Headworx

The Friday news about Google / Nest acquisition of Revolv spells one word to me: desperation. Nest is of course desperate for talent acquisition. Tim Enwall's team is certainly valuable to Nest. On the other hand Revolv must have been desperately looking for a much needed pivot. The overhyped, overpromised and underdelivered multi - protocol hub probably never recorded significant traction. It had not much to offer. No state machine, just a pass-through command translation between a few radio protocols (but notably no Bluetooth Smart!) has been not enough to generate wide adoption of the system. At Seed we almost tried the same but soon realized the market for smart home hubs has been very limited to date, and competition was mounting. Simply put: not enough smart devices out there yet, to create a significant market for hubs. A problem? Or an opportunity? Not many smart devices on the market is a problem for a hub company indeed. But is an enormous opportunity for those, who...

I smiled this week when I learned about Qualcomm paying $2.5B in cash for CSR , the Bluetooth pioneer. As much as the Google/Nest transaction earlier this year, this deal is a profound shift in the wireless landscape, reinforcing the strategic position of Bluetooth as the leading M2M / IoT protocol. Bluetooth Smart has been an absolute winner in personal gadgets and wearables, but it has not gained a similar level of acceptance in Smart Automation. Up till now we, at Seed, were feeling somehow lonely, pioneering the widespread adoption of Bluetooth Smart in various Smart Home / Smart Environment product segments. The most common dilemma our customers have had was "why not WiFi". And we have kept on repeating the same set of advantages: significantly lower power, ease of use, lower cost. Customers have been expressing their doubts "but Bluetooth is short range and it is point-to-point only" while we have kept on evangelizing them proving we are reaching 1000ft ...

Confession: I have finally succumbed to Android Wear enclosed in the Motorola Moto360 watch. There were ups and downs with this decision. First I wanted it badly. Then I learned it was using an old processor and worse, the battery needed a recharge during a day, or it was dead before evening. I could live with a slower CPU, but the battery problem ruled the product completely out! Only two weeks ago I learned Motorola issued a software patch fixing the battery. Geez... how many times this history must repeat itself? I started posting on this back in 2006 and the phenomena is still valid :) But back to the Moto360. It is gorgeous. Even Apple fans admit it beats the looks of the iWatch. Google Now behind it performs great with speech recognition and many fine tuned smart details (like: wearing the watch puts the phone in a silent mode - why get two beeps when you can get just one vibe on a wrist?). And it has Qi wireless charging. No smart watch vendor has solved the charging pr...

Last week Google / Nest unveiled some specs of the Thread IoT protocol announced back in July. My take on this: I am disappointed. First, both Tony Fadell and Chris Boross made several good points about the need for a 2nd network ant home (assuming WiFi is the 1st one). "Wi-Fi is not perfect for all devices in the home and it's not perfect for all use cases," said Boross in front of an audience. "We feel there should be a second network in the home." They were both pitching multi-year lifespan of battery powered devices. We all know this cannot be done with WiFi today. So they propose Thread, which really is a (yet another) 6LoWPAN stack running on top of a single - channel 802.15.4 ZigBee at 250kbps. Being deeply involved in Bluetooth Smart for more than a year now, I opened my eyes wide... WHAT? They are going to push 100+ byte packets over a 250kbps network? This is crazy. Or may be is enough for a couple of thermostats but not for a smart home! They...