Dave Evans, CTO, Stringify, provides insight on several key industry trends for Parks Associates’ 20th-annual CONNECTIONS Conference, which will be held May 24-26 in San Francisco:
How is your company engaging consumers through new technology solutions?
In short, Stringify gives consumers choice, flexibility, and control. Choice because they can now connect best of breed products regardless of manufacturer, protocol, or API. We give them flexibility as they can now connect just about anything to anything, creating powerful solutions that meet their needs around such topics as safety, security, energy management, entertainment, and fitness just to name a few. We give them control to build solutions that makes sense to them. Stringify makes their products better, more engaging, more useful and more fun.
What is the biggest change you have seen in the past year in the connected home and entertainment industries?
The sheer volume of devices is increasing at a rapid pace, and newcomers such as augmented / virtual reality devices continue to shape the space. I believe consumers will quickly discover that they need platforms that seamlessly tie these products together in simple, yet deceptively powerful ways.
What do you think is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?
Technology has to solve real problems. Consumers want value and that value persists only if the utility of the "thing" persists. A device that is gimmicky will be short lived, whereas a device that solves a real problem will last a lot longer. Technology has to be easy to use and has to work for people. Too often we find ourselves working for technology when the real reason we purchased the technology was so it would work for us. Again, technology has to solve real problems, be easy to use, and work well with others.
What is the greatest challenge for the connected home industry in the next year?
We need to be careful not to continue to build silos for consumers. Consumers want to be able to use the best of breed products (contextual based on their need) and know that they will simply work with their other products. Products that promote vendor lock-in, have limited feature sets or are closed (i.e. don’t work well with others) will be short lived.
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Evans will speak on the session “IoT: Wearables and Smart Home Use Cases” on Wednesday, May 25 at 4:30 p.m. Other speakers on the panel include Misfit Wearables and Withings.
For more information on CONNECTIONS, visit www.connectionsus.com or register by clicking here.
