Bluetooth Smart Home

I'm writing this on my way back from the CES. The show went absolutely exploding for us with one major unexpected development that must had happened over the last few months or even weeks: the adoption of Bluetooth Smart as the radio of choice for home automation.

At Seed we placed our bet on Bluetooth Smart a few years ago. It has been a lonely journey for most of the time. It was taking us a lot of efforts to keep explaining "why Bluetooth" in our pitch to investors and customers. Today we may drop this part. Everybody, essentially everybody we met at the Show, have already been converted to Bluetooth Smart. The questions were not "why?" but "when?" and "how?" and "how fast?".

One particular reason we are so confident about the future of Bluetooth is the structure of the Bluetooth SIG organization, which essentially "owns" the radio. This means the speed of evolution of the standard is the fastest possible. No need to go out and ask other standard bodies if this or that is needed. Any member company in need of a particular feature, like for example, mesh, long range, faster data rate, can start a working group that will bring all interested parties together and contribute the effort to the new release of the standard. This makes Bluetooth the safest bet looking into the future.

Without waiting for the future, Bluetooth delivers today a single worldwide frequency band, 40-channel frequency hopping transport, the highest data rate among the ultra low power networks, and, above all, direct connectivity to smartphones. Try beating these features with anything else.

2015 is the year of delivery for us. And it shapes out to be the great year of delivery for our customers.