Episode 27: Early adopters will suffer for their love of the smart home

This week the smart home got some new capabilities with Philips Hue announcing a new HomeKit enabled bridge that also will be upgraded to support the newly announced Nest Weave protocol. Kevin Tofel and I discuss both the new bridge and the new Nest Weave protocol and whether or not we want to keep investing in new gear to upgrade our networks. We also touch on the new cloud offerings announced by Amazon and Microsoft for developers looking to build connected products.

designswarm_profile_alex

Our guest this week Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (pictured above), who is a design consultant and the creator of the Goodnight Lamp, joined me to discuss consumerism and selling the internet of things. We touched on product lifecycles, again on the Hue bridge and even about designing for sustainability and the responsibility that connected device designers have to consumers and the environment. She came to a pretty grim conclusion, but it’s good food for thought, especially if you haven’t bought into the connected device bonanza yet.

Host: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guest: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Design Swarm

  • Should you upgrade your Philips Hue bridge to the latest version?
  • A deep dive into the Nest Weave protocol
  • Consumerism and the IoT. Is this what we want?
  • If you buy your connected device today, be prepared to suffer.

Published by

Stacey Higginbotham

I am a journalist who has covered technology for over a decade at publications such as Fortune, PCMag, Gigaom, The Deal and BusinessWeek.