Home Automation Could Be Next Tech Bright Spot

Originally posted on Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com, here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/consumer-electronics/home-automation-could-be-next-tech-bright-spot.html.

The future looks bring for home automation and energy management vendors

Hold onto your hat tech investors – we already have some hot sectors like consumer electronics, wireless, the cloud, VoIP, collaboration, healthcare automation and security to name a few. Now, home automation is looking like it could be the next big thing as evidenced by this great article by TMCnet’s Peter Bernstein who goes through seven reasons why we are at a home automation/energy management tipping point. What got him started down this path is the fact that iControl Networks just received a $50M cash infusion and has impressive investors and partners.

I don’t want to steal any of his thunder but my personal thoughts are we are getting to a point where disparate products need to start working better with one another. For example, I can watch Netflix on my TV directly via the Samsung widget or via Xbox – but each has a different interface and neither is really pleasant to use. Moreover, consumers have music, photos and videos strewn throughout their devices and bringing them together to accessible by all devices is what consumers want. Apple will give you an iCloud but what happens when you want to tap into it with an Android device?

Earlier today I wrote about how Facebook is integrating deeply into smartphones – if the companies who play in the space aren’t careful they may watch the leading social network becoming the digital hub for all their rich media as well.

Tags: android, collaboration, facebook, icontrol, iphone, media, Microsoft, Netflix, peter bernstein, Samsung, tmc, tmcnet, voip Related tags: automation energy, energy management, automation