Good Morning and a Happy New Year to all our readers🎉 In contrast to December, week one of 2022 was busy from a smart home news perspective. To be expected, CES unveiled a raft of stories for us to digest, here are some ones that caught my attention:
Eve in the Outdoors 🎍
Eve’s new outdoor camera is a welcome addition to the companies extensive range of thread-enabled devices. The camera supports HomeKit secure video and similar to the Ring outdoor cameras have an integrated floodlight. Worth considering if you are all in on the Siri ecosystem. Here are some product details to check out.
Amazon Acknowledges Matter 🉑
Amazon has been pretty silent on Matter and not fully embraced the future of the smart home until this week. At CES, Amazon provided the industry with some concrete examples of how it plans to adopt Matter into its ecosystem:
- Announces some new developer tools that make it easier for developers and partners to build across multiple device standards and protocols — including Matter, and integrate deeply with Amazon’s Alexa-enabled products.
- The Echo 4th generation will be a Thread border router, while also continuing to be a Zigbee hub.
- Echo devices would receive a software update so that they can start commissioning and controlling Matter devices soon after the Matter SDK is ready.
So lots of positive news coming from the Amazon camp this week.
This Weeks Blog Post ✍️
Are you experiencing increased competition in recent times and subsequently lower margins from your electrical and alarm install business?
If so, how about checking out the bubbling smart home, expected to reach several billion dollars by 2025! There are various claims of easy installations in the growing smart home market, the reality is many consumers will want and need help to install next-generation smart home products and devices.
>> Read the complete article on the blog
Smart Speaker OS Rumors ✨
Some technical talk! 9 to 5 wrote an article before Christmas related to rumors that Nest Hub Max may be getting a new operating system called Fuchsia. Here is the formal description from the wiki:
Fuchsia is an open-source capability-based operating system developed by Google. In contrast to prior Google-developed operating systems such as Chrome OS and Android, which are based on the Linux kernel, Fuchsia is based on a new kernel named Zircon.
Standard Nest Hubs already run Fuschia and it’s a natural evolution for Google to migrate its second flagship smart speaker product over to the new operating system. From an end-user perspective, the migration is expected to be seamless.
Wi-Fi Update
Also at CES, the Wi-Fi alliance provided us with some updates on the Wi-Fi 6 standard. According to the press release, the organization is releasing an update to the existing standard that will bring new features that support greater performance and power management Wi-Fi enabled smart home devices. You can read the full announcement here.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
“Hey Siri, Did I lock the front door?”
This is it for today, See you next Sunday 😉. If you have colleagues, friends, or neighbors that would benefit from knowing about smart home devices, please consider sharing them.
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– Gerard