Kent Dickson, Co-founder and CEO, Yonomi, 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?
We are making the connected home easier and simpler to use for consumers. Yo
u can choose the devices that you want in your home, and Yonomi being platform agnostic gets them all to play together in routines. We help the home respond to your needs with automated routines based on things like location and time or you can trigger routines anytime through your phone or Echo. The idea is that your devices, ultimately your home, should take care of you.
What is the biggest change you have seen in the past year in the connected home and entertainment industries?
Device makers are becoming much more serious about creating partner APIs to enable value added services and integration. Early on we'd seen some resistance to this but that has essentially completely evaporated.
The other thing we've observed is how new types of interfaces like Echo have further invigorated interest in the connected home.
What do you think is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?
User experience and usefulness. Is this thing a joy to use and is it solving a pain point in my life? I think we've already saturated the "home automation enthusiast" market with products that are good enough for techies to get working in a useful or at least novel way. But the mass market consumer needs for this to be ridiculous easy and have immediate tangible value. It must amaze and delight out of the box and every day thereafter.
What is the greatest challenge for the connected home industry in the next year?
The greatest challenge continues to be FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). A lot of devices makers have FUD about the technology stack and ecosystem they build into their products (HomeKit, Weave, Thread, etc.). This is having the effect of slowing down innovation and product delivery. But the truth is all they really need to do is create good APIs on top of whatever they implement and the market will solve the integration problems.
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Dickson will speak on the session “Smartphone Apps and APIs: Lifeline for the Connected Consumer” on Wednesday, May 25 at 1:15 p.m. Other speakers on the panel include Cozify, IFTTT Inc., and Lutron.
For more information on CONNECTIONS, visit www.connectionsus.com or register by clicking here.
