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Most Innovative Companies 2015: A Q&A With SmartThings Founder Alex Hawkinson
Join Fast Company assistant editor Rose Pastore for a live Q&A with SmartThings founder Alex Hawkinson. The event will begin at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, March 11, but you can get your questions in now.
"The vision is that it's super easy for an everyday person to make their home a smart home," SmartThings founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson told us last year. The connected-home company, launched on Kickstarter and acquired by Samsung in August 2014, offers an open, cloud-based platform through which consumers can control locks, light bulbs, sound systems, kitchen appliances, garage doors, and more.
SmartThings' kits of smartphone-controlled sensors can be used to automatically turn on your coffeemaker when your wake-up alarm goes off, for example, or to send you a text if your refrigerator door is left open. Hawkinson sees his company's Internet of Things platform as Android for the home. Because the SmartThings platform is open, developers can create their own smart-home apps and sell them directly to consumers.
We'll be talking with Hawkinson about how SmartThings fosters its community of developers, how people are using connected-home tech today, and what the smart home of the near future might look like.
The event will begin at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday, March 11, but you can get your questions in now using the "make a comment" box below. And be sure to read our Most Innovative Companies article on Samsung and SmartThings.
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Before the chat tomorrow, you can read our January 2014 interview with Alex Hawkinson:
How SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson Is Growing The Internet Of Things
Fast CompanyAlex Hawkinson is the founder of one of the leading Internet of Things startups. Here he tells us how he plans to make your home smarter. -
Good morning, everyone. I'm talking today with Alex Hawkinson, founder and CEO of SmartThings. Welcome, Alex!
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Hi everyone! I'm excited to have a chance to connect with you all and answer your questions. SmartThings has been such a crazy and fun journey that it's fun to share.
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First, will you tell us how you got the idea for SmartThings?
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The initial idea emerged after a personal disaster a few years ago. My family has a hiking and skiing home out in the remote mountains of Colorado, and in the winter of 2011 we arrived for a trip and found it destroyed by a flood and then freezing event. The power had gone out some number of months before, the pipes had frozen and burst, and then the power had come back on thawing everything and letting water run through the entire structure for months on end before we found it. It shocked me that the home "didn't have a voice" and wasn't able to warn us about what had happened. If we'd known, we could have called the neighbor and avoided almost $100,000 in damages.
We came back in December 2011 after having the house repaired and I looked for a solution to give my house the voice that it needed, and I was shocked that I wasn't able to find anything consumer friendly that was readily available. I sat there downloading a book on my Kindle, and realized that there was plenty of bandwidth in the air and that someone needed to solve this problem. To make it simple for anyone to give their home a voice. -
So a group of friends and I started prototyping a basic device and within a few months had something working. It was then that I realized that there was a much bigger opportunity. Thousands of companies were building new connected devices and that the Internet of Things was emerging. There was no connected platform that was going to make it easy for regular people to tie it all together, and open so that it could leverage the innovations coming from worldwide developers and device makers.
That was when we realized that we should create that easy and open platform, and SmartThings was officially born. -
Your Kickstarter campaign in 2012 raised more than $1.2 million. Why do you think people responded so strongly to the idea of an open platform?
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We decided to launch on Kickstarter exactly because we wanted SmartThings to be completely open from the very beginning. Our idea was that if we could bring together the full ecosystem - consumers on the one side and developers and device makers on the other, that it could gain some magical momentum with a like-minded community of people who wanted to make the world smarter, together.
Why did people respond so strongly to the SmartThings Kickstarter campaign? It was definitely a combo of hard work to share our commitment to a compelling vision, lots of authentic community engagement, and some lucky timing as well. Lots of people were ready for this vision of the world to come together. -
In terms of engaging the community on Kickstarter, it was also really important that we spent a lot of time being thoughtful about the content and then answering the questions the community had along the way. It literally took 3-4 of us almost full time just to respond to questions that backers had during the campaign. If we hadn't stepped up to engaging that deeply, it may have stalled.
We also did a lot with stretch goals along the way during the campaign. A good example was that we offered a free "thing" (an extra sensor) of their choice to any backer who responded to a question of how they would use our platform to make the world smarter. We had more than 1,000 responses within an hour or two! -
How large is the SmartThings developer community today? What are some of your favorite recent projects to come from them?
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The developer community has really continued to grow quickly, which is so incredibly exciting to me and for everyone involved with SmartThings. The last numbers we disclosed in January during my keynote at CES were that the number of developers had more than doubled since the time of our merger with Samsung last August. More than 10,000 developers had actually published a running app (we call them SmartApps) or integrated device (we call them Device Handlers) in our platform by that time.
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So many favorites amongst the innovation that it's very hard to choose. One clever recent one that comes to mind is an energy saving app that knows your target inside temperature in your home and depending on the weather forecast outside tells you if you should open a window instead of using the HVAC. Just a little example, but cool and practical and "green". There are literally thousands of monthly examples now ranging from the practical to the super cool to the absolutely crazy.
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In the coming year we'll get way better at showcasing and sharing all of this innovation in a way that consumers can enjoy it.
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When I hear about connected home tech, it is usually in the context of controlling your lights or AC/heat remotely. How do you find that most people are using SmartThings?
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Usage is very diverse, as we've found that smart homes, as they deepen, end up reflecting the personality and uniqueness of the person who lives in the home. However, there are some big patterns where we see use cases that are popular across much or all of the customer base.
The top 3 most popular areas of use are 1) Peace of Mind, 2) Comfort and Savings, 3) Convenience and Entertainment. I will elaborate a little on each to make it more clear. -
By peace of mind, I mean that people are giving their home a voice and using some combo of sensors and controllable devices to add security or watch out for common problems in the home. So adding a door sensor and knowing if your door was opened when you were away from home. Or adding a moisture sensor and knowing instantly if there was a leak somewhere there shouldn't be. Or adding a controlled door lock or garage door opener so that they can lock up automatically when the leave. Things in this genre.
