Facebook Is Entering The Smart Home (But It’s Coming In Through The Back Door)

[paulbates]

This is a story from NextMarket. Facebook acquired Parse and chose the Arduino Yun for their IoT backplane, and I see that as  mixed blessing: Their acquisition of Parse from Mozilla instantiates yet another push / mobile integration platform-- we're drowning in these already. The Yun has lower technical capability and less open on the unix side then the Raspberry Pi, but it does have the Arduino's capabilities and direct 'trap doors' in to python.

 

Maybe the path for us is about integrating to the the things that are good at integrating like the PI and the Yun? Since it (all) seems to be going to the cloud, cloud based aggregation / mashup capability services across all of the big players and their standards seems to be in the cards, providing services that aggregate the disparate push and IoT standards and all integration in a single spot (at least I hope). If you take a look at what Roost is doing, they seem to be leaning that way. Its an HA compute platform in the cloud.

 

This is all changing so fast. Who of the big new players will survive the journey, and how do we survive the integration journey are key questions. What will thing look like by mid 2016?

 

Paul

The story follows:

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Facebook Is Entering The Smart Home (But It’s Coming In Through The Back Door)

 

This past week at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, the social network giant had a series of product and customer announcements for its Parse platform that show the company has designs on becoming an IoT and smart home powerhouse.

So what’s Parse? It’s a company-turned-platform that Facebook acquired in April 2013. Post-acquisition, Facebook first used Parse to fast-track mobile app development by turning it into a platform to provide developers building blocks for such things as notifications.

 

But apparently that was just the beginning. As we learned this week, Parse for IoT will provide a combination of a hardware SDK for an Arduino Yun (a Wi-Fi controller board build around the popular open-source hardware) with a suite of cloud-powered services for IoT hardware developers.
 

The Arduino board is interesting in that it puts Facebook in direct competition, in a sense, with IoT/smart home hardware platform players like Electric Imp, a company that also provides controller boards and SDKs backed by a IoT cloud to enable customers to fast-track product development.

On the cloud-services side, the company is taking its suite of services originally targeted at mobile app developers - Parse Core, Parse Push and Parse Analytics - and enabling these services for IoT hardware. Two smart home companies, Roost and Chamberlain, announced they were early customers of the cloud suite. Roost indicated it would use entire suite of Parse offerings. From the Roost release:

"Parse Core offers Roost the ability to run custom app code in the Parse Cloud, easily schedule recurring tasks and background jobs. It also provides a dashboard to view analytics, as well as schedule and send push notifications. Parse Push allows Roost to create, schedule and segment push notifications from its app. Finally, Parse Analytics enables Roost to track any data point in its app in real-time. This gives Roost the ability to measure app usage, optimize push campaigns and track custom analytics."

Chamberlain’s integration with Parse looks to be primarily with Parse Push, which will enable users of the MyQ app for Chamberlain’s smart home connected garage doors to get push notifications alerting them when the door’s been left open or when it’s been open while they are gone.

Facebook’s move here with Parse likely created a little discomfort for a number of players in the smart home and IoT enabling technology space. Perhaps most uncomfortable are those companies creating smart home and IoT clouds - like Electric Imp, Greenwave and Zonoff - who have to be wondering if this move could put in direct competition with a giant like Facebook.

WeChat was also served notice. This move by Facebook looks to be a response to some of the initial moves we’ve seen from Chinese mobile messaging service, which announced a hardware API effort in 2014. In January 2015, smart home and IoT cloud platform provider Ayla Networks showed off an integration with WeChat to enable notifications and command/control of connected devices through the WeChat app.

In many ways, the move into IoT makes sense for Facebook. Like Amazon and Google, the company sees opportunities in unlocking its leadership position in cloud technologies, and one of the key battlegrounds for IoT will be around cloud-powered services, messaging and notifications and analytics. However, unlike Amazon and Google, I don’t get the sense - at least for now - that Facebook wants to create any consumer-touching hardware for the smart home.

So in this sense, while Facebook has most definitely entered into the smart home, it looks for now like it’s coming in through the backdoor.

[Teken]

In a few words garbage . . .

 

I really can't wait for the day Face Book / Twitter simply explode and die . . . Besides that the endless use of IoT (what a stupid phrase) coined by the idiot mass we are surround by.

 

At the end of the day this will be like the VHS / Beta Max wars. Same as has been seen with Android / iOS and their like. Sometimes I truly wish this world would become like the Walking Dead TV show.

 

All of the petty things people place upon others thinking how best to wrestle out that last dime out of your pocket. I have been supporting the cloud infrastructure for more than 15 years.

 

I can tell you right now the majority of this stuff is geared toward the cheap, stupid, lazy, and incompetent. Every company is pushing the whole cloud experience and service like its going out of style. Every time I am engaged by a client as to why they can't access their mail, archive, data, what ever.

 

I sit there and laugh out loud thinking *hey you gave up the control and direct access* because you were too stupid to realize some things must remain in house and accessible locally! The cloud is great as a measure of sharing resources, security, access, and also as a means of remote back up etc.

 

It should never be considered as the primary method to store, communicate, or secure ones data! These Arduino devices are just hobby toys which the 1% of us use and play with. Those who use these *Toys* are doing so because they are low cost and highly available nothing more.

 

Its always great to have options in my view but people should not lose sight of the fact some of this stuff is nothing but noise. You have people like Google, Samsung, and their like and even with their massive revenue they are quick to drop support on something that they really had no long term plan for.

 

The market is currently inundated with complete sh*t products like the Wink and similar fair. This makes the whole HA experience just terrible for those just entering the market. As much as I loath Apple they have historically made positive contributions in bringing the market together right or wrong.

 

Only time will tell if the Apple Home Kit will be a bust or boom. All I know is it has pushed this *hobby of HA* into the spot light where it should have been 10 years ago!

 

I will continue to sit from afar and watch this endless gong show unfold because it will be quite telling what shakes out in the next five years. 

[lilyoyo1]

As you already know, I'm no fan of all these protocols popping up. I wish more companies would jump on board insteon and/or zwave and build their product from there. This mix of products will bring automation down. When the avg person spends a few hundred on "the next big thing" only to see it disappear it will turn them off from pursuing it again.This is just another thing with limited support or integration.

[lilyoyo1]

I think homekit will succeed only because its apple. They have an extremely loyal following. Its going to work, not because its a great system but because its apple. For some reason, when it come to Apple their fans think its gold. While I don't see homekit taking over the world, I do think it'll give people a great way to get started and grow from there.