Samsung CEO Vows ‘Open, Robust, Secure’ Standards on Smart Home
BERLIN -- The smart home of the future can be turned rather quickly from “vision into reality, but only if we as an industry work together,” Samsung Electronics CEO Boo-Keun Yoon told IFA in an opening keynote Friday. “We will work with everybody who shares this vision because we want to make sure that standards are open, robust and secure,” Yoon told an audience of thousands at the cavernous new CityCube Berlin exhibition hall near the south entrance of IFA’s Messe Berlin fairgrounds.
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"We'll open our own standards to accelerate this process,” Yoon said. “And we are making sure that our devices and our own platforms will serve other devices, services and platforms.” Through initiatives like the Open Interconnect Consortium, of which Samsung is a charter member along with Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel and Wind River (CD Aug 28 p8), “we have started partnering with industry leaders” on open device interoperability standards, Yoon said.
But Samsung’s “commitment to openness does not stop” with the Open Interconnect Consortium, Yoon said. That commitment drove Samsung’s recent acquisition of SmartThings, “a leading open platform for the next-generation smart home experience,” he said. “In just over two years, SmartThings has created an active ecosystem of more than 1,000 devices and 8,000 apps picked by its community of device makers, inventors and developers."
SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson then took the stage and told the crowd that his company’s goal “has always been to turn every home into a smart home.” The seed for SmartThings was planted in 2011 when Hawkinson and his family visited their Colorado vacation home and discovered a pipe had frozen and burst, he said. “The place was a wreck when we showed up,” he said. “Everything in the house was coated in ice.” At that moment, Hawkinson thought to himself that it’s “staggering that I know what my friends are doing on Facebook, but how could I not know what’s happening in my own home?” he said. “And why hasn’t anybody invented a solution that would make it simple for me to know what’s happening in my home and get an alert when something goes wrong?"
From its beginning, SmartThings has had a strategy “to engage and support an enthusiastic community of developers and inventors around the world and try to build the first open, standards-agnostic platform for the smart home,” Hawkinson said. Building that platform has been “a crazy and very rewarding ride,” he said. With the “scale, resources and the support” of Samsung, “we're going to be able to expand our platform to even more partners, even more devices, and create richer experiences for consumers all around the world.” Under Samsung’s control, “we're going to continue to run SmartThings the way we always have,” and the “entire founding team” at SmartThings “is joining us on this great road ahead,” he said. Yoon retook the stage to promise Samsung won’t tamper with SmartThings’ success. Regarding SmartThings, Samsung wants to “ensure that its platform remains open and independent, with Samsung as a premier partner."
"What’s clear is that the home of the future is not about the technology, and it’s not about being smart and connected,” Yoon said. “It’s about working in a way so that you don’t notice the technology at work. It’s about picking the right options at the right time. Above all, it’s about adapting to you."
For many, the smart home of the future “is still just a vision,” Yoon said. “But change is coming, and it is coming fast. Just remember how quickly, in just a few years, smartphones and tablets have changed our lives. I am certain the home of the future will be woven into the fabric of our lives just as fast."
Here, Samsung “can take a leading role,” Yoon said. Its various “lifestyle research labs,” product innovation teams and design centers throughout the world “give us deep insights into what people really want and need,” he said. “And uniquely, we do that across the whole range of consumer electronics, from mobile solutions to TVs, from home appliances to health care. All these inform our innovations and shape our portfolio of products and services.”