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By comfort and savings I mean them controlling temp and energy use across the home with a connected thermostat or appliances. By convenience and entertainment I mean things like connected lighting and music throughout the home.
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Amongst those, 2/3 of customers start with peace of mind as the reason that they get started with a smart home.
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Over time though, smart home impacts almost every facet of life in cool ways.
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Lots of readers are asking about the cybersecurity risks of Internet-connected home devices. What happens if your house gets hacked? Here's a question from a reader:
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Security is a great issue in the internet of things context. How are you at SmartThings are dealing with it, and what should developers be reading in order to create better devices and applications?
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Security of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT) in general is a very, very important topic. In our view, it is something that must be viewed holistically and designed into a platform and ecosystem at a fundamental level. In other words, it's not a feature, but rather a first principle that must be thoughtfully enforced everywhere.
In our case, we believe that the most secure systems are open ones. So we've published a white paper on our approach to security from devices, to the hub, from hub to cloud, apps running in the cloud, cloud to mobile app, etc. Every level. The community is fully engaged in making the approach even better. -
In addition to that, we actually engage with multiple security "white hat hacker" firms to regularly try to find ways to break the security of the platform. That's how seriously we take it.
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All that said, in any new tech there are great benefits and risks. In the case of IoT and smart home, the benefits of being connected far outweigh the risks.
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You mentioned earlier that the most popular applications involve security, things like doors, locks, leak detectors, etc. That makes sense to me for the first generation of smart home tech. What's next? Here's another reader question in that vein:
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Which connected home devices do you think will see the most consumer adoption this year and in 2016?
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By the way, here's our list from 2014 of the world's top smart home companies:
The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies In The Internet Of Things
Fast CompanyThere's No Place Like The Connected Home Sweet Home. -
There are two big categories of popular devices - sensors that help you stay connected with your home and then devices that you can control.
For sensors, the most popular ones are the enablers of the peace of mind scenarios. Door and window sensors, motion sensors, cameras, moisture and smoke detectors, etc.
For things you can control, it tends to be newly connected versions of objects that we already have in our homes today and tracks to those most popular use cases I mentioned. For peace of mind, it's door locks (Yale, Kwikset, Schlage, August) and garage door controllers, for savings, it's thermostats (e.g. Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee), for convenience and entertainment, it's connected lights (e.g. Philips Hue) and speakers (e.g. Sonos).
In the near future, we're also going to see lots of devices that literally never existed before. I think the world will be surprised by some of these even in 2015. -
Any predictions about what those yet-to-be-invented devices will be like?
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Some of them will just be deepening into things that we have but don't think about or interact with on a daily basis. For example, the heating vents in a home. It turns out that by connecting those and making them able to open and close programmatically, you can squeeze out 5-10% additional energy savings in a household.
In other cases, it's going to be stuff we hadn't necessarily ever even conceived of. An example that will become real soon is a sensor that you can put under your mattress that can sense all of your health and sleep patterns without you having to wear anything. Another example might be a sensor that can "smell" and alter your environment or take actions based on the smells in a home.
Imaginations will run wild. And what's cool is that as these new things come online, developers get to innovate with them and come up with ever more use cases. -
Interesting. So how would that kind of sleep tracker be different from other sleep trackers on the market already?
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In a few ways - one is you don't need to wear it! It just sits passively under your mattress and that helps with a lot of people we've seen who don't want to continuously wear something on their bodies. It's also different in that it goes beyond most sleep trackers and tracks your vitals - heart rate, breathing rate, etc.
That enables lots of powerful applications. Practical ones such as watching for healthy patterns, and deeper ones such as learning algorithms that learn about how you sleep best and in the future adjust climate, sound, etc. in order to help you rest well. -
One big point of all this is that the combo of innovation from device makers AND developers is very powerful. So much of the industry is focused just on the new devices coming out. But what's powerful is that every time a new device gets invented, developers all over the world are using our platform to come up with amazing new uses and benefits that weren't expected.
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All right, we're almost out of time, so this will be the last question: As you said earlier, Samsung acquired SmartThings last August, and since then your developer community has more than doubled. What should we expect from SmartThings in 2015?
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It's all about scale and taking the easy and open platform vision to the next level. We will launch a new version of our products in the coming months, with a new hub, devices, and much more. Those will be available everywhere in the US and Canada. We will also, finally, begin to launch in international markets this year. We've seen so much interest around the world, and it's great to have the resources of Samsung behind us that will enable us to make SmartThings available on every corner of the Earth.
We will also make some incredible investments in our community of developers and device makers this year, helping them to leverage the new products and start to actually launch and build businesses around SmartThings.
Finally, we've got some fun surprises up our sleeves that bring together the best of SmartThings with the amazing hardware capabilities of Samsung. Stay tuned! -
And that's the end of our time this morning. Thank you, readers, for your smart questions (sorry that we could not get to them all!). And thank you, Alex, for talking with us.
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Sweet! Developers and device makers can connect with us and get up and running in a few minutes by checking outAnd of course anyone can learn everything about the company at SmartThings.com.
Categories - SmartThings Community
A community for everyone interesting in making their homes and lives smarter. -
And here's a great recent story from our video team about what how smart home companies should think about marketing:
Why Smart Home Companies Should Think Like The Clapper
Fast CompanyCompanies like Nest might want to get marketing tips from old-school home tech. -
Thanks so much for spending the time with me today and the great questions. Let's keep the conversation flowing on Twitter (@ahawkinson and @smartthings) and elsewhere!