An Eye For an Eye

The most basic component in Home automation could be the security. As a matter of fact in many cases, the only component:-)
My cousin asked me recently to recommend a camera he can use to monitor any room from web or iOS. A very common requirement when we have to leave house to strangers to manage or have people who need special attention, be it kids or elders.
This will be a very important aspect of the security. It is not just about having cameras and door open sensors, its about being able to track people or activity in different parts of the house without being intrusive to privacy. A camera might be one aspect which can be turned on or off when needed.

Tags or sensors which can be carried by people to identify themselves, or face recognition can do this intelligently. The technology is not mature enough to do it at home I guess since we do not see the face recognition based tracking in many products. But with technology becoming more common place, this could evolve some time soon, keeping you well informed about arrival or departure of others checking them  in at different zones or locations, and also about suspicious individuals spotted at your place.

Gadgets like Apple watch and many health monitoring devices, can monitor the rhythm of your heart beat and other vitals and report any abnormalities as indicators of variances from regular patterns.

The zone awareness can go further marking the mostly populated zones regulating the power consumption to focus on areas where most people spend. It can also follow you to route your calls to place where you are rather than a single point. With mobile phone being the primary mode of communication, this may look a low priority now, but many still leave their phone in one place once reached at home either for charging or to just free their hands, and then when it rings a frantic sprint takes place to pick the call. If the audio systems can be connected up to the main communication hub,  the calls can be routed through them and the phone can be anywhere at home.

Climate sensors informing you of open windows when the weather gets bad may not be a common use case in US where most of the windows are closed, but I am sure elsewhere it may be an important one. Also informing you when your kid is outside when weather gets bad or some other event takes place connecting them up and giving you a very specific warning can help a lot.

In places like India where public transportation is recently under lot of notoriety for bad incidents, may be having a system where we can subscribe to location of people and their transport outside the house is also an important usecase.

Thus Spoke the Hub

Home automation is getting to be really busy and there is a large paradigm shift happening from web cams focused to Artificial Intelligence centered solutions. Many hubs are in Kickstarter, (Including one called Homie from India:) The last one I saw was really interesting, giving the Home a personality of its own. And why not?

Cubic is a Russian origin solution which extends Amazon Echo further to the Activity domain also.  And since its not distracted by a different motivation, its more apt to be open.

Its in the very early stages of development and a lot is to be seen. Nothing is expected till end of 2016 mainly, But I have a lot of interest in this tool. With their Watch working as the badge and some good home hub working as the cube,  Apple is well poised to thrill me the same way. Apple, are you watching?

Ninja Sphere and Automation Hub

Ninja Sphere is a home automation hub allowing you to interact with Voice and wave of hand. A learner, it is said to adapt to your needs.

That is good. I am very pleased with its cool looks,(All that I have seen in pictures alone, alas!) With the integration other Wireless devices at home, security ones and media ones, it can provide you a good amount of use case coverage.

One challenger to the throne was from Revolv which is bought and killed by Goodle now. (Why would google kill it? They will mostly club its technology with the Android TV and their automation ambitions and launch one or two products I guess)

Question that remains is, will Apple update their Apple TV to work as a hub for Home automation. And if and when they do it, will they make it really worth the wait?

The success of the implementation will depend a lot on the reliability of the system, as when people want to depend on the automated workflow, it should just work.

Taking the example of the universal remote at home, I took a lot of pain in mapping the buttons of remotes but that seemed to be a never ending process. It invariably happens that the button I need to press will be one that I am yet to map:-) And it became so complicated that end of the day I never used it. Where as the apps of each individual appliance still was usable for me with just one phone at hand. Now, Homekit is planning to do what universal remote did for individual remotes.

That being the case, I understand that all the functions of the individual appliances will not be taken over by Homekit and mostly it will unify the generic functions so that we can string them together. That is what a home automation should aim to achieve else it will become too tied to the products each has.

Apple has Siri with them already and should enable them  to execute some of the workflows with voice. Provided Siri works perfectly. I do not know about folks in the states, here in India, I have issues with the performance of Siri. It takes a bit of time to respond and many times I get a response, "I am unable to help right now"

All being done, we may not be able to do away with the remotes as there could be less tech savvy people who will feel comfortable doing things the old way. They will not want to watch the movie on the home theater but they would definitely want to listen to music or watch the TV and their daily doze of soap. This will leave couple of remotes still on the coffee table, but I do hope, for the rest of us, we can still ask Siri to start the show some time soon.

