By 2020 there will be 30 billion connected devices and a smart home will generate 50 GB of data every day, according to Microsoft. What trends will influence the smart home’s acceptance, growth and sustainability? Whole platforms and ecosys­tems have yet to resonate with consumers causing frustration to grow around this fragmented technology not yet meeting its value proposition. Singular solu­tions are further complicating the journey to the smart home.

Three Trends for the Ultimate Smart Home

1. Simplification.

For many consumer tech creators, there’s a simple philoso­phy behind improving the consumer experience: less buttons. While the industry is further along in making new user interface (UI) technologies ubiqui­tous, the need to reduce complex interoperability is still an obstacle. To simplify UI, artificial intelligence (AI) and voice assistants are essential. While they are not yet commonplace, about 220 million voice-controlled smart home devices are forecast by 2021. Voice assistants allow for a more engaged consumer but challenges remain. For instance, a voice assistant doesn’t work with smart home devices out-of-the-box, but must be set up and linked to new products and apps. As a result, the initial setup remains cumbersome. However, the end-result removes the habitual need to use a smartphone to control the home. Each person can dim lights, view a live stream, play music or turn on an appli­ance – without needing to find the one smartphone in the house that has the passcode and apps. Tablet-styled touch panels, or in­home displays (IHD), feature another essential user interface. While IHDs allow anyone in the home, friends or family, to interact with the smart home – they need to become more user­friendly and affordable. The combination of voice and display will enable a more immersive experience, where everyone in a home can engage with the ecosystem. Prolonged voice and touch engagement will enable devices to collect data, learn routines/behaviors, detect patterns and ultimately create an autonomous experience that antici­pates your needs.

2. Comfort and security.

Increased convenience and improved quality of life is driving sales of smart home products. It’s about activating the thermostat and pre-heating the oven on your drive home in the evening, or hav­ing a smart refrigerator that orders the food items you need restocked. Similarly, peace of mind is another fundamental reason why consumers buy smart home devices. For example, security cameras enable you to see what’s happen­ing when you’re not home or monitor your baby from afar. And smart doorbells can see who’s at the door if you’re away.

3. Energy management.

Smart homes require intelligent energy management. Beyond controlling the heat inside the house to ensure it’s optimal, and that electric vehicle charging points are opera­tional, expect to see services like weather forecasting combining with other utility services rather than remaining a separate app. New services will emerge, due to the increasing availability of smart meters and solar panels. Homes will generate their own energy supply and also be able to sell the excess back to the national grid. These developments will bring the smart home closer to expectations.

Chatbots are ushering in a new era of man-machine interaction that goes far beyond information retrieval applications that rely on simple question-answer sys­tem constructs. As machines learn how to speak and perform human functions, voice and Al will enable e-commerce and retailers to deliver differentiated con­sumer experiences that will transform, disrupt and enhance shopping through the most intuitive way of interacting with devices: voice communications. Voice control products are changing customer behavior. Between Amazon Alexa and Google Home, nearly 30 mil­lion voice devices have been sold in the U.S. Today, 26 percent of U.S. smart speaker owners have made a purchase by voice. One in four people have placed an order or executed a monetary transaction on a screenless device, according to Voicebot.ai’s Sma1t Speaker Consumer Adoption Report.

Voice: Making Shopping Easier

As traditional retail faces turbulent times, e-commerce is being reimag­ined. In 2017, roughly one percent of retailers and brands said they were investing in voice experiences. In early 2018, that percentage rose to 50 per­cent, with many companies under­standing that voice is playing a pivotal role in the consumer experience when it comes to searching for and buying items on a mobile device. Many websites and mobile apps are improving the shopping experience with natural language to bring new efficiencies and engagement. For example, retail giant Alibaba is using “very simple natural language process­ing” to answer a huge volume of customer queries for their popular November 11 Single’s Day sale. “There are so many customers, if you don’t use any machines to help you to reply to their questions, you will be in trou­ble,” said Assistant Professor Lu Wei from the Information Systems Technology and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. As software, Al and machine learning advance, people will be able to search, transact and create wish lists, with voice creating a personalized expe­rience. Customers will simply browse and purchase via voice rather than typ­ing, regardless of device. By 2020, more than 400 million devices will connect with voice-based platforms, including consumer tech products like watches, phones and appliances as well as Alexa and other smart speakers, according to Cowen Research.

