Integration of AI, IoT and Big Data: The Intelligent Assistant

The Evolution of These Technologies Is Clearer

The IoT Tower of Proprietary Babble Is Slowly Crumbling

The Rise of the Intelligent Assistant

Five years ago, I wrote a post on this blog disparaging the state of the Internet of Things/home automation market as a “Tower of Proprietary Babble.” Vendors of many different home and industrial product offerings were literally speaking different languages, making their products inoperable with other complementary products from other vendors.  The market was being constrained by its immaturity and a failure to grasp the importance of open standards. A 2017 Verizon report concluded that “an absence of industry-wide standards…represented greater than 50% of executives concerns about IoT.” Today I can report that finally, the solutions and technologies are beginning to come together, albeit still slowly. 

 

One of the most important factors influencing these positive developments has been the recognition of the importance of this technology area by major corporate players and a large number of entrepreneurial companies funded by venture investment, as shown in the infographic above. Amazon, for example, announced in October 2018 that it has shipped over 100 Million Echo devices, which effectively combine an intelligent assistant, smart hub, and a large-scale database of information. This does not take into account the dozens of other companies which have launched their own entries. I like to point to Philips Hue as such an example of corporate strategic focus perhaps changing the future corporate prospects of Philips, based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I have visited Philips HQ, a company trying to evolve from the incandescent lighting market. Two years ago my wife bought me a Philips Hue WiFi controlled smart lighting starter kit. My initial reaction was disbelief that it would succeed. I am eating crow on that point, as I now control my lighting using Amazon’s Alexa and the Philips Hue smart hub. The rise of the “intelligent assistant” seems to have been a catalyst for growth and convergence. 

The situation with proprietary silos of offerings that do not work well or at all with other offerings is still frustrating, but slowly evolving. Amazon Firestick’s browser is its own awkward “Silk” or alternatively Firefox, but excluding Google’s Chrome for alleged competitive advantage. When I set up my Firestick, I had to ditch Chromecast because I only have so many HDMI ports. Alexa works with Spotify but only in one room as dictated by Spotify. Alexa can play music from Amazon Music or Sirius/XM on all Echo devices without the Spotify limitation. Which brings me to another point of aggravation: alleged Smart TV’s. Not only are they not truly “smart,” they are proprietary silos of their own, so “intelligent assistant” smart hubs do not work with “smart” TV’s. Samsung, for example, has its own competing intelligent assistant, Bixby, so of course, only Bixby can control a Samsung TV. I watched one of those YouTube DIY videos on how you could make your TV work with Alexa using third-party software and remotes. Trust me, you do not want to go there. But cracks are beginning to appear that may lead to a flood of openness. Samsung just announced at CES that beginning in 2019 its Smart TV’s will work with Amazon Echo and Google Home, and that a later software update will likely enable older Samsung TV’s to work with Echo and Home. However, Bixby will still control the remote.  Other TV’s from manufacturers like Sony and LG have worked with intelligent assistants for some time. 

The rise of an Internet of Everything Everywhere, the recognition of the need for greater data communication bandwidth, and battery-free wireless IoT sensors are heating up R&D labs everywhere. Keep in mind that I am focusing on the consumer side, and have not even mentioned the rising demands from industrial applications.  Intel has estimated that autonomous vehicles will transmit up to 4 Terabytes of data daily. AR and VR applications will require similar throughput. Existing wireless data communication technologies, including 5G LTE, cannot address this need. In addition, an exploding need for IoT sensors not connected to an electrical power source will require more work in the area of “energy harvesting.” Energy harvesting began with passive RFID, and by using kinetic, pizeo, and thermoelectric energy and converting it into a battery-free electrical power source for sensors. EnOcean, an entrepreneurial spinoff of Siemens in Munich has pioneered this technology but it is not sufficient for future market requirements.  

Fortunately, work has already begun on both higher throughput wireless data communication using mmWave spectrum, and energy harvesting using radio backscatter, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla’s dream of wireless electrical power distribution. The successful demonstration of these technologies holds the potential to open the door to new IEEE data communication standards that could potentially play a role in ending the Tower of Babble and accelerating the integration of AI, IoT, and Big Data.  Bottom line is that the market and the technology landscape are improving. 