Back to where I started off from. So will I get a Ninja Sphere? Not now atleast. Will wait to see what Apple has in making. I feel comfortable in  their eco system and that has paid back well for me in  ease.

Why Amazon Echo?

No, I did not imply anything is empty at Amazon. On the contrary, I was mighty impressed by their new product Echo.

The product is more like having a Siri on Speakerphone to put it simply, for the more Apple Savvy. It does just that one job, with seemingly good hardware where as Apple has squeezed it into a phone along with other functions. That way I would expect better throughput from this device.

Product is still not available and I have impulsively clicked on the register for invitation. But I do hope this product takes off, as a virtual assistant I can keep in some place and still be able to access.

Couple of things I am not sure of are,
1. Am I to lug this along when I move from room to room or keep it at maximum volume so that I can hear it from anywhere or will I have the ability to channel its audio say using Sonos connected in each room, automatically picked as I move inside the house carrying its remote or manually by doing this part myself?
2. I read that the remote has a mic on it so I am assuming I can go any place around in house and talk to Echo.
3. Is the keyword hard wired as in case of Siri? Can I change it?

Anyway, will be a good item to look at if I land it at the Premium customer price, atleast until Apple TV springs into action as the hub doing all this I am hoping for!

Lock Stock and Barrel!

Come August, I may be in a new address. And I am planning to have an August Lock at the entry.

Why? Does it's great looks got to do anything with it? Yes, but that's not all. But before going there,  let me explain what it is.

Door lock automation is an integral part of my home automation vision. I was offered a Yale lock by my automation person with a large desk phone type viewer which will allow me to speak to the person at the door and then release the lock with a button pressed on it. This will mean that the console will be kept at one place and instead of running to the door when the bell rings, I have to run to the console, talk to the person and then may be run to the door! Not my kind of automation.

Off late many companies have come up with wireless door locks which can talk to your smart phones. Goji, Kwickset are few of them. My focus initially was fully on Goji.

Thats when I came across August Lock. A well designed product. Further reading rocked me through tides of interest as people showered them with praise and gripe. There was a huge lag in the schedule and people were loosing faith. And I was not sure how soon I can get my hands on one.

Then they put it on Apple store! I am thrilled to bits to initiate a purchase on the product!

Why didn't I go for the other products? For Kwickset, the only reason was that it was a single unit against a plug in on to an existing deadbolt assembly in case of Goji and August. This meant that when I have some issue with the deadbolt, I will be in trouble being in India to get it sorted out even if the actual automated door opening part is still intact. I have seen in personal experience that  many a times in India you end up calling a carpenter/locksmith to fix a jammed door bolt. I would not want him to come and play with a geeky gadget!

Goji was focusing on a little more than lock automation. It was trying to be your door lock and your video phone. I had issues with that approach. For example, the angle and height a camera should be at according to me is different from that of a lock! Especially if I plan to keep a porch light above!

Another issue was it was costing a bit more than the August!

Anyway, will keep this updated (Not any time soon though:-( as the door where it should go is still in logs!)

iDAPT Charging station

I had been thinking of finding a way to cleanly keep my iOS devices to charge. Wires used to run all around the headboard of my bed and there used to a tussle on who gets the USB plug when! I have 2 iPhones and one Sony Xperia and one iPad always fighting it out for their charging slot in a slightly skewed round robin protocol run at home.
Rajesh, my ever considerate cousin had been telling me about a universal charger  he had left at some place for me but never could really go and pick it up. When he told me about it, what was in my mind was a wore with tentacles that you normally get to see under this name. Finally I got my hands on the package.
It was a charging station called iDAPT. With replaceable charging tips which can be popped into the unit, it came with 2 32 pin tips, 1 Lightning pin tip(!) two micro USB tip, and 1 Mini USB tip. With three slots and 1 USB port on it, the charging station just covered all that I had!

Initially I tried to balance the iPad on the second 32 pin tip I had, but soon realized it was not meant to be. the USB port will allow me to connect the cord and lay the iPad safe on the table top.

Now the table is clean, we have couple of additional USB plugs freed up and the room looks much cleaner!

