Nokia Loves the Jetsons

Exciting news from Nokia, sadly they haven’t announced a flying car, or indeed a machine that instantly washes and dresses you each morning, however the company unveiled a Smart Home Platform designed to allow people to monitor and control their home via mobiles and PCs.

The Jetsons aside, in the non-cartoon world the concept is nothing new - IBM launched its Home Director platform almost exactly 10 years ago with similar aims. I actually witnessed a demo which allowed to open the curtains and turning the porch light on and off at a house inCanada – all from the comfort of London’s Earls Court. While remotely annoying residents of suburban Vancouver may have some limited appeal the idea never really caught on and Home Director was later spun out from IBM as a separate entity which despite some financial troubles in 2006 is soldiering on today.

However, despite the lack of significant uptake over the past decade, there are a number of factors which mean smart home technology might be just about to have something of a renaissance (or indeed naissance). Nokia’s news follows on from the announcement earlier this year of SoftAtHome, a JV between Orange, Thomson and Sagem which has similar aims. Relatedly (and I should include the disclaimer that we do the PR for Ubiquisys) many of the femtocell vendors have been talking about how their devices enable home services. While both Nokia and the SoftAtHome solutions initially appear to be quite WiFi centric, it’s not hard to see that both groups could incorporate femtocell technology relatively simply.

The combination of the world’s biggest handset manufacturer and a major operator group making moves into the area suggests that it could be the hot new thing but the core question is what kind of services will these systems enable and will consumers actually want them? Nokia claims to be targeting “security”, “household energy management” and the catch-all of “smart home solutions” – which are the pretty standard examples. After a quick poll of the office here the general consensus is that turning on your heating on the way home could be quite useful, and also setting the PVR to record when you’re stuck in the pub but whether cameras in the home will make you any more secure is a debatable point. Femtocells would add an additional angle, enabling presence triggers – so for example with your phone set to “date” mode you could arrive home to a roaring fire, dimmed lighting and Barry White playing on the stereo or perhaps more sensibly the latest episode of Lost could automatically download to your phone for future viewing.

The biggest single problem, as it was ten years ago, is going to be getting a range of disparate domestic systems all speaking together in the same language. Although embedded intelligence is much more common in consumer electronics and white goods these days making them all talk together is still a tall order and one it will be interesting to see solved.

Personally I’m interested in the possibility of remotely controlling a robot which I could then get to hoover my house while I’m at work – but perhaps I’ve just been watching too much Jetsons.