Smart Home Market Plugs through Awareness Gaps and Hacks

Consumers have an awareness gap when it comes to understanding smart home/Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities. That’s the upshot of a recent survey by Bosch, which sampled more than 6,000 consumers in the United States and Western Europe.

This is one of those good news/not so encouraging news situations for industry stakeholders. On the one hand, two-thirds of the survey respondents were aware of smart home technology that can automatically turn off the lights when you walk out the front door. However, less than a quarter of those same respondents (22%) are aware that with enabled services, an oven can suggest recipes—though I’m not sure such oven technology is a big driver of adoption. (Foodies might disagree.)

Interestingly, saving energy was the most appealing aspect of living in a smart home, with 69% of all respondents, regardless of country, saying this was an attractive benefit. Spanish (71%), British (72%), and French (75%) respondents were particularly keen on saving energy.

Overall, French respondents were the most confident about what smart home technology can do compared to those from the United Kingdom, United States, or Austria. Respondents from Germany and Spain were the least confident about smart home technology. Not surprisingly, awareness of smart home technology decreased with age, with those in the 25-to-34 age bracket the most likely to understand the current state of what is possible.

The highest barrier to adoption of smart home technology was price, according to respondents, with 60% saying this was holding them back from embracing smart home IoT-type products.

Smart Home Hacks

Perhaps more concerning to the industry is another disturbing report about hacking of devices. According to several accounts, hackers recently hijacked as many as a million Chinese-made security cameras, digital video recorders, and other devices to mount a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Among those infected were French web hosting provider OVH and the website of well-known American security researcher Brian Krebs. The attack on Krebs’ site was so crippling that network provider Akamai had to cancel his account because too many resources were being used in trying to defend it. Krebs himself concluded wisely, “We need to address this as a clear and present threat not just to censorship but to critical infrastructure.”

That was one of the clear message from Guidehouse Insights’ recent webinar, The IoT Transformation of Buildings. Security against hacks must be priority number one in the connected IoT world we now inhabit, and those in the energy sector must continue to demand this protection as a priority from technology suppliers and ensure that security is paramount in all of their deployments.

SpaceX

Quick pivot: No matter what one thinks of Elon Musk and his companies, it is worth noting his bold plan to colonize Mars, which he announced on September 27. There is an energy angle to this, too, as Musk’s Dragon spacecraft will utilize two solar arrays for producing power. Two YouTube videos help explain what this is all about. There might be plenty of good reasons to be skeptical of Musk’s vision and plan. But for the moment, let’s give him credit for being a trailblazer, explorer, and dreamer. We need big thinkers like him, even if we have doubts about their ideas.