Ideas Category:
Two of our favorite companies are now set to become one as Dell announced its planned acquisition of Alienware yesterday. Dell has dominated the PC space for a while now and brings more of a home entertainment feel to the company with Alienware and its line of unreal products. The guys over at HD Beat pose the question “Dell buying Alienware: What does this mean to us?“ That’s a great question with potentially industry changing answers.
We can’t wait to see what these guys are able to pump out using that amazingly efficient Dell business model. Take a Dell plasma television, hook it up to an Alienware Microsoft Windows XP Media Center, add a Control4 home automation solution and you’ve got one awesome setup! One would think that Dell will take advantage of Alienware’s focus on the consumer electronics side of things to gain an even bigger foothold in that market but we’ll have to wait and see. The innovation in each company by itself was out of this world and now they’ll each have access to the best parts of the other…brilliant!
This brings up another idea. How long is it before we start seeing Control4 applications that can interact with Media Center? Both Control4 and Media Center have APIs that developers can use to enhance the product lines, making it easy to integrate both as a single solution instead of separate but connected solutions. We do know that there is a company out there called Exceptional Innovation that’s already doing this type of integration with Media Center so it looks like Control4 might need to catch up. Maybe Control4 should buy Exceptional Innovation and merge the best parts of its lineup with the life|ware platform. Oh the possibilities…
This is the most frequent question we hear on a daily basis. The business we are in is confusing, not to us, but to most everyone else. Vocabulary that we can use to describe our business includes:
- Low-Voltage
- Custom Electronics Professional
- Home Automation
- Home Security Installer
- Home Systems Integrator
- Home Technology Integrator
- Network Engineers
- Smart Homes
- Systems Integrator
And the list goes on. People know our industry by so many different names that it often makes it difficult finding common ground when answering the question. It makes our day when we can give our pitch and actually find someone who understands what we do. In the same sense, it scares us to death that we have friends and associates that we do business with on a daily basis that have heard our pitch hundreds of times, heck, they’ve even seen the technology in action, but still haven’t got a clue what we do. We have to figure out a way to change that.
Part of our solution to the problem is this blog. Blogging allows us to connect with people in ways which we couldn’t possibly have connected in the past. It gives us the ability to give you the story straight from the horse’s mouth helping to educate you in the process. After all, if we’re experts and we can’t figure out a better way to educate our customers about what we do, we’re in trouble.
Our challenge to you is for you to tell us what you don’t understand about our business, the products we sell and the services we offer. Anything and everything is fair game so don’t be afraid to come at us with whatever it is that you’d like to learn. We don’t want you to have to spend all day researching what we do just to figure it out. Instead, we want to figure out a way to condense all the education you need into easy to use guides that you can refer back to over and over again, whenever you need them. Anyone can post a FAQ page, but can anyone take it a step further and actually make FAQ’s more useful? We intend to do so.
I know that we still haven’t answered the original question that titles this post but we’re hoping you stick around as we engage in conversations that will help shape the answer. We like to think that it is a living answer.
I referred to the “Grandma” test in my last post and thought I should elaborate. The Grandma test as it’s referred to for our purposes relates to the ability of a grandmother to operate any sort of technology related system(s). If grandma can walk up to a thermostat, keypad, remote control or any other device and operate it with minimal effort, that particular device passes the test. If not, it receives a big red “F”.
The Grandma test can also refer to a test applied to conversations with your customers in any business. I found an article that refers to this application of the Grandma test when I Googled the term “grandma test”. I’m adding this Grandma test to our repertoire as well. Call it Grandma2.
It’s no coincidence that I am on the subject of the Grandma test today, although I think about it quite a bit anyways. Today’s thoughts were brought on by one of the blogs I regularly read, the Wibrary at Untangled Life, and their To Heck with Tech feature. Well done guys.
Note: I’m purposefully not tagging the Grandma test in Technorati as doing so led to some unfavorable results. I’m not an expert at tagging as of yet so any suggestions on how to properly tag it without producing these types of results are greatly appreciated.
It has, up to this point, been easy for most integrators to ignore the middle because it didn’t fit their business models. The margins weren’t there and too potential customers felt that they were being taken advantage of by profit hungry salesman that over promise and under deliver and who didn’t really care about their needs. That or you’d run into a company that lowered their prices so low that nobody in the market could compete. These types of companies use the strategy making their margin up in volume while providing an inferior solution in every way shape and form. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been told of situations like these, none of which are good for business.