Thanks Rajesh!

Apple iPhone 6 Plus Apple Watch

Apple had its event launching iPhone and Apple Watch. I had to rely on the live blog to get most of it live, as my Apple TV and iPad refused to show me anything watchable:-( But I was going to talk about the launch.

The iPhone did not have anything earth shattering as I was afraid. But  having waited with my 4S until its life's end (When Apple stops giving you the OS upgrade, its almost time for you to move on if you ask me:-) it was still something to hear about. A better battery life, they said, and that is good! My reading is, this is the lull before the storm, OS 8 going to bring you! The fun will start when people start using the iOS 8 features to integrate many things into the Apple environment. Then, the speed and performance enhancement other wise just a matter of statistics now will be interesting!

Watch did not disappoint. It did not thrill me yet either! A remote on my wrist is great to have, and that is done quite well by Apple. The covering of watch face to silence the phone and the tap gesture to guide you on a walk is a nice one, will be greatly appreciated by people with special needs and others too!

Once again, in itself, Apple Watch and iPhone 6 does not excite me the way some of the other launches did in  past. But the prospect of these with new iOS 8 is really interesting.

Lets see what the future has in store!

Update:I heard a news on HealthKit that its having some issues and the apps are pulled out the last minute due to that. I hope this will be sorted out quickly.
iOS8 seems to have brought song recognition! And it seems to be working great too. I am yet to update my OS so more on iOS 8 Later!

WD TV Live, Sonos and Music Heaven

My weekend project was to set the distributed music using Sonos and some NAS.
So I hooked my Sonos to my home network and it beautifully played music from the services available. But unfortunately the services it offered had hardly any regional music originals I would want to play. It had some radio stations which did not cater to my taste.

So I plugged in my Drobo on the Airport Extreme and renamed the hub to a single string name and made sure the disk share was fine as explained in here. The disk appeared in the Sonos Server settings and I was hopping with excitement! But that did not last too long.

The music on the Drobo never appeared in the Sonos application. Also the music streaming also became suddenly impaired. It kept on giving me timeout error(1000). I thought it must be because Sonos is busy building my index. So I waited for two days,  Nothing really happened. So I reset the Sonos and decided to start all over again.

This time after setting the Drobo share, I thought I should try the disk on the WD TV Live already connected up and available on the same network. Now the question was how do I access the disk on WD TV Live? Some writeup was talking about WDTV hub and I took a cue from it and created a share using wdtvlive as the name of server and the name shown in WD TV live as the disk name. No user name and password and it just connected up and said it will be indexing now. (This message did not appear when I connected my Drobo share.)

Sure enough, I left it running for the day and by evening all my music was available on the Sonos!
It tried to import some already created playlists but I could not find any useful ones I had. But no worries, I quickly searched up the name of artists and created the playlist for the quick start. (One point to note here, the search gives you multiple results for most of the artist searches depending if they are solo or duets etc. So you have to add each of those into your playlist if you have to have all of them under the same name.-You can do this to the other person in the artist list also so that the same set appears both places- And when you do it, you have to watch for the "more" shown on top right of the list  since by default under each category of search, Sonos displays only a limited set.)

Time well spent! My distributed music Proof of concept is in place!

An Update: Incidentally to watch the Apple event flawless, I had turned off the WD TV and without realizing that,  the next day morning I opened up Sonos player and played the song list and it started playing without a blink! Interesting. So looks like even when your WDTV is turned on by the remote, the file server functionality continue to be working for Sonos to treat it as a NAS!

Home automation integration

Picking from where I left off on HomeKit, I was reading up on smarthome hubs from different vendors including some from Belkin and Revolv and Smart things. What I was kind of drawn to was revolv as it looked more promising.

Revolv had its own game to integrate different workflows. People had reviewed it and gave it a hard time saying that the device do not integrate the applications which control each of the devices effectively. What some were expecting is that revolv will give you an all encompassing application which will allow you to access every feature of all the appliances it can interact with! That is not practical and I am happy Revolv is not trying to achieve it. Idea is to make sure the most common workflows that need to be integrated between devices are addressed and the piping is laid to connect them up. A T Joint or an LJoint is not supposed to give you a shower head:-)

I am not sure what the product gives, as I do not want to plunge using it and later  regret it. Being not in US, I have logistic issues procuring devices and later if I have to return it, it becomes a problem. There is not much information on the net to convince me for or against it.

