 When we talk about the Internet of Things, what we're really talking about is this group of items, things that have traditionally never been digital, and we're connecting them to the Internet. Doors and windows, it's coffee pots, it's slow cookers. These are all real examples. But the thing is with the Internet of Things is right now we're in a phase where it's a kind of a Wild West. Not everything is talking to each other. We have so many Internet of Things items, so many connected devices, but we're really not asking ourselves what should these do? More importantly, what shouldn't these things do? And how do we interact with them? This is Mapped, a co-founder of One Button. It's a company that specializes in home technology and automation. But his ideas about the home of the future are a little more practical and down-to-earth than you might think. To me what a smart home is is a home that's controllable and well-designed. But you don't like that being called smart because the other thing that's a little more less human friendly is also considered a smart home. Right, smart home would typically imply that there's some degree of intelligence going on. We really like to think the intelligence comes in the design. So what are we looking at here? This is a future automations mount. The mount's designed to work specifically with this TV. And that was just the controller? Like there's no iPhone app this time, it's just the button. This is a standard Harmony remote. Standard Harmony remote. So why go with a physical piece of hardware, a physical remote versus a phone? Ultimately, convenience factor. It's tough to beat something you pick up, press a button, pulling out your phone, unlocking it, going to the right app, launching the app, waiting for it to load, pressing the volume down. Far more steps there than just having something tangible in front of you. What does the Internet of Things mean to you? In many ways, it's a whole bunch of solutions looking for a problem. So there's a whole lot of neat things that you can do out there, but not necessarily a lot of compelling use cases yet. So most of our clients when they come to us, they don't want all the things. They've been experiencing the drawbacks of all the technology creeping into things that might not provide all the benefits. So we have a full music system in here. We've got six Sonos zones. Also, we've automated all the shades and lights in the space. So this is all based on the Lutron Radio Raw 2 system, both for lighting and shade control. So both shades and lights can be fully controlled from the iPad. For the most part, we don't like to rely on the iPad for day-to-day control. People are going to use the keypads on the wall, which are also mirrored here. So the keypads, we put them at the entry thresholds, and that's what you're going to use most of the time. So you come into your house, and you're going to press a button, entry, and it's going to turn on a path of lights to the space where you're going to occupy. Is there an element of these companies just throwing smart devices out there just because they can? They look at a thing that has a chip or maybe doesn't have a computer chip and go, let's connect it to the Internet. Let's see what happens. Yeah, and I think that's currently the hazard of the Internet of Things, and that's the state that we're in right now. Every time you add technology to something, you're adding complexity. So are consumers asking for a more complex coffee machine? Maybe not. It's got to have some sort of compelling value. It's got to do something that it doesn't already do that's compelling enough to offset the extra complexity. For Matt, this philosophy bleeds over into his own home. We don't always have to have the newest, flashiest technology at our disposal. Sometimes we have to work with what we've got. Matt has added new systems and retrofitted old ones to improve his own apartment. So this is the August lock. It lets us remotely or locally lock and unlock the door. So right now, it's just communicating via Bluetooth. So I press that and it'll give us a lock. Now the big thing here, of course, is like what does this talk to? Does this connect to anything else in the house at this point? Right, so it'll connect to a couple of things. So I've got a Nest login, and that allows me to see my temperature just right on that main screen so I can see it at 72 degrees in the house. Okay. So no hub or device needed. It's just going directly to the Nest login. So the Nest is talking to the cloud, pulling that information down, and then giving it to the Nest as well. When I lock the door, it will ask me if it wants to set the Nest to away. So it'll conveniently let me right now say set to away, and now the Nest will become in a more conservative temperature mode. So from the smart lock, it's actually talking to Nest, and this is one of the units it's talking to right here. So this seems like a hack job to me because I know this is like what came in with the apartment. Right, it did just occur to me that just like a wall thermostat, the P-TAC unit here was using an identical device to a wall thermostat, and that you could just as easily replace that with a Nest as you could if it were in the wall. So August is talking