It has been a main focus of ours since day one to provide access to our products and services to anyone that wants them, left, right and middle. We want to let you know that home automation is affordable for everyone. Are you interested in basic lighting control? Interested in saving money on your energy bills? Is your family safe and secure? These are questions that we want you to feel that you can always answer yes to without remorse. The best part is that you can start with the basic core for your home systems and gradually increase capabilities over time. Stating this is not just hype or marketing hyperbole, it’s the truth. Any integrator that isn’t willing to work with you on your timetable and budget only has their own personal agenda in mind.
Your agenda drives our agenda and that will never change. It is in this spirit that we are creating some new and exciting tools that you can use to design your own home systems with a few mouse clicks. These tools will not only help you build your system, but will also help teach you about it at the same time. These tools will be accessible to anyone and everyone that would like to use them and will be free of charge. Everyone likes free don’t they?
Horner Networks, ensuring that all of our home solutions pass the “Grandma” test, since 2003.
There’s been much discussion about rumors of Google’s GDrive plans in recent days and it got us to thinking. Wouldn’t it be easier if each individual user could have their own storage built into their home or business and have all of their applications online instead of on individual devices? The software as a web service business model is brilliant and would be perfectly suited to take advantage of a setup such as this. Instead of constantly installing the latest software on your PC and saving files to a remote location (for data integrity purposes), you’d do just the opposite. You would use applications on the Internet that saved directly to your own personal GDrive right in your very own home enabling convergence with all of your home systems without having to cross the wire to retrieve the data. No worries about data theft from a security breach on someone else’s servers. Set your privacy and security concerns at ease as the data is stored in your home, under your own mattress!
There are obvious issues with a setup like this including firewalls and data backup, but those solutions can and should be pretty straightforward. The GDrive could have a firewall built in (no backdoor of course). Next issue. Soon after your personal GDrive showed up, you could subscribe to an offsite disaster recovery service whose job it is to manage your backed up data. Your GDrive burns its backup DVD on a weekly basis, tells you when it’s done, you drop your DVD into a secure drop box (think bank vault) down the street and is shipped off to another vault somewhere that nobody can ever access, except you of course. Run into a problem? House burns down, hardware failure? No problem, get some new hardware (from an insurance check, sorry about the house) as well as the latest backup from the secure location and you’re back up and running without missing a beat. Open up a new business model for the “Data Bank” while you’re at it. Have a few branches in every town.
Maybe banks can start handling all of your data as well as cash? Hmmm…
The stranglehold on the last mile is nothing new to any of us. There are a handful of companies that control the communications networks that connect our homes to the rest of the world and they, at their discretion, let us know when we need more bandwidth, better services, etc. Wait a minute… Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Since when is the customer on the outside looking in? But I digress…
What would happen if we figured out some way for every home in America to be a node facilitating the construction of a larger network owned solely and individually by the homeowner? As the network begins to grow, each node comes in contact with an adjacent node and another adjacent node and another adjacent node, until each home has formed an entirely new network in true mesh topology. Think of the possibilities such an infrastructure could create. If we’re all eventually connected, can’t we then just go around the monopolies and connect to each other without their oversight? What would be their purpose if such a network existed? There’s obviously some mixture of wired and wireless technology that would need to be involved in a project like this but it’s not out of the realm of the possibility. We’d also have to involve local and state governments but they work for us remember! We could effectively redefine what it means to be truly connected.
What we have pondered over the past few years is a way to make this type of scenario possible. A combination of wireless fiber products, mesh wireless products, other mesh wireless products, WiMax and some creative thinking should overcome current network obstacles. How about creating a company that’s sole purpose is to manage said network and that’s it? They wouldn’t provide any type of service on the network itself; they’d just provide the infrastructure. What if it was some type of consortium (maybe like UTOPIA) whose sole purpose would be to oversee operations and was specifically governed by network neutrality and forbidden from ever offering their own services over the network? We think that this type of setup would open entirely new business models for services we can’t even imagine and allow everyone, regardless of income level, to have access to everyone else, all the time.
I could go on all night about this particular topic and am happy to share the close to two years of research and ideas we have on the subject if you’d like. Just say the word.