I have plunged in  still with lesser guaranteed products and why am I holding off on this? Its because I have my eyes set on what Apple's Homekit has to offer!

Apple has all that it needs to give me this functionality by providing it all on the stack of HomeKit! Each individual appliances can come to table to shake hands on HomeKit and the workflow will work smoothly! This puts the onus on the appliances to make sure they act well on the interface than on a product like Revolv to tweak their code each time any one of the devices think different!

So I am betting my money on HomeKit. So wait, August Lock, wait, Hue lights, wait, dropcam. Till end of the year for the Homekit!

Roomba, Another pawn in the big plan!

After lot of debate and deliberation within, I have procured the Roomba 880 few days back. Some of the major concerns I have was sourcing components part of ongoing usage and practical performance of the product in Indian conditions.

When the first concern is yet to be fully addressed, my test run did not disappoint from  results perspective. My 6 year old could feel the difference, and so did my better half. Thats  a good sign.

It picked up a lot of stuff from under the cot, in a small room, it roamed around for a good 20 mins and stopped before it covered one strip beyond the foot board. I suspect that the algorithm got confused roaming around under the bed and bumping on to the foot board. A small issue, since I had to re point him to the strip which he is yet to take care of and he promptly set off to take care of it. Lesser problem than  what we have with the current maid!

So overall I am pretty happy with the splurge. I will be using it once a week. So will keep you folks posted with any new findings I do.

BTW, I liked the remote. You have to keep pressing the button to keep it moving in a direction, but, may be that's a good thing that you accidentally do not run him over wrong places.

Drobo and WD TV

Yesterday after a few days of contemplation, I decided to connect up my Drobo to the WD TV Live and check. I was shying away from the possibility of that not working together:-)

So hooked up the Drobo to the WD TV and plugged in the power and went to work in  the morning. Evening when I came back, I turned on the power and changed the channel of the TV to show up the WD Screen.

All good so far!

WD started indexing the contents almost immediately. I do not remember what format I had done to the file system on Drobo, but I have three bays of hard disks with more than 4 TB utilized. This happened at around 7:00PM

The indexing was going on when today morning I turned on the screen to WD. I could see some pictures and movies when the indexing was going on.

Hopefully,  evening when I go back home, the indexing will be done and I will have  the full browse view option for the media! Anyway, next step will be to hook up the Sonos and see how the audio from the Drobo can be played by Sonos, Wireless!

Update:7/3/2014
Yesterday evening also the indexing was continuing. But I had to restart the Drobo and the WD due to external factors. And after this, the Drobo is not being recognized! I am not sure if there is any issue with the Drobo since I could connect another USB stick and get it recognized. Now there are some pointers on the net how to tackle these kind of issues and I am hoping it will work!

Update:7/14/2014
As per the pointers I deleted the WD files and disabled Media scanning, now its recognizing the disk. So that is good news. I am yet to try playing the media from Sonos. Will have to try it.

Sonos and WD TV

Monday I got my shipment of Sonos and WD TV. 6 Sonos Play 1 speakers and one WD TV box. Thanks to my cousins bought it, carried it back here from states via Bangalore! It was really heavy and a hassle to carry when you are travelling. Kudos!

I opened the same day and started the setup. That is when surprisingly my Airport Extreme refused to accept connections, may be because the internet connection  was down(?!) and the Sonos needed a WiFi Connection  to try. I took just one speaker and the WD box and a pile of wires (Each Sonos Speaker came with a Network cable and a power cable) and moved to Sister's house next doors where I could try  the connection.

Plugged in the Sonos both to the power and the internet and used the downloaded Sonos app, and the Radio was playing right away! Nice clarity, very low Bass. (My nephew put on their Boss speakers next to it and played one of his Yanni collection and the drums were very subdued on the Sonos! Means, I did not impress him much!- Bummer!)

Then I moved to the WD setup. The WD also got connected to the WiFi easily,  the app was simple and useful, once again,  cool start. Went around on  some Picassa old pictures(Nice recall!) But some video I guess hung up the WD. May be it was trying to download the video and play as Apple TV does, but there was no indication of what was going on. May be the net was slow or unreliable too. Anyway, it did not allow me to exit or break off from the wait. I had to physically unplug! Not a very good thing! Hope it does not happen all the time!

