Ready to invest in a smart home? Let’s look at 3 of the biggest names in home automation and see what they can do to make your life a whole lot easier.

When life gets busy, you’ve probably found yourself wishing that technology could help you out and take some of the load off your hands, right?

How great would it be if you could tell a device to do things in your home when you’re not there, or organize your to-do list for you without even having to think about it. Someone – or even something – you could even talk to.

Now with our popular SURE Universal Remote app you can control many of the smart devices in your home. But did you know there is a whole new breed of voice-activated smart control devices out there, all battling to be the centerpiece of your future smart home?

With big tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon getting into the mix with similar products, it can be confusing to know which one is the best fit for you.

Let’s look at three of the biggest names in this area and what they can do to make your life a whole lot easier.

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What new and innovative ideas can we expect to see in 2017? Take a look at 5 new tech trends that are on the horizon this year!

We recently recapped the tech trends for 2016. One thing is for sure; the smart home industry has been steadily growing with new advancements and devices.

Our SURE Universal Remote app works alongside many of your smart home devices. From your lights to your air conditioner to even your media streamer and TV, making use of the SURE Universal is the first step to an easy-to-control smart home.

Where is smart home technology headed, how is the Internet of Things (IoT) involved and what do we have in store for this year? Let’s check out what the new tech trends are for 2017.

CES 2017 is just around the corner. What big news can we expect out of Sin City at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show?

The world of things is getting smarter, and some of the smartest things in the world are set to be automobiles. Self-driving, intelligent vehicles, laden with sensors and cameras, are on the radar of the world’s top car manufacturers, and vehicles are becoming a major driver of technology development. While it isn’t a specific theme of the event, the big news at CES 2017 is likely to be smart car technology. In a sense, smart cars are a platform upon which many allied technologies – AI, IoT, vision technology, sensor technology, and robot technology – are being developed. Like the space program in previous generations, technologies that are being developed for smart cars will eventually seep down into other consumer products, with the tech showing up in many possibly unexpected places.

For proof of this, one needs to look no further than the 2017 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It’s a Las Vegas extravaganza that brings hundreds of thousands of people from over 150 countries around the world, and 33,000 companies out to Sin City to see the latest and greatest in consumer products.

Lack of interoperability is a major obstacle to adopting IoT. Can OCF solve this and connect billions of devices with their new standardization of protocols?

With the holidays fast approaching, you’ve probably been bombarded with ads for smart home devices, right?

Smart TVs, self-automated vacuums, or even smart plates that can help you manage your diet, are filling shelves at malls and big box stores. While a lot of people welcome these new technological advances, many are still not totally on board with smart technology and the Internet of Things (IoT).

One reason people aren’t adopting these devices is because of how difficult it is to get different devices to communicate with each other, making their IoT dreams fall short of reality. In an ideal world, your IoT life would look something like this:

You head out to work for the day. Your smart home knows nobody is in the house, so your smart thermostat turns down the heat to save energy.

Your iRobot gets to work so you come home to a nice, tidy house, and minutes before you pull into the driveway, your smartphone alerts your home that you’re near. Your smart lighting turns on to welcome you, and your smart pet feeder gets Max’s dinner all served up!

For such a story to become real, devices must be able to work together, and there must be common connectivity between the individual devices. Luckily, there is a movement happening right now to accomplish just that. A group of 170 companies (including many tech giants) are working together to enable standardization, certification, easy discovery and easy connectivity between IoT devices, which will radically change how we use smart devices and home appliances in the future.