READ MORE: IEEE Talk: Integrated Big Data, The Cloud, & Smart Mobile: One Big Deal or Not? from David Mayes

My IEEE Talk from 2013 foreshadows the development of current emerging trends in advanced technology, as they appeared at the time. I proposed that in fact, they represent one huge integrated convergence trend that has morphed into something even bigger, and is already having a major impact on the way we live, work, and think. The 2012 Obama campaign’s sophisticated “Dashboard” application is referenced, integrating Big Data, The Cloud, and Smart Mobile was perhaps the most significant example at that time of the combined power of these trends blending into one big thing. 

READ MORE: Blog Post on IoT from July 20, 2013

The term “Internet of Things”  (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media.  But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication, like Internet communication, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets, is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home, in your car, everywhere: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. It has also been called home automation. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so-called machine to machine or M2M communication.  The data communication can also terminate in a compute server where the information can be acted on automatically, or made available to the user to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet-connected device.

Another key concept is the promise of automated energy efficiency, with the introduction of “smart meters” with data communication capability, and also achieved in large commercial structures via the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program or LEED.  Some may recall that when Bill Gates built his multi-million dollar mansion on Lake Washington in Seattle, he had “remote control” of his home built into it.  Now, years later, Gates’ original home automation is obsolete.  The dream of home automation has been around for years, with numerous Silicon Valley conferences, and failed startups over the years, and needless to say, home automation went nowhere. But it is this concept of effortless home automation that has been the Holy Grail.

But this is also where the glowing promise of The Internet of Things (IoT) begins to morph into a giant “hairball.”  The term “hairball” was former Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy‘s favorite term to describe a complicated mess.  In hindsight, the early euphoric days of home automation were plagued by the lack of “convergence.”  I use this term to describe the inability of available technology to meet the market opportunity.  Without convergence, there can be no market opportunity beyond early adopter techno geeks. Today, the convergence problem has finally been eliminated. Moore’s Law and advances in data communication have swept away the convergence problem. But for many years the home automation market was stalled.

Also, as more Internet-connected devices emerged it became apparent that these devices and apps were a hacker’s paradise.  The concept of IoT was being implemented in very naive and immature ways and lacking common industry standards on basic issues: the kinds of things that the IETF and IEEE are famous for.  These vulnerabilities are only now very slowly being resolved, but still in a fragmented ad hoc manner. The central problem has not been addressed due to classic proprietary “not invented here” mindsets.

The problem that is currently the center of this hairball, and from all indications is not likely to be resolved anytime soon.  It is the problem of multiple data communication protocols, many of them effectively proprietary, creating a huge incompatible Tower of Babbling Things.  There is no meaningful industry and market wide consensus on how The Internet of Things should communicate with the rest of the Internet.  Until this happens, there can be no fulfillment of the promise of The Internet of Things. I recently posted “Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win,” which discusses the need for open standards in order for a market to scale up.

Read more: Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win

A recent ZDNet post explains that home automation currently requires that devices need to be able to connect with “multiple local- and wide-area connectivity options (ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, RFID/NFC, GPS, Ethernet). Along with the ability to connect many different kinds of sensors, this allows devices to be configured for a range of vertical markets.” Huh?  This is the problem in a nutshell. You do not need to be a data communication engineer to get the point.  And this is not even close to a full discussion of the problem.  There are also IoT vendors who believe that consumers should pay them for the ability to connect to their proprietary Cloud. So imagine paying a fee for every protocol or sensor we employ in our homes. That’s a non-starter.

The above laundry list of data communication protocols, does not include the Zigbee “smart meter” communications standards war.  The Zigbee protocol has been around for years, and claims to be an open industry standard, but many do not agree. Zigbee still does not really work, and a new competing smart meter protocol has just entered the picture.  The Bluetooth IEEE 802.15 standard now may be overtaken by a much more powerful 802.15 3a.  Some are asking if 4G LTE, NFC or WiFi may eliminate Bluetooth altogether.   A very cool new technology, energy harvesting, has begun to take off in the home automation market.  The energy harvesting sensors (no batteries) can capture just enough kinetic, peizo or thermoelectric energy to transmit short data communication “telegrams” to an energy harvesting router or server.  The EnOcean Alliance has been formed around a small German company spun off from Siemens, and has attracted many leading companies in building automation. But EnOcean itself has recently published an article in Electronic Design News, announcing that they have a created “middleware” (quote) “…to incorporate battery-less devices into networks based on several different communication standards such as Wi-Fi, GSM, Ethernet/IP, BACnet, LON, KNX or DALI.”  (unquote).  It is apparent that this space remains very confused, crowded and uncertain.  A new Cambridge UK startup, Neul is proposing yet another new IoT approach using the radio spectrum known as “white space,”  becoming available with the transition from analog to digital television.  With this much contention on protocols, there will be nothing but market paralysis.