Then wanted to play some more songs on Sonos and realized Airplay does not work out of the box. I have to connect my Airport Express to enable that! But I can always play the music provided I have Sonos app on the device. Audio streaming from any app will not work though.

The remote quickly disconnected when I moved away from the speakers. The WiFi did not help it to hold on. I hope with multi room Speaker setup, I will have a better experience with different Sonos holding on to the connection.

Another concern I had was how do I play all my music collection lying on an external HDD via Sonos? Will I have to have the Computer on to do this? From the reading I did, it looks like WD and Sonos combination will be the answer to it. WD exposes a connected HDD as a NAS drive. And Sonos can be configured to play from the NAS. Have I tried it yet? Nope. That will be the project for the week. If that works, I will have my distributed music project complete.

What is the backup plan? I will have to get a Sonos Bridge and connect up the WD directly to it and then use that to stream the music.

Continuity matters

Before I got my first Mac, I had noticed a feature in Mac OS where I can take the call from Mac instead of the phone, provided I have the bluetooth connection. But then iPhone happened and this feature disappeared from the OS. By the time I got my Mac, it was no where to be seen.

Then couple of vendors came with this as a tool and it did not quite work well for me. I ended up buying one of them and soon the guy closed shop! And it always been a thorn in the flesh for me.

The reason behind it was because I wanted to keep my phone some place and still be able to take my calls on any other device which ever is accessible to me.

It was very nice to know  that the feature is back and with a bang! Its called Continuity now. I am really looking forward to this.

The phone calls may finally end up in my Apple TV also if I choose to, provided I can route the calls as airplay/hand off into AppleTV and continue using my iOS device Mic. This will work well when you want to use the home theater as a big hand free call. A simple integration to Apple TV to popup caller ID on screen will be big plus!

Continuity does not stop at handing off calls. When you work on something on one device, and you move your location and context and you want to shift to another device, Continuity promise to make it a cake walk!

Even though not called in under the continuity umbrella, I feel that one other feature worth mentioning is the ability to airplay without connecting the Apple TV to the network! This makes a lot of sense since now I can play from any network I am in into Apple TV without switching to just be in the same network as Apple TV!

You can get the full feature details Here. I like the way Apple is letting you move between applications and devices quickly by bringing them closer. (Notification Center, Apps to share data)

Homekit and Healthkit

In yesterday's WWDC, Apple launched two major things, Homekit and Healthkit. There had been a lot of time spent on other items like Yosemite and Hand off and other features, but I felt that the most disruptive of the announcements yesterday was these two. Why do I feel so?

There had been solutions for measuring your BP, for measuring heart beat, for measuring movements and activity and the like. (Nike Plus and Fuel band etc). And similarly there had been applications for controlling a lot of your appliances in using smart phone.

But all that remained in silos and never talked to each other. Having an opportunity to have all of these synchronized into one place and to orchestrate these into useful workflows is a major leap in iOS eco system.

The home automation and personal health are seemingly disparate areas but have some common touch points. When some one elderly wakes up in night and have to grope for switch, if the lights can come on, and when someone who needs attention wakes up and you are intimated about that immediately, it can result in a lot of useful usecases.

I am sure, someone will come up with, if not Apple in its Watch, a technology to measure your Vitals and identify your mood, and say sensing your are panicking may call some SOS contact you have on your phone or message them with your location, without you lifting a single finger!

Or you walk into the home tired, your home senses that, also remembers what you did last time when you were down, (Like drink a cup of coffee and slump into the couch to watch the TV) and reacts to the situation accordingly. The home can really come alive around you!

HDMI:A Home theatre perspective

I am not technically competent to comment about the quality of HDMI vs some other technology. But HDMI combines the audio and video connection into one, which takes away a lot of clutter behind the Entertainment center, especially with so many devices occuping the rack these days, Blue ray player, Media player, Some game center, Apple TV/ Roku/Amazon Fire to name a few.

The real challenge though, comes when you want to conceal wiring. The HDMI connectors are big and a conduit to pass these later, will have to be equally big, mostly to a level of being prohibiting. Unlike many other connectors, you cannot crimp/end the HDMI on your own according to experts. Another limitation is HDMI does not work well for beyond 25-50 Feet.

