Mike Wolf

The State of the Connected Kitchen

IHA reconnected with Mike Wolf, founder of NextMarket Insights, to learn about what’s next in the connected kitchen and home, which he will address at the 2018 International Home + Housewares Show. At the Show, the Innovation Theater will feature 21 presentations over four days. Topics discussed will include smart home, consumer shopping preferences, branding and global market…

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…

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…

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…