500 Smart Devices At (a typical) Home

The news from Gartner may be shocking to some of us. How come... 500 smart / connected gadgets at an average home? Well, welcome to the (not so distant) future! At Seed, we are going to be an important contributor to this number (mark my words!). Why am I so sure about this future? Because I already live there.

"Live in the future, building what's missing" was my personal call to action back in 2010 when I seriously considered starting a company with a goal to manage 500 smart / connected gadgets at home. We started officially in 2011 as HomerSoft and have morphed finally into what is today Seed Labs.

I remember exactly the moment when I realized "the time has come". I was experimenting with a number of connected (Ethernet and WiFi at that time) gadgets: network music players, IP cameras, plug computers. They were all "headless" (no screens / keyboards) and the only way to communicate with them were IP addresses. And the only way to manage the IP addresses was a long list of static DHCP entries in my router's configuration. With every device purchased I was patiently registering every MAC address in the router's configuration table. Until I simply ran out of space on my C-class home network (255.255.255.0 mask). Yes, that is right: in 2010 I had more than 254 IP hosts on my home network. And the immediate thought was: we needed something better than static DHCP to manage smart objects.

So 500 smart objects at home in 2022 is not a far stretch for me. I am close to this number already. Live in the future, building what's missing. So we are at Seed. And while our smart management platform is still waiting for the market to develop, we started seeding (pun intended!) the market with the smart objects, with the evolved mission to empower manufacturers of everyday products to make them smart and connected. 500/home is a good target. I feel we may not need to wait until 2022 for this to happen!