Google vs. Amazon

The competition between Amazon and Google for voice shopping is heating­up. In March 2018 Google introduced its Google’s Shopping Actions pro­gram, to enable retailers to compete against Amazon while their customers are shopping on a mobile device. Last August, Google partnered with Walmart to enable voice shopping from Walmart only through Google Home devices. Amazon followed with a partnership enabling Amazon Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana to com­municate with each other. Google’s Shopping Actions program allows retailers to list their products on Google Search, the Google Express shopping service and the Google Assistant for mobile phones and enabled devices like Google Home. It gives customers an easy, voice-driven shopping experience across Google. A shareable list, universal shopping cart and instant checkout with saved pay­ment credentials works across Google and the Google Assistant – allowing a store’s customers to seamlessly turn browsing into buying. Target, Walmart, Ulta Beauty, Costco and Home Depot have signed up.

Technology on the Move

With the rise of Al, machine learning and deep neural networks, speech technology is becoming more sophisti­cated. Found in everything from smartphones and smart speakers to appliances and automobiles, voice tech will provide immense business value. Voice is expected to be how consumers soon will interact with retailers and brands alike to provide a frictionless experience, regardless of platform
or channel.

Susan Schreiner (susan@c4trends.com) is the founder and editor of C4Trends.com and a veteran journalist who covers developments in consumer technology. She is also a CE industry and events analyst.

Two of the latest buzzwords are Internet of Things (a.k.a., IoT) and machine-to-machine, or M2M.  In most cases, these terms are increasingly interchangeable.  What’s the relevancy of these terms to retailers and resellers?

What do wearables and fitness devices, a sports shirt, mattress covers, smart home/home automation, healthcare, connected cars, and more have in common?  Unlike most products today that are largely stand-alone, all devices in an IoT universe will be outfitted with embedded communications technology to enable any device to be connected to and communicate with other devices – independent of human intervention.  Make no mistake: IoT will disrupt our ways of living and working – and retailers will not just be selling a distinct device, but a more valuable user experience.

To support this ‘next big thing,’ a new ecosystem is unfolding that includes, for instance: applications, platforms, semiconductors, sensors, encryption/security, networking technologies and infrastructure, service providers, marketing and analytics.

Hyper-connectivity will become the new norm.  As part of the back-end IoT framework, previously “dumb” objects will acquire unique identifiers, which subsequently allows the device to collect and exchange vast streams of detailed data, without human intervention.  Objects will have an address, an increasingly detailed profile, and an Internet presence with which other devices can interact – to deliver optimized solutions and seamless ‘smart’ personalized experiences or solutions.   Consequently, the physical and virtual sides of an object’s functionality will blend – including, for instance, toothbrushes, doorknobs… anything.

Security will be one of the challenges – and Symantec, a leader in security products and services, is planning to announce an IoT device security platform that will provide end-to-end protection and provide a company with telemetry about any attacks. It is working with organizations across the ecosystem, from chip providers such as Texas Instruments to the developers of the software that power IoT devices.

The abundance of all of these types of products on the show floor—and their revenue potential for the channel—is backed by newly released data from CEA. It is projecting that overall wearable unit sales will reach 30.9 million units (a 61 percent increase from last year) and will generate $5.1 billion in revenue in 2015 (a 133 percent increase).

Similarly, CEA expects that—thanks to strong sales for activity-tracking devices—the health and fitness wearables category will post a projected 20 million units to be sold in 2015. Revenues from the subcategory will be more than $1.8 billion. CEA also projects that smartwatches will take off in 2015, selling 10.8 million units (a 359 percent increase) and earning a projected $3.1 billion in revenue (a 474 percent increase over 2014).

These are large numbers—and huge jumps, on a year-to-year basis. We saw major brand names and mid-to-smaller companies jump into this marketplace. CES 2015 crystalized the fact that this product area is not going away; however, many generational developments are yet to take place until widespread adoption occurs. Also, we expect that new business models and monetization strategies will emerge for retailers as well as vendors.

As form factors and functionality continue evolving, certain trends relevant to retailers are unfolding. Fitness bands, for instance, have begun to stratify on price and also on functionality, with the release of the Samsung Gear Fit. The Gear Fit and several other similar models offer notification services for calls and texts as well as fitness-based functions, giving the ability in some cases to answer calls from the wrist. These expanded capabilities mean that the devices are moving into functions that, until now, have been the domain of smartwatches.

In a universe where traditional industry boundaries are disappearing and commoditization is becoming ever more commonplace, the customer experience provides the sizzle and differentiating factor for many of these fitness and wellness devices, smartwatches and fitness trackers—whether in a catalog, on a website, or in the store and on the floor.