A lot of google later, I found that there are few alternatives available.
1. You can have a Mini HDMI to HDMI conversion connectors at both the ends and the cable concealed can have a Mini HDMI both the ends.I haven't found the challenges in this yet, but something tells me, this is not a good solution
2. There are Faceplate pairs available with HDMI female ports exposed to the front and back. The HDMI female port behind the plate, you can connect using a cable laid inside the conduit. This will work if the conduit size is not a concern for you as you are required to still pass the fat end of HDMI to be passed through the conduit first. Just that the external connection part does not have to bother you.
3. You can have a conversion between HDMI and Cat6 or Cat5 cable and use that as the middle tier. There are converter face plates as well as devices which does this for you. They are called "Balun". There are Baluns with or without power supply.

When you evaluate all these options, one thing you have to keep in mind is what kind of digital content are you planning to transmit. Is it 3D, Full HD or just 1080i? The HDMI connectivity is not just the same across. There is something called Highspeed HDMI which is required to transmit the 3D content or Full BlueRay content. Else there will be a degradation of quality across. Again, I am not sure if the 3D will stop working all together if you use a lower spec HDMI or it will just loose the impact, but one should know there is such a difference before plunging in to buy one of these solutions. Somewhere its said that its better to buy a powered balun since this will ensure reduced loss in transmission and better quality.

So I am off now to educate my Automation consultant on these because, I think he has not considered the connection between the Media center and TV as his head ache or he is planning to have some channel disguised as something else to be there as an eye sour to take care of this!

Wireless Power

Getting some automation at home had been my task at hand and every other time I am running into the same challenge of Power supply.  Some cases its making sure the items only available in American market works with 220V 50Hz supply India has, and at times, its a surprise sprung up from vendors that the Calling bell/Door Bell uses a different connectivity across the continents. In India, for the wired bells, its just another power switch with the only difference that it is a hold-to-turn-on switch. Else the power supply etc are the same as the 220V AC power directly wired between the Bell and the switch. I found out that in US may be that is not the case, with a transformer in between which makes sure a lower DC volt is used for the buzzer and the main supply do not pass through your switch at all.
What does that do to me? Well, I have to build a transformer to my otherwise normal bell circuit if I am planning to use the Skybell or similar products.
The challenge is that this will require changes to electrical diagrams etc, I will have to have different power points planned. Once the conduits are in, and the plastering covers it, its not easy to change things up here with out having ugly exposed conduits or false decorative fixtures spoiling the aesthetics.
Wireless power may change a lot of this. I do not have to decide where I keep my stuffs to power it. But  will the wireless power be strong enough to power my washing machine? If it is, will it be safe for me to walk through the magnetic field it uses to send the power around? Can the field be channeled through some layer of wall where I can plug in power points and draw the power out to connect my devices? I don't know if those answers are out there.

But for today,  I am still wondering how to be able to connect a good looking Door camera hooked up to my connection without again asking for a electrical wiring change to the builder! 

Internet of things

It had been my Gripe that many of our home appliances are a collection of redundant components not fully utilizing their potential. If we could define any display unit as just display unit, any audio unit as a player or receiver of audio etc, we could have any source of information, by just having a mediator external to the systems translating it for the right target consumer, could send or receive information across devices. My concern started from the initial requirement to show my caller ID on my TV, without having to depend on the cable/TV provider. Ideally, all I would need is a device connected up on the point before the TV input, some place on my receiver or so, to translate the caller ID information coming from my phone on bluetooth connection. My car head unit can do this, why can't my TV do the same?
(Well there is the fact that the car head unit switches the display completely to the bluetooth screen, but with PiP etc availabe with TVs, it must be fairly simple for them to allow this. Another option they could have opened up is TeleText which can be overlayed on the screen. If only I can send any text to a component in the TV which can do this.)
Taking it to next level, it can even allow me to take the call right on my home theater system if I have a mic connected up, pausing the program running on the TV at the moment until I complete the call and resume from there. Same with any security event any place at home.

LG is trying out a networking of its devices chatting up  to you taking English like commands like Siri does. Check the link. Its an interesting development when your House comes up alive and active to tell you what was going on during the day or act as a home secretory, asking you for a go ahead to pay your bills and handle your laundry!It can also tell you when you are running too much of a bill in spite of its best effort switching off things which can be. When it starts receiving feeds from your vehicle, it can take care of managing a bit more than that! I think time is ripe for some standards are defined in this area so that different brands will still be able to work easily in this colony of devices.

