Kimmo Ruotoistenmäki, CEO and co-founder, Cozify, 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?
Cozify has introduced a smart home hub, which connects different smart devices together, no matter who is the manufacturer or what is the underlying technology. It provides one single application to control and automate your home.
With the open technology approach, Cozify gives the user the power to choose the best of breed products instead of locking into a standard or a vendor. And while many smart home solutions focus on remote controlling, Cozify is about DIY automation without the need for any technical experience.
What is the biggest change you have seen in the past year in the connected home and entertainment industries?
Traditional players are starting to pay attention to opportunities of the smart home as part of their own core offering. This does not include only ISP insurance companies and utilities but also real estate, construction, elderly care, etc.
For IoT and smart home companies, this is both a challenge to open interfaces for vast integration, but also a huge opportunity to become a central technology in every aspect of life.
What do you think is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?
From the end-user perspective, security and energy efficiency are the “rational” reasons to buy a smart home technology, however they will not sell without the most important one: Convenience.
From technical perspective, integrated solutions, open APIs and automation will play bigger and bigger roles as the "clutter of IoT apps” invades users’ phones.
What is the greatest challenge for the connected home industry in the next year?
Assuming that end-user experience is already on a reasonable level, the greatest challenge is viable business models. Selling device packages with free add-on services seems to have challenges. On the other hand, users are somewhat reluctant to pay for recurring fees. We believe the best business model is about breaking silos between traditional players and their business models – and the best model is yet to be found.
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Ruotoistenmäki 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 IFTTT Inc., Yonomi, and Lutron.
For more information on CONNECTIONS, visit www.connectionsus.com or register by clicking here.