Is everyone following all of these acronyms and data comm protocols?  There will be a short quiz at the end of this post. (smile)

The advent of IP version 6, strongly supported by Intel and Cisco Systems has created another area of confusion. The problem with IPv6 in the world of The IoT is “too much information” as we say.  Cisco and Intel want to see IPv6 as the one global protocol for every Internet connected device. This is utterly incompatible with energy harvesting, as the tiny amount of harvested energy cannot transmit the very long IPv6 packets. Hence, EnOcean’s middleware, without which their market is essentially constrained.

Then there is the ongoing new standards and upgrade activity in the International Standards Organization (ISO), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Special Interest Groups (SIG’s”), none of which seem to be moving toward any ultimate solution to the Tower of Babbling Things problem in The Internet of Things.

The Brave New World of Internet privacy issues relating to this tidal wave of Big Data are not even considered here, and deserve a separate post on the subject.  A recent NBC Technology post has explored many of these issues, while some have suggested we simply need to get over it. We have no privacy.

Read more: Internet of Things pits George Jetson against George Orwell

Stakeholders in The Internet of Things seem not to have learned the repeated lesson of open standards and co-opetition, and are concentrating on proprietary advantage which ensures that this market will not effectively scale anytime in the foreseeable future. Intertwined with the Tower of Babbling Things are the problems of Internet privacy and consumer concerns about wireless communication health & safety issues.  Taken together, this market is not ready for prime time.

 

https://www.slideshare.net/mayo615/ieee-talk-integrated-big-data-the-cloud-smart-mobile-big-deal-or-not/mayo615/ieee-talk-integrated-big-data-the-cloud-smart-mobile-big-deal-or-not

The internet of everything–annihilating time and space

An excellent discussion of the deeper social implications of the Internet of Everything. Perhaps difficult for some to grasp, but consistent with many other futurists’ views. The current world of MOOC‘s in online education, for example, may only be a brief waypoint on the journey to anytime, everywhere education.

Reblogged from Gigaom

by Liron Shapira, Quixey

SUMMARY:In the future everyone will be connected—everywhere, all the time—making space and time no longer an issue for physical devices, people and products.

Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.

In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.

The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points with a speed-of-light telecommunication channel, you annihilate the spacetime-distance between the points. You get a kind of wormhole.

The internet is a network of spacetime wormholes connecting every human being on the planet. If you want to chat with someone face to face, you just stare into your cell phone and they stare into theirs. You can’t tell if they’re a thousand miles away, or in the next room.

But when it comes to physical things, we’re still living under the tyranny of spacetime. Kevin Ashton, the inventor of the term “Internet of Things”, wrote in 1999: “We’re physical, and so is our environment … You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more.” Just look around the room right now, at anything other than your cell phone. All the things you can see and touch depend on where you are in space, or on how much time you spend moving yourself to a new location.

That’s a problem, because at any given moment, most of the things you care about aren’t in your line of sight. Almost none of the food you’re going to eat that day is. Almost none of the appliances you’re going to use that night are. That’s the tyranny of spacetime, which the internet of things is now beginning to overthrow.

The internet of things has three major spacetime-annihilating functions:

• Transportationmaking far away things come to you
• Teleportation – instantly getting copies of far away things
• Telepresence – interacting with far away people and things

Transportation

In the past, far away things had no way to know what you wanted from them or when you wanted it. The right things wouldn’t know how to find you. So you’d have to travel to where the things were — to a restaurant, to your house, to various stores.

If you shop on Amazon instead of going to the store, you’re on the internet of things. Last year, Amazon acquired robotic warehouse technology company Kiva systems. When you one-click on that toothbrush, Amazon’s robots move it from deep inside the warehouse onto the floor where employees pack it and ship it to you.

The internet of things transports things to you pretty fast, but not at the speed of light. It uses the internet’s fast-moving bits the way skydivers use a little pilot chute to pull out a bigger, heavier parachute.

Teleportation

Actually, sometimes the internet of things does make faraway things come you at the speed of light. The trick, called “teleportation”, is to convert things to bits and then back to things again.

