. A well-known long-time Google observer in the United States said that the worst case for Google’s acquisition may be to let entrepreneurs think that the toaster is connected to the Internet, and its company is worth $3 billion.
But this does not mean that there is no opportunity for entrepreneurship in the smart home sector. There are already enterprises in China that produce smart sockets, smart remote controls, smart air monitors, etc. These products seem to be far from realizing the dream of people's smart homes, but they may be the first step for entrepreneurs to move toward smart homes.
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