I hope this will be of interest to the Iotivity community. I attended the Smart Home Summit 2016 <https://tmt.knect365.com/smart-home/> in Palo Alto last week (NB: the webpage says 2017 but the content appears to be from last week's event).
I asked Iotivity-related questions at a half-dozen or so sessions and the most common reaction was "What's Iotivity?" Some people did know about it, and at least one OCF member was a sponsor, but in general awareness of Iotivity seems to be quite low. Awareness of Alljoyn seemed much higher. On the other hand, one of the discussants on a panel on interoperability argued strongly that real interoperability requires an application-level protocol and common data model, as opposed to mere interconnectivity. But also lots of people recommended just picking a technology and getting to market asap, and let the market pick the winners. So Iotivity would seem to be well-positioned if it can get a little marketing support. Or maybe this will be a case where software developers drive corporate awareness. More generally, pretty much everybody agreed that the smart home has not lived up to the hype - it's been stuck at the far end of the "early adopters" phase of the adoption cycle for several years. Reasons: too expensive, still too complex (e.g. to turn on your lights you have to find your cell phone, find an app, find the right screen, etc.), too siloed (interop), and in general remains a solution in search of a problem. Recommendations: industry should stop talking about technologies (platforms, protocols, etc.) and start focussing on user experience, make their devices interoperate, look to voice input for control, etc. Notably, the big platform players had minimal presence; Amazon sent an Echo evangelist, and the president of the Thread Alliance was on a few panels, that was about it. The impression I got was that it remains unclear to everybody whether the market is going to go to the Big Platforms or move to more open solutions. So there is still plenty of opportunity for Iotivity. hth, Gregg -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.iotivity.org/pipermail/iotivity-dev/attachments/20161105/ad98470c/attachment.html>
