Home Automation

IKEA is continuing its assault on the smart home, with its new TRÅDFRI smart lighting range undercutting stalwarts like Philips Hue when it hits US stores this spring. The popular homewares and furniture company - known as much for its competitive pricing as its flat-pack, self-assembly products - has confirmed US pricing for the connected bulb range. Notably, the TRÅDFRI line-up will support Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa support natively.

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If you've embraced the smart home with Philips' Hue connected lights, and you're an Xfinity Home subscriber, your fancy lighting options are now becoming even cleverer. The two companies have announced a deal this morning which sees Hue light control brought under the umbrella of the Xfinity Home app. There, it joins IoT gadgets like Nest's smart thermostat and August's connected locks.

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That's probably one of the most ironic things you'll hear. A brand that is so easily associated with Apple's ecosystem is adding support for an exclusive Google product. But don't let the name fool you. iDevices line of connected home products is actually compatible with more than just Apple's HomeKit platform. In fact, with Google Home now in the bag, its smart switches and sockets now support Apple's, Amazon's, and Google's smart assistants.

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Amazon's freshly revealed Echo Show may be represent an evolution for Alexa, but Microsoft wants to take things one step further. As it turns out, Microsoft may have something in the pipeline called HomeHub, which will use Windows 10 and Cortana as the backbone. The idea is to turn Windows 10 machines into the hubs for smart home interaction, potentially giving HomeHub more functionality than Alexa or Google Home.

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The new Amazon Echo Show, the latest way for Jeff Bezos & Co. to sneak Alexa into your home, has been officially revealed, complete with both voice and touch. The first Echo device to include a display, the Echo Show has a 7-inch touchscreen and a 5-megapixel camera for video calls. There's also a total of eight microphones packed into its fairly blocky housing.

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Home automation company ecobee will soon be launching its next-gen thermostat, dubbed the ecobee4. Like previous thermostats in ecobee's lineup, the ecobee4 is a smart thermostat that can be controlled either through the built-in touchscreen, ecobee's companion app, and with this launch, Alexa voice controls. The device even goes up for pre-order today for those who are interested in picking one up.

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As homes start to get smarter, the need to protect the people and hi-tech devices inside also gets stronger. When it comes to smart home security, however, there is almost always a compromise between ease of use and strength of security. Danalock, who has been making smart locks for years now, offers a solution. The third version of its smart lock product, the Danalock V3 offers the same ease of installation, speed of reaction, and remote convenience while, at the same time, utilizing the same level of encryption used by government.

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Pizza company Domino's has yet again tapped modern technology to improve the pizza-ordering process, this time announcing a new partnership with IFTTT, making it the first-ever restaurant brand to get on the platform. To kick things off, Domino's has announced some IFTTT Applets able to work with the company's Pizza Tracker to adjust smart homes in optimal ways (for pizza delivery). Do you have sprinklers on outside, for example? They'll automatically be turned off when Tracker says the delivery is underway.

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It's robot wars, but not quite like the Terminator movies warned it would be. iRobot has launched a salvo of litigation against a whole host of rivals, alleging that collectively they infringe on a total of six patents the company holds around robotic vacuum cleaner technology. While warring robo-vacs might sound comical, the stakes are high.

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Logitech's Pop is getting an Apple HomeKit upgrade, allowing the programable wireless buttons to act as light-switches, scene-triggers, and more for iOS fans. Launched in August last year, Pop offers a triple-function button that can be customized to control hundreds of devices in your smart home. Now, there's a second version for those who went the HomeKit route.

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The personal assistant war has long moved from smartphones to smart homes the day Amazon launched its Echo speaker and introduced Alexa to the world. Pretty soon, Google followed with its Home (not Gnome) and Google Assistant and soon, Microsoft will do likewise with Cortana. That device has already been teased before to bear Harman Kardon's brand but very little else. Now some more details are falling into place courtesy of leaks, including a rather unusual but still totally generic name: Invoke.

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Amazon has dramatically improved how Alexa, its smart assistant found, works with connected bulbs, allowing users to control color and white light temperature by voice. The tunable lighting control update, announced today, allows developers to integrate color and temperature control with simple voice commands, and is compatible with some of the most popular connected bulbs on the market. It's a feature which has been much-requested by smart home fans.

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