2020 looks like a great year in the smart home industry. Electronics are flying off the shelves, delivery trucks are full and professional installation is at an all-time high.
The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), an Internet of Things (IoT) standards body, announced that products from BSC Computer GmbH, COMMAX, Haier, LG Electronics, Resideo, Samsung Electronics and SURE Universal will be showcased in completely interoperable smart home demonstrations at the OCF IoT Breakthrough press event at the Barrymore Restaurant in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, 2020, from 3–6 p.m.
DIY video surveillance company Ring and parent company Amazon are facing a federal lawsuit that claims the companies have not done enough to protect their products from security attacks.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) produced a report evaluating the performance of current facial recognition technology across demographic groups.
Silicon Labs and the Z-Wave Alliance announced plans to open the Z-Wave Specification as a ratified, multi-source wireless standard available to all silicon and stack vendors for development. With this change, semiconductor and software suppliers will be able to join the Z-Wave ecosystem, contribute to future advancements of the smart home standard and develop and supply sub-GHz Z-Wave radio devices and software stacks.
Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet.
PassiveBolt, a provider of smart lock technology, has won the CES 2020 Innovation Award in the smart home category for its Shepherd Lock, a touch-enabled smart lock with enhanced security through sensors and Artificial Intelligence.
Gizmodo published a report on Dec. 9 which shows just how extensive Ring’s network of home security devices is. The publication acquired data from nearly 65,800 individual posts shared by users of the Neighbors app — Ring’s crime alert app in which users share the location and video from their Ring cameras of crimes in their area.
RemoteLock — which went through a rebrand approximately 18 months ago — has always been in the lock business, cutting its teeth in the vacation rental space. But now, the company has evolved into focusing on software versus hardware.