Now with the internet  of things brewing up, Soon, I will be able to have that.  The only question remains, with all this extra time, what do a common individual do? What will it mean to him to take away all those small chores he used to do by hand?

Android TV And some TV concept thoughts

I was looking for a solution to have my media collection a bit more easy to navigate around with. I did not want a computer to be powered on to stream all my media into the TV. I would prefer to have a simpler setup where the media source lies on an ip node wired to a media management system allowing me to easily add more media, manage it, tag it from my computer, yet, easily see it at my Entertainment center even with computer turned off.
The rumor was abuzz about a new TV solution from Apple, but somehow it seems buried with its visionary. I checked out on the web about Western Digital's Live TV, even added it to my wish list on the Amazon, when I had second thoughts. I read something about Boxee, XBMC and VIZIO Co-Star. The Google TV was on the radar again! And then my cousin, the Android of family, told me that Google is planning for Android TV.

Searching for more information  about Android TV, I came across this articale
http://gigaom.com/2014/04/07/the-technology-behind-android-tv-how-google-wants-to-reinvent-apps-for-the-living-room/

And the Article sparked some thoughts. What should be the future TV like? What features should it have which will make it useful for the Geeks and Greens?

One thing I can think of right away that will attract me is an ability to know what other programs are running at this point which is in line with what I watch. For that the TV should first understand who I am and who I am not. What I mean by that is it need to know me from other members of the TV viewing community at home and me as my interests and dislikes. Google, known to do a lot of research in customer profiling should be well positioned to do this.

People do not watch channels, they watch programs. I do not want to watch HBO or any other channel, I want to watch some nice movie or some program I am interested in. Changing channel is so passe.

When I turn my TV on, or even before that on my Google Now, I get an alert saying,  this program of your interest is on in a channel you have subscription to, and it is at this stage of playing and it will be again available at this time, and present me with a set of options to watch, record or ignore will be a good step in the right direction. So I get to see all the possible programs of my interest lined up for me when I choose.

With the kind of voice recognition Google has now, it can easily allow people to switch to source which is playing their favorite program. If I want to watch an action movie,  I can be presented with all the action movies playing now or will be starting soon.

It can also happen that  someone whom I know who is also with the TV solution  watching a program feels that I will be interested in, suggests that to me over the social network on my TV, and this program gets added to my to be viewed  list with my approval.

When I start watching the programs I may want to know more about it, on the location, the people acted in it, technicians, source of story, adaptations if any,  other programs or contents of similar grain and genres, etc, which I can say, add to my viewing list. In case of informative programs, related information from  the content can be shown. So if I am listening the news about a bill being passed by the congress/parliament, I may want to know more about it, what some of the leading comments about it etc accessible to me. If the Sources can deliver along with the content, some tags and header which gives all the useful information, this can be done easily. (Well, getting them deliver that information in itself, can be a challenge. But the framework should start aiming at it is what I feel so that people will start adapting in future hopefully)

If I like the program, I may want to rate it, then and there and let the source know what as a consumer, I feel about it. This can be a great input to them to plan and prepare their program contents. TRP ratings will have a more live touch to it this way!

It is also possible that when a specific news is being watched, I want to tweet it, or facebook it so that people come to know about it; right from the TV.

A new channel of advertisements can be started by giving an option for people to choose and order things from the program by tagging different things.  Like if a movie is showing a beautiful scenery and a tour operator has one to offer in that area, he can let people choose it right there from a corner of the TV using an alert or something telling there are active components on the scene, or by just adding all those as collections to a separate area where people can go and check later!

One big gripe I have about today's TV or many appliance is that they do not use their full potential. If I have a surveillance system at home, or when I have my phone ringing,  if the TV can pick up those streams and allow me to see who is at door, or who is at my phone and if required, open the communication channel right there at the entertainment center, it will work great!

If the framework allows all the other devices to easily post some alerts to the TV, voice or not, it will work wonderfully going forward since with this single device I am much closer to a connected home! After all, most of the guys are found in front of the TV slouching when at home, and what is the better way of reaching them than to target the TV?