The first teleporters were invented before the internet, but the far away “facsimiles” they brought you were just pieces of paper. Modern teleporters are a lot more versatile.

The MakerBot Digitizer can scan 3D objects and store their structure as a file of bits. The MakerBot Replicator can read a file of bits and print a 3D object. Put the Digitizer and Replicator at opposite ends of an internet connection and you get a teleporter.

Thousands of objects can already be teleported at the speed of light – silverware, vases, lamp frames, and even some weird-looking, but functional shoes. Soon the internet will be able to teleport physical objects into your lap as easily as it teleports web pages into your screen, and you’ll be able to surf the internet of things.

Telepresence

Sometimes you want to interact with far away things without having them transport or teleport to you. Then what you want is telepresence.

For example, you often move far away from your locked bike. Normally that means you can’t unlock your bike to let a friend borrow it, and you also don’t know when thieves are cutting your lock. LOCK8 is a smart bike lock that lets you unlock it from far away, and notifies you when a potential thief is tampering with it. No matter how far away you are from your bike lock, LOCK8 gives you all the benefits of being near your bike lock.

What if you’re far away from your office, but still want to attend meetings as if you weren’t? Virtual presence systems like Anybots and Suitable Technologies’ Beam let you remote control a walking, talking, seeing, hearing robot. You can travel halfway around the world, and still have a physical presence at your office.

The future: The internet of everything

Did you know you have two wireless modems in your head? Your eyes constantly receive radio signals in the visible spectrum, and your sense of vision connects your brain to nearby physical things, like a de facto Local Area Network. But your sensory LAN connection only extends as far as your line of sight. It’s nothing compared to a Wi-Fi internet connection.

In the future of the internet of things, Wi-Fi is going to be everywhere, and the internet will connect you to every person and thing on the planet via transportation, teleportation and telepresence. A trillion wormholes will let you reach out from anywhere on earth and hug your loved ones, or try on a new pair of shoes, or unlock your bike.

In the future beyond the internet of things, all your senses will be wired directly into the internet’s wormholes, and you’ll be completely indifferent to the location of your physical body. When you look around you, you won’t be looking into a nearby region of space. You’ll be surfing an internet that annihilates all time and space – the internet of everything.

Liron Shapira is the co-founder and CTO of Quixey and is an advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).  Follow him on Twitter @liron

Gigaom

Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.

In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.

The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points…

View original post 955 more words

New Global Mega Industry Battle Developing in the Internet of Everything

Another chapter in my Industry Analysis series

It has dawned on me recently that an entirely new Mega Multidimensional War of Titans is developing, entirely separate and distinct from the mobile smartphone Multidimensional Mega War of Titans.   In many ways this new industry war may be more strategic, larger and more valuable than the smart phone war.  The emerging new battleground is the Mega Global War of the Internet of Everything. The global players in this newly developing war are well known names in high technology: ARM, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Intel, and Qualcomm, not to mention a new class of players like The Zigbee Alliance, Honeywell and a host of others.  A number of small Canadian companies are also in the thick of this.

Some history

The Internet of Everything has been around for over 20 years and gone absolutely nowhere for lack of “technology convergence” and effective industry “co-opetition.”  Definitional confusion has abounded, with terms like “home automation” and “machine to machine” (M2M) communication. The technology convergence issue is now resolved but not the need for “co-opetition.”    Despite this, it is estimated that there are already as many as two Billion  “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices already out there, though many of them do not yet work. Think of these as “sensors,” each with a microchip of some description, and some form of data communication, not all Internet compatible. The problem with what is out there is what I call “the Tower of Babbling Things.” There is no global industry consensus on how these sensors should communicate, so each competitor has gone forward to establish their own vertical proprietary markets.  Layer on  top of that multiple data communication protocols that do not talk to each other. The international standard bodies like IEEE and ISO have bravely declared their intent to establish coherence from chaos, but without the major players, their efforts are doomed. The result is a massive market hairball.  But the market value projections are so massive (see the Business Intelligence Infographic below) that the biggest global players appear finally to be moving.

The Mega Battlefield Begins to Take Shape.

While some major players have been engaged in the Internet of Everything space for some time, others are only beginning to mobilize their forces..  Intel has this week announced the formation of new Internet of Things division, following Intel’s recent announcement of of new family of “Quark”  Internet of Things microprocessors.

This is clearly a very important new technology development for all us, and is very much worth following. It will have an impact and major implications for all consumers and businesses.

