You will be hearing A LOT about “The Internet of Things” or “The Internet of Everything” or “Industrial Internet” this year and next. But it was this month’s Wired magazine who devoted the issue’s cover story to “Welcome to the Programmable World.” It starts off with a focus on SmartThings‘ CEO Alex Hawkinson and his ‘smarthome’:
On a 5-acre plot in Great Falls, Virginia, less than a mile’s stroll through exurban scrub from the wide Potomac River, Alex Hawkinson has breathed life into a lifeless object. He has given his house, a sprawling six-bedroom Tudor, what you might describe as a nervous system: a network linking together the home’s very sinews, its walls and ceilings and windows and doors. He has made these parts move, let them coalesce as a bodily whole, by giving them a way to talk among themselves. Open a telnet session in the house’s digital hub and you can actually spy on his chattering stuff, hear what it says when no one’s listening.
There are few more appropriate guides to this impending future than Hawkinson, whose DC-based startup, SmartThings, has built what’s arguably the most advanced hub to tie connected objects together. At his house, more than 200 objects, from the garage door to the coffeemaker to his daughter’s trampoline, are all connected to his SmartThings system. His office can automatically text his wife when he leaves and tell his home A/C system to start powering up.
Great article and it is one you need to read, not only for SmartThings, but because many people (including me) believe strongly that the connected, programmable world will be the biggest thing to hit our world since the internet itself.