In considering approaches to a customer experience—and as channels select products and product lines—given that these are personal products, there is a greater need for retailers to understand their customers.

Know Your Customer

Who is your customer? Male or female? Age range? Are they into sports? Are they health-conscious, geeks or early adopters of electronics? Are they infirm, pregnant or just want to stay in shape? What’s the range of price sensitivity? What matters more: features, brand name or price?

In many ways, while so many of these products get relegated to that drawer within six months, according to industry data, consumers keep buying them. The trick for retailers is to find the sweet spot between fitness functionality and also positioning these devices as attractive lifestyle products, or even jewelry. Just consider that consumers have more than one watch—based on form factor, looks, relevancy to a social situation, and so on. Similarly, many of these smartwatches may fall into this bailiwick as fashion meets wearables, like a smart watch bejeweled in Swarovski “diamonds.”

CES: A Major Showcase

As retailers and channels look to find new business opportunities, a worthwhile metric for selecting products might be to consider the CES Innovation Award honorees in product categories related to fitness, wellness and even accessibility. It’s likely that the honoree vendors will provide additional promotional materials that will enhance the credibility and value of these new and growing product categories for your customers.

These honorees also provide insight into the blurring lines between wellness, fitness and accessibility, along with considering trends related to baby boomers wanting to age in their homes, devices for managing chronic diseases, and even for caring for pets. While many in the “Tech for a Better World” and Accessibility categories move beyond the major thrust of this article, they nonetheless present related or adjacent business development opportunities for channels in their communities such as physicians’ offices, senior centers, caregivers, parents with newborns, those concerned with child safety, and so on.

We are all just at the beginning of a journey into the world of wearables and other devices and apps that are designed to improve people’s lifestyles, as well as the growing quantified self-movement in relationship to one’s wellness and fitness.

This article would be incomplete without mentioning Apple, because we perceive that the launch of the Apple Watch will certainly increase consumer awareness and help to establish the sector as a mainstream product group.

Put that together with what we saw at CES, and it promises to be an exciting ride with many twists and turns as new revenue opportunities arise along the way.

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 3D printing is disrupting traditional manufacturing and may be the catalyst for the next industrial revolution. It’s moving beyond making prototypes, molds and tooling into the customization of end-use parts for applications ranging from aerospace, medical, automotive, consumer products, architecture and electronics.

McKinsey estimates that the 3D printing industry could generate between $230 billion and $550 billion by 2025. Companies like 3D Systems, GE, Shapeways and Stratasys are making major bets on this manufacturing transformation that holds the potential to stimulate job growth with economic spillover effects in design, research and development, the supply chain and entrepreneurship.

Shapeways, an online service provider for personalized 3D printed products, has created more than 100 jobs in the last two years and helped fuel the birth of many new small businesses. Shapeways makes it possible for anyone—from designers to niche 3D modelers—to start a business.

Experts predict that the consumer market will account for 60 percent of the total estimated 3D printing market. 3D printing entrepreneurs have a huge opportunity to create thriving, sustainable businesses. In addition to toys, furniture and other applications, jewelry is an example of how 3D is disrupting a consumer sector.

 

A Case Study

President of American Pearl, Eddie Bakhash, is a second generation jeweler. He’s expanding the family business founded 50 years ago from its physical processes and location in New York’s Diamond District—to 3D printing and ecommerce. Bakhash aims to shake up the $275 billion industry using a combination of proprietary computer-aided design (CAD) software and a Solidscape T-76 3D printer.

His customers can personalize their own designs and have their jewelry produced and delivered in four days. “We’re empowering consumers to customize their jewelry, with the same high quality gems and materials as our competitors but at a third of the cost. There are thousands of designs and combinations. We have more jewelry for sale than Tiffany’s,” says Bakhash.

American Pearl’s CAD/CAM software platform then outputs a digital file taking human error out of the equation. The company produces a 3D printed model of the jewelry made of thermoplastic wax and pours the chosen metal into a digitally-designed, precisely-proportioned mold. Once it hardens, the gemstones are set by a jeweler. The company also can recreate a lost family heirloom. Just click on ‘Jewelry Replicator,’ upload a photo and voila, a 3D digital model and an authentic piece of jewelry can be created. Its 3D process streamlines inventory and workflows, and eliminates most of the labor costs and margins for error in high-end jewelry designs so it can deliver luxury jewelry for a fraction of the cost at high-end stores.

Because 3D printing technology enables virtual inventory and high-quality, just-in-time product customization, many hope this will bring U.S. jobs back and allow companies to compete with cheaper overseas manufacturers.