Headworx

At Seed we are promoting a rather radical departure from the currently established smart home topologies. Almost everybody else have been promoting two fundamental angles of approach: A smartphone is used to control the devices A routed mesh network is needed to deliver the commands to the devices What we say is the opposite: A smartphone is used to configure the smart home network (it can also be used as a controller but when outside, to control remotely) There are no control commands being sent to the devices #1 is quite obvious. Of course the joy of clicking on a phone and controlling lights or blinds is cool. This cool effect has been for years behind the success of Philips Hue and similar products. ("see, I can turn on the light with my iPhone"). But this is short lived. Nobody will like walking around their homes clicking the lights on a phone screen. The lights should be either automatic or controllable with buttons and dimmers - the classic UX we've be...

Not sure if moving from Samsung Galaxy Note 3 to LG G3 can be considered an upgrade or a downgrade. Anyway, I did this two months ago. Being a little uncertain of this would work, I've refrained from announcing the switch. Now, after several weeks, and especially after being able to touch and hold the Nexus 6, I have to admit I like this setup the most! LG G3 is today probably the most extreme balance of screen real estate vs the overall device size. The screen is huge and the resolution is awesome - the same as the 27" Apple Cinema Display, but squeezed to 5.5". Being an LCD type it lacks the "pop" of AMOLED, which is the feature I regret the most, but nevertheless the clarity and visibility even in full sunlight is very good. The phone looks awesome, the bezel is tiny and there are no buttons to occupy any space. The latest iPhones compared side by side look fat and old. LG has managed to squeeze the iPhone 6 Plus display in a significantly smaller packa...

Mass production is ramping up. It has taken us much longer than we thought to get to this point. But still (from what I hear) it is a record pace. The first batch of a couple of thousand Bluetooth Smart Plugs arrived last Thursday. Customs cleared, certified, ready to be put on store shelves. Actually I don't believe they will sit on any shelves at all, as our b2b partners are fully booked and awaiting them. BTW this plug is the world's smallest, fully certified Smart Plug in the European form factor. Powered by the cutting edge software stack we've been working on for almost two years. Clearly it is a masterpiece of mechanical and electronic engineering. We want it to be the ambassador of everything we do at Seed, especially the software, which - believe me - is even better than the hardware. The Proxi system finally debuts this week at the Amsterdam ISE show. Delayed by a couple of months, but with an extremely important extension to the system, which I will be co...

Global operations introduce one extra variable to all equations applied to run an organization: time zones. At Seed we are Asia (UTC +8), Europe (UTC +1 in Winter / UTC +2 in Summer) and California (UTC -8 in Winter / UTC -7 in Summer). And we have customers spread across the North America, so count in Eastern Time (UTC -5 / UTC -4) too. This poses several challenges for a small organization, but with careful planning can be turned into a significant advantage, which is almost round - the - clock operations. If you are willing to do so, of course. Last week a friend of mine was telling me the story how great it was working in Europe with a team in India. They could exchange only two emails daily. "Because when I replied to his 2nd email, he already left". Well, this is not how you want play this... It is a learning curve, but our team gets better and better understanding the advantages of time synchronized global engagements. For our engineering / R&D team in Pola...