Read more: The Internet of Things: the promise and the hairball

Read more: Zigbee wants to be the Bluetooth of the Internet of Things

Read more: Will the Internet of Things turn into a Tower of Babbling Things?

The Internet of Everything Outstrips the Smartphone Revolution

The Internet of Everything

Reblogged from SemiWiki.com

Can Intel Compete in the Internet of Things?

by Daniel Nenni

Published on 11-05-2013 03:00 PM

Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer, is credited for the term “The Internet of Things” to describe an ecosystem where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors. Simply stated: rather than humans creating content for the internet IoT devices create the content. To be clear, this does not include PCs, Smartphones, SmartTVs, or wearable electronics. Think everyday things like thermostats, appliances, parking meters, and medical devices enabling physical-to-digital communication via the internet.

Today there are an estimated 2B IoT devices in play and that number is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, so yes, this is a big deal.The question I have is this: Does Intel have a chance here or will ARM and the fabless semiconductor ecosystem continue to dominate the IoT market?The annual ARM user gathering was last month and IoT was a major focus. You can read about the ARM and the Internet of Things keynote and visit the ARM TechCon website for more information. My agenda at the conference was gathering 14nm silicon data but I attended the IoT presentations as well and that lead me to where I am today, at the IEEE IoT workshop.“The great promise of the Internet of Things is about the transformation of the world based on the convergence of numerous disjointed systems into a fully connected environment where complex tasks are synchronized and performed by a unified platform,” said Oleg Logvinov, member of the IEEE-SA Standards Board, member of the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group, and director of market development, Industrial and Power Conversion Division withSTMicroelectronics. “During the workshop in Silicon Valley, we will explore how various technologies can be applied across multiple verticals and how convergence is fueling IoT’s endless potential and opportunities.” I also attended the IDF 2013 Forum last September where Intel announced their IoT contender, Quark. For you Star Trek fans Quark was the beloved con man pictured above. For Intel, Quark is a synthesizable core based on the 486 instruction set to which they claim uses 1/10th the power of Atom and is 1/5 the size. This was just slides with little technical data but details are now starting to emerge. The first Quark will be manufactured on a 32nm SoC process. The main problem I see here is that Intel’s 32nm is HKMG which is not cost nor power optimized and will unfavorably compete with TSMC 28nm poly/SION but I digress…. Lets get back to business.

The IoT value proposition is similar to mobile with low power and cost being the primary drivers. Business models and ecosystem are also going to be determining factors. Do you even know what silicon is inside your mobile devices? I do, but most people don’t. Do you even care? I do, but again, you don’t. Is IoT going to be any different? Absolutely not so say good bye to the old school benchmarks and transistor one-upmanship.

Also read: Intel Quark: Synthesizable Core but you can’t have it

The first questions during the IDF Q&A were about Quark and the Intel business model. By definition a synthesizable core can be licensed and customized by the customer. ARM takes this to a deeper level by licensing the architecture and instruction set so customers have complete control over implementation. So the first question to Intel CEO Brian K. was: Will Intel license the Quark cores? The answer was, “No”. Can Quark be manufactured outside of Intel? No. Can customers synthesize Quark? No. Can Intel be successful in the IoT market with their current Quark business model? No (my incredibly biased opinion). Fortunately business models can change faster than technology so Intel still has a chance with IoT and Quark but they had better hurry.

ZigBee wants to be the Bluetooth of the Internet of Things. Too bad everyone hates it.

More on my two earlier posts on the Tower of Babbling Things

REBLOGGED FROM GIGAOM

by Stacey Higginbotham

ZigBee is fighting for its place in the internet of things against Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy and Z-wave. It has to overcome fragmentation, sneak into user’s homes and keep Bluetooth at bay. Can it do all three.

Poor ZigBee. As a wireless standard, it has long faced an identity crisis that pitted it against Wi-Fi in the home and proprietary standards or Bluetooth for low-data rates. But as companies such as Comcast embrace the connected home and thanks to anacquisition last year, the standard could get its day in the sun and a place in the home.

Meet ZigBee, a confused standard

ZigBee is designed to carry small amounts of data over a mid-range distance and consume very little power. It’s also a mesh networking standard so the sensors can carry other data along to the hub. Its closest analog is the proprietary Z-wave standard that comes on chips made by Sigma Designs.

