Smart Greed

The Smart Home adoption is slower than anticipated. So says the report from BI Intelligence. And it is hard to argue. After all 3 years since Philips Hue launched there are hardly any winners. Early adopters are either satisfied or bored and fed up. Mass market is still not picking up. Of course the technological fragmentation is one of the reasons. This will start changing significantly this year when Bluetooth rolls out the Smart Mesh standard.

But there is yet another factor. The economy. In a post-(cold)-war era everything has to make business sense, otherwise it will cease to exist. We no longer fly to the Moon neither can book a supersonic Concorde to London, Paris or New York. At the same time fleets of incredibly cramped Dreamliners cross the skies burning less fuel per passenger than ever. And SpaceX lands back their empty rockets to cut down the cost of space travel.

Technological fragmentation when removed, alone will not help the mass market adoption of Smart Home systems. Consumers need to see tangible benefits coming from smart devices. And financial incentives are most likely to be one of them.

Smart - in a straight line - leads to more (big) data and this data is extremely valuable to both energy producers and energy consumers. Both start understanding their patters and are able to act proactively (consumers) and (producers) predict the demand and plan the output. In both cases the data insights lead to significant tangible savings. This is how Smart Greed leads us to the real Smart Grid. The savings justify the investments and efforts required to roll out smart home systems. This is why the mass market Smart Home category will be led by utilities.