

Cheap Willl Be Smart. Expensive Will Be Dumb. - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/12/cheap-willl-be-smart-expensive-will-be-dumb.html

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sudont
The “bridges” mentioned are potentially one of the most interesting
developments of the next few years. We’ve seen a huge, huge explosion of
Arduino projects, but soon enough it’ll be commoditized and simplified for the
layperson as in the Twine box(1). However, I’m particularly excited by CSR’s
BLE (Bluetooth low energy) chips (2), a SoC promising 3 years battery life on
a coin-cell for wireless peripherals, which could potentially create an entire
universe of environmental sensing motes, similar to Nike+’s shoe-sensor.
Unfortunately CSR is not particularly hacker-friendly, requiring a nearly 10k
developer seat (3) to develop for the otherwise cheap chips.

[1] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-
li...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-
your-world-talk-to-the-internet)

[2] <http://www.csr.com/products/45/csr-energy>

[3] <http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=16425>

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fragsworth
The technical culmination of this vision would be that all of our expensive
devices (i.e. refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters) will have simple APIs
that can be controlled by any administration tool on any device.

For instance, our heating/air conditioning systems can have a standardized API
that really only has the following functions, available (with some simple
authentication) over any wifi connection:

1\. Turn on 2\. Turn off

Then an administration tool (probably on the cloud) can handle all the
daily/weekly/monthly automation, provide a clean and easy to use interface,
with all the complicated and special features we would like to see. We could
change and upgrade our administration tools as we see fit. We would access
them with our smartphones, home PCs, or for old schoolers, the wall mounted
device.

~~~
ams6110
Sigh. I have a simple device that does that already. It's called a thermostat.

Edit: I have the simple device, not a device that can be controlled from
anywhere. But that's not a problem I have or need to have solved.

~~~
fragsworth
> But that's not a problem I have or need to have solved.

Sometimes it's hard to be aware of problems that exist. The fact that we have
to interact with a thermostat on a regular basis is a problem. To save energy
and reduce the need for us to remember to interact with the device, it might
be nice for software to figure out when we leave or enter our homes (perhaps
via GPS on our phones, or by some other detection mechanism) and control the
device automatically. I am almost positive that your thermostat doesn't do
this.

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AmericanOP
The airplay rollout has not been executed well.

Overall, it is successful of course. It's a killer feature and highly popular
among consumers.

I believe it has been mismanaged for the following reasons.

First, rollout has been incredibly slow and there is still a major dearth of
airplay enabled devices. This is not due to limitations of technology. Airplay
comes from a company called BridgeCo, not Apple. BridgeCo did not do a good
job of building OEM relations and following through to see Airplay
implementations. This is not BidgeCo's fault, entirely. The BridgeCo team was
a small (>6) executive staff in the states with an engineering team in India.
While I do not know the full extent of Apple's imposed limitations, I know
they were a factor. Still, BridgeCo had an opportunity to build a robust
ecosystem- instead they were focused on selling SDK's for >$20k and not the
front end UX. I do not think they were a Silicon Valley company culturally.

Apple has not taken a lead on pushing the technology as a standard at all. For
the first year after Airplay's rollout, the only A/V receivers with airplay
capabilities were super high-end Denons with a pricepoint near $1k. Not
consumer. For the record, I haven't checked recently, this could still be the
case. The market for 3rd party all-in-one speakers, the obvious destination
for airplay technology, also developed very slowly.

Fortunately, apple sells a $99 airplay antenna called the Apple TV which can
plug into just about any home theater system. Within the last few months
though, Apple has been pushing updates to ATV's which has _completely
destroyed the airpay experience_ by locking down the format. I can no longer
play downloaded video media on my non-jailbroken apple tv. Apple wants me to
purchase streaming media from the Apple TV market- I don't care. I want to
play the downloaded media on my laptop on my HDTV. Crazy, I know. Apple says
no.

And this, of course, is the biggest fail of the Airplay rollout. Airplay is
not just audio- it's video. This feature has zero presence on 3rd party
devices- possibly positioning for an Apple HDTV launch. Still, BridgeCo (now
SMSC) should have pushed the tech on HDTV OEMs.

While interesting, and slightly sad, none of this matters since ultimately
airplay is the standard and I will continue to watch its development and buy
airplay devices since there are no alternatives due to there being no other
company developing next-gen core computing user experiences.

~~~
andrewcooke
isn't logitech's squeeze an alternative? see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server> etc. i started hacking
airplay to work with linux (rewrote the .net client in java), but gave up and
bought the logitech hardware instead. it's open - the server is written in
perl and runs perfectly on linux - interoperates with a bunch of stuff, and
has been around for years, now.

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moizsyed
I thought he was going to say that cheap devices will be smart as in they will
collect our data, etc (so they can monetize) and expensive devices will not
(because they're expensive and come with the added advantage of privacy)

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makmanalp
The author does not seem to understand that with long upgrade cycle products,
you want to include the _minimal_ number of new / improved features.
Otherwise, I won't buy a new tv for 15 years and you'll make no money. But
what is that? You say you have Plasma? LED? HD resolution? Better refresh
rate? Gimmicky 3D that no one supports? Of course I'll buy a new one!

With cell phones and tablets, the expected lifetime is only 1-2 years anyway.

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veyron
Is the willl misspelling intentional?