to Nest, one of it is in the Nest in the bedroom. Is there a central hub? Are they talking directly to each other? So we're seeing this shift in IoT from devices that are talking to a hub and kind of like a hub spoke model. It's kind of more of a mesh network. So for instance, we're seeing things like the Nest and the August lock talking to one another, but not necessarily to my door sensor unless it needs to. From lights to shades, it turns out a smarter home is actually within reach for us non-professionals. So let's give it a shot. This is Sean O'Kane. He's a reporter and photographer at The Verge, and that's me in his apartment. I brought along a lot of consumer level toys to make life in his house hopefully better. So here's the plan. We're gonna try to improve three aspects of Sean's apartment. Music, lighting, and security. I brought along a few options for each one. First step, music. We chose the Sonos Play 3. It's a standalone speaker, and it doesn't require a Sonos hub. The box posts one button setup, but it didn't tell you how many taps were required. The Wi-Fi setup through the Sonos app seemed like it would never end. Can we press the button again or is it already recognized? In fact, we couldn't get the Sonos to work at all without being hardwired to the router. So it lives here now. It sounds great and works solidly with many, many online audio services, but they need to be controlled from Sonos' own proprietary app. In fact, you need to sign into each service within the Sonos app, even if you have that services app elsewhere on your phone. It's a great option for people who want the simplicity of a single destination for everything audio, but I'm looking for a little more flexibility. Amazon's Echo promises the same standalone wireless speaker experience, but via standard Bluetooth. And as a Bluetooth speaker, it sounds, well, pretty bad. Alexa, play No Scrubs. No Scrubs by TLC from Prime Music. But that's not the only reason you want to buy an Echo. By saying Alexa, followed by what you want the Echo to do, the speaker can surface music from Amazon's streaming library, read the news, set timers, and more. Alexa, how much time is left on the timer? About one minute and ten seconds. Like a lot of voice recognition in AI services, it's hit or miss. But when it works, it actually feels like magic and I really liked having it in my kitchen. So music is taken care of, but there's another reason I brought along the Echo too. It's got hooks into lighting systems with Philips Hue and Belkin WeMo. Hue is a system of Wi-Fi enabled LED light bulbs that can change their color and brightness based on input from mobile apps, web services, and more. The setup for the Hue also took a very long time and involved waiting for the Philips app to find the hardwired Hue hub. So that's one more brick attached to the router. But once it finally locked in, the system worked great from within the Hue app. And because it's got an open API, things like the Echo can hook into their abilities. I can shout, Alexa, turn the living room light on, and the Echo will ping the Hue service on the internet and that service will find the bulbs and turn them on. This worked equally well with the Belkin WeMo system. And in fact, that could be even more powerful since WeMo switches are just on-off wall outlets. With some clever setup saying, Alexa, turn on the coffee pot, could do just that. We live in the future, I guess. So let's lock all this down. I'm away from my apartment most of the day, but my dog Moose is not. So I want to know if something goes wrong while I'm gone. In case there's an emergency, the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector can alert my phone if something is amiss. It's super loud, too. Testing smoke. Oh, God. Damn it! And while I'm away, I also want to make sure Moose doesn't get into too much trouble. That's where a drop cam, also by Nest, comes in. It's a small internet-connected surveillance camera. Setting up the drop cam was actually much easier than anything else we tried today. We just connected an iPhone to the camera's own Wi-Fi, taught it about the apartment's Wi-Fi, and we were off. The drop cam app does some pretty cool things, like alerting you when there are loud noises or when there's motion in the scene. You can even set it so that you're only alerted when there's motion in part of the scene, which is good because the drop cam has a pretty wide view. So where does this all leave us? There's something fun and novel and maybe even useful about being able to control lights with your voice. But it's hard to justify minor convenience when there's so much time spent setting up and troubleshooting. And as the costs of each device start to add up, it really is true that less is more. The Internet of Things is just a sea of experiments and toys. But the big question is, how do all these toys actually talk to each other? That's where projects like Apple's HomeKit and Google's Brillo and Weave come into play. Finding a common language among smart appliances is the next great platform war, and there's really no clear winner yet. But until then, I'll just enjoy the simple jury-rigged pleasures of automatically hearing the sounds of Kaiza every time I open my back door. You