Headworx

2014 is the year of the Internet of Things. It could not be off to a better start than the Google's acquisition of Nest that cemented what the world focused on at CES. I simply feel this with my every sense. I went on a tour to China back in December 2013, visiting many prospective hardware partners there and I found it difficult to persuade them the tide of the IoT and Smart Home in particular is coming. Most of the time their standpoint was "we would wait on the sidelines and see how it develops". Then I came back a month later - the week when Nest was bought (which was a week after CES). It was amazing how much the attitude changed over this short period of time. Suddenly they all understand the IoT is already here. And they all "want it". I also see how our prospective customers we've been trying to evangelize over the last year about connected devices are suddenly coming back willing to engage in projects involving smart / connected devices. IoT in ...

So a year after the latest investment round at the lofty valuation of $800M, Nest Labs has been acquired at 4x the price, for cash. WOW! Not too many predictions I made about Nest in 2013 have literally happened, but in general Nest has been moving in the expected direction. They did not release an European thermostat, but I believe they are making lots of research on Home Automation in general. And the rationale behind the Google's move? Well, I think there are two stories behind the acquisition. #1 is the preemptive action to leave Apple with empty hands. Home Automation is hard. Nest has always been the leader. Only followed by a bunch of startups, far behind. There are no other important players today. The old league of established Smart Home players is in a different galaxy. They require professional installation and will never grab the DIY market. The startups, with one exception, are just toys that disappoint after one afternoon. My Revolv hub started collecting dust ...

The common wisdom is electricity is expensive (as a consumable energy). Which is only partially true. Because electricity is only expensive at peak time, when demand forces the suppliers to engage the most expensive power plants. Off-peak electricity is cheap. And there are even times when the suppliers would happily pay the consumers to burn it. As is already is the case in some European countries (Belgium). Because it is almost impossible to stop a nuclear power plant. And when windy, the renewable generators inject even more of what we cannot consume at 3AM. The problem with electricity is the daily fluctuation of demand and no practical way to  balance it. The most common so far has been PSH, or Pump Storage Hydroelectricity: pumping a lake uphill off-peak and then draining it to generate back power during a peak demand period. 30% is wasted this way. Now think about electric vehicles. They don't care when they are charged and they can store significant amount of energy. T...

WiFi often has problems. The more vast the intended coverage area, the more troublesome the technology is. Many of us experience this at our own homes. The range of a single AP is often not enough. Adding a second AP makes things even worse, because (as of today) none of the consumer OS platforms supports WiFi roaming properly. The only cure at the moment seems to be a professional WiFi installation (like the Ubiquiti UniFi , which actively kicks out clients on poor connections forcing them to reconnect to another AP). WiFi is problematic for home users, but it is a nightmare for service providers. Majority of support issues handled by the call centers are WiFi - related. Users can withstand refreshing a page on a tablet computer, but a choking video stream is utterly annoying. The underlying problem is the lack of redundancy / aggregation at the MAC Layer. Networking protocols such as UDP (Layer 3) and higher work only over a single Layer 2 route at a time. Even worse, the activ...