On 11/05/2016 09:12 AM, Gregg Reynolds wrote: > 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
Thanks for the write-up, Gregg. One fervent hope I have is that IoT will follow the example that email set in the early years of internetworking, and develop interoperability protocols that would allow any type of email client to talk to another, regardless of which client you use, which network you're on, where in the world you are, and so on. An example that instant messaging didn't follow, sadly, and never really fully realizing its potential as a communication mechanism. If IoT solutions can only talk to their preferred, silo'd proprietary controllers, and the market remains or becomes a thousand fragmented pieces of technology placing the onus on the customer to integrate, we lose as an industry. It's not realistic to expect the customer to know or care about the details of these complicated technologies, and make them choose. thanks, Nivedita
