July 28th, 2008
Fleury's Open Remote is all about the software
It has been over five years since I started writing about wireless applications which live in the air, for home automation, inventory, and health care.
Very little has really happened, and the reason might be proprietary architectures. If it is, Marc Fleury has the solution.
Open Remote is software for the home automation piece of the puzzle. As Fleury explained in a recent blog post, “We intend to be hardware agnostic.” (The picture is from OpenRemote.org and titled The Black Box.)
Of course, as Big Money Matt notes, there is already a home automation firm in the Linux space, called Control4. He calls it “the Apple of home automation.”
Which may be the problem. Apple is notorious for proprietary tweaks. As a result “the market is big and fragmented,” Fleury writes, with “no standard to draft on.”
Is Open Remote that standard? By taking a completely community-based, open source approach to the problem, it could become that. And then the business models fall out like tumbling dice.
My own view is that Fleury should be thinking bigger, and perhaps he is.
Once you have a standard which runs your home remotely, why can’t you track what’s in your home, so you don’t lose track of your keys and know what’s in the fridge?
Once you have a standard which runs your home remotely, what about all those heart monitors and glucose meters, those baby monitors and grandma trackers, now running as proprietary, one-off solutions?
There are some killer apps out there, applications which can use sensors, motes, and RFID connected by wireless networks to simple, Linux-based base stations. Linux because that’s where the embedded market is going.
The company which can deliver a truly open platform to these nascent industries won’t be the Apple of home automation. It will be the Microsoft of the new century.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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