If you own a Nest thermostat, Comcast’s recent router or a Hue lightbulb you have ZigBee chips inside your home already.

A ZigBee outlet.

But as those devices illustrate, ZigBee has been plagued by interoperability problems. The standard isn’t just the wireless transport mechanism, but a layer of software on top that can create profiles that interfere with different versions of ZigBee profiles. That means that unlike Wi-Fi, two devices that have ZigBee chips might not interoperate.

The ZigBee Alliance is working on this. In an interview last month with Alliance Chairman Tobin Richardson he said that ZigBee is getting more aggressive about policing those who use the ZigBee certification without actually interoperating. That’s going to be amazing, but the next step will be getting those that use ZigBee to want to go through certification.

ZigBee versus Z-wave

And that may require device-maker and consumer demand. But still, things are changing. Cees Links, the CEO of a Holland-based company called Greenpeak Technologies, which supplies ZigBee chips is optimistic. One would expect that, of course, but Links is also the man credited with convincing Steve Jobs to put Wi-Fi inside the Mac, which was a huge step forward for that technology’s adoption.

He’s betting he can do it again with ZigBee. So, while I’ve heard that roughly nine out of ten sensors are using the proprietary Z-wave standard over ZigBee, and more startups are coming out with Bluetooth Low Energy devices that will communicate with handsets, Links is confident that ZigBee still has a place in the developing internet of things. First, off ZigBee is an open standard with multiple vendors, while Z-wave is dominated by one.

The Nest thermostat.

Second, the Alliance is really safe-guarding that openness now. He points to the acquisition of Ember by Silicon Labs last year as a big turning point for the standard. Not only did it bring a large chipmaker into the mix, something that will assuage the fears of device-makers who might be skittish about trusting a startup for all of their chip needs, but it freed up the ZigBee Alliance to become a true standards organization.

Links says that Ember had really dominated the direction of the Alliance and wasn’t interested in creating a broader ecosystem where other vendor’s chips would interoperate with theirs, but now that Silicon Labs has taken over, the Alliance is focused on broadening adoption of all ZigBee chips, not just Ember’s. So with Greenpeak, Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments all producing silicon Links hopes device-makers will go with ZigBee as opposed to Z-wave.

Sneaking ZigBee into the home

As for the contention that all you need it Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Links is skeptical that Bluetooth Low Energy can really handle the distance to become an in-home network, as opposed to a personal area network. And Wi-Fi consumes too much energy. So while, executives at Broadcom and Qualcomm are skeptical that you need more thanBluetooth or Wi-Fi, so far service providers and companies deploying in-home sensors are pretty sure ZigBee or maybe Z-wave has a place.

The next step after getting the chips widely used inside homes (the Comcast deployment should help here in the U.S.) will be getting a ZigBee chip inside the smartphone. Since the mobile handset or tablet is the homeowner’s primary method of communicating with sensors in the home, getting such a chip integrated inside would be huge for ZigBee.

Right now, a ZigBee radio must sneak into the home through a hub, router or set top box — making its adoption by homeowners dependent on the service providers and a few early adopters who buy things like the Almond Router, the SmartThings hub or the Revolv hub. That’s why Comcast’s decision to integrate ZigBee in its Xfinity Home gear is so big.

Of course, we’ll know if ZigBee is getting closer to the defacto standard for sensor networks once Qualcomm or Broadcom picks up Greenpeak — or they change their tune on the standard. And then, maybe we’ll see ZigBee make it into the handset or tablet. Of course, given the existing popularity of Z-Wave and the damage of fragmentation in the ZigBee market so far, none of this might happen, but if it’s going to, now’s the time.

Gigaom

Poor ZigBee. As a wireless standard, it has long faced an identity crisis that pitted it against Wi-Fi in the home and proprietary standards or Bluetooth for low-data rates. But as companies such as Comcast(s cmcsa) embrace the connected home and thanks to an acquisition last year, the standard could get its day in the sun and a place in the home.

Meet ZigBee, a confused standard

ZigBee is designed to carry small amounts of data over a mid-range distance and consume very little power. It’s also a mesh networking standard so the sensors can carry other data along to the hub. Its closest analog is the proprietary Z-wave standard that comes on chips made by Sigma Designs.

If you own a Nest thermostat, Comcast’s recent router or a Hue lightbulb you have ZigBee chips inside your home already.

But as those devices illustrate, ZigBee has been plagued…

View original post 677 more words