Smart Home

The future of housewares is quickly moving toward the smart home. Connectivity is being incorporated into nearly every corner of the home - from light bulbs to coffee brewers, from thermostats to ovens - connected products, once only a dream, are fast becoming a reality. Smart products too are making an impact - from Alexa to Siri, from vacuuming robots to trash cans - intelligent sensors are changing the way we live in, and interact with, our homes.

The Living Kitchen: How Technology Will Become Part of the “Fabric” of Our Homes

By Ashley Daigneault and Michael Wolf In 2015, Swedish furniture giant IKEA released a video that outlined their vision for what the kitchen of the future might look like. The IKEA 2025 Concept Kitchen looked like something out of the movie “Minority Report,” where machine vision, built-in sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) combined to make surfaces come alive with…

Learning to Cook in the Modern Age

By Carley Knobloch You might not be unboxing a robot butler this decade, but there’s a good chance you’ll be adding a robotic appliance to your kitchen. With ovens that recognize what’s inside and tell you how to cook it, slow cookers that are controlled via app and appliances that stop when your meal is “just right,” will home cooks go the way of telegraph operators? Here’s…

IoT-Powered Business Models Set to Reinvent the Appliance Business

By Michael Wolf Over the past few years, appliance manufacturers have embraced the Internet of Things (IoT), making their products more connected and adding new consumer-pleasing features such as app control and notifications. However, while neat new capabilities have garnered buzz and helped raise consumer interest, these are minor compared to the resulting shifts the…

A Cheat Sheet to Smart Home Platforms

By Michael Wolf and Ashley Daigneault For over two decades, a variety of companies and industry consortiums have worked to create standards and platforms to help devices and services work better together in the connected home. Many of these technologies that are now part of making the smart home work have become household names: from long- established and pervasive…

Alexa, Show Me the Future: The Emerging Interfaces of The Smart Home

By Michael Wolf For most of my adult life, doing things around the home meant pushing buttons and turning dials. In fact, for almost everyone who isn’t a teenager or younger, the process of cooking, making coffee or doing laundry meant using mechanical controls. But that’s beginning to change. Touch screens have become massively popular over the past decade, and more…

Smart Home: Keeping Connected

Michelle Hespe meets Carley Knobloch (or Carley K, like her blog is called), a digital lifestyle expert, to chat about the Internet of Things and the smart home. As a retailer, you need to embrace this new wave of technology or risk falling behind your competitors. A couple of years ago, most people hadn’t heard of Internet of Things (IoT) or the smart home. Even 12 months ago…

Smart Thinking for Smart Living

Michelle Hespe catches up with Mike Wolf — a leading U.S. expert on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the evolution of the Smart Home — for a chat about what the future holds, and what is happening in the smart world, right now. It’s hard to comprehend that the first iPhone was released in 2007, and today over 2 billion people are using them. It all happened so…

The Smart Home of the Not-Too-Distant Future

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a movement that is already part of our everyday lives and is growing rapidly. And, the future is exciting for the Smart Home with several trends emerging including: Cooking Technology – Products are being embedded with smart sensors that control exact time, temperatures and even the humidity needed to properly cook a meal based on precise…

Smart Homes Bringing Unprecedented Change to Housewares Industry

Smart Home thought leaders discuss challenges and opportunities at 2017 International Home + Housewares Show What’s working in the world of smart home products, where are we going and what is needed to get there? These are just some of the questions addressed today at a lunchtime panel discussion entitled “How the Smart Home is Disrupting Housewares (and What to Do…