Smart home market is a mixed bag

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, once said: "In the future, homes without smart home systems, like homes that do not have access to the Internet, are not in line with the trend."

China has more than 1.3 billion people and more than 400 million households. Smart homes have unlimited prospects. At present, Internet companies including Alibaba, Tencent, Jingdong, Midea, Haier, and TCL, and home appliance companies have entered the smart home market.

However, the current domestic smart home is still in its infancy, whether it is hardware intelligence, or the development of software, are still not mature. “The smart home industry lacks standards, and disorderly competition has led to chaos in the industry. As a result, smart homes have been unable to make use of heat and cooling in the interior. It has remained at the conceptual stage.” RICI, provider of high-end smart home products and systems solutions ) Tong Hui, general manager, believes that if the industry wants to break the board soon, it needs new thinking.

Mixed

Through the Internet of Things technology, the various devices in the home are connected and controlled as they please. This is no longer a scene in the Hollywood blockbusters and is gradually entering the homes of ordinary people. Juniper Research, a market research organization, predicts that by 2018, China's smart home market will be nearly 140 billion yuan. This market will become the next battlefield for the competition of home appliances and Internet companies.

Under the temptation of huge cakes, Qihoo 360, Jingdong and other Internet companies have announced their respective smart home strategies. At the beginning of the year, Qihoo 360 Chairman Zhou Hongyi visited Gree Electric Appliances, triggering widespread speculation in the industry. Since last year, 360 has been active in the field of smart homes, and has successively reached cooperation with home appliance companies such as TCL and Oaks in air purifiers and smart air conditioners.

The smart home market smelled of smoke smell. On May 13th, Alibaba Smart Life Division announced the launch of the “Air Cloud” solution to enter the air purifier market, aiming to highlight the ambition of the smart home market. On April 12th, Alibaba established the Smart Life Business Unit to integrate powerful e-commerce sales resources, integrate cloud data services and content platforms, and strive to open the entire industry chain in order to speed up the incubation of intelligent hardware.

Compared with Internet companies, home appliance companies have greater ambitions and are eager to dominate the battle. As early as last December, Midea teamed up with Xiaomi to carry out in-depth strategic cooperation in the fields of smart homes, their ecological chains, and mobile Internet services. The marriage between the United States and Xiaomi has opened the curtain for cross-border cooperation. At the beginning of the year, Haier teamed up with Meizu and conducted cross-border cooperation in smart homes, logistics, warehousing and financial services. Meizu entered the Haier U smart home platform, and Haier opened its U-platform SDK (software development kit) to Meizu.

The smart home market is very lively and everyone wants to come in and eat. However, the smart home market is a mixed bag with only a handful of strengths. RICI general manager Tong Hui pointed out that at present, some companies are only using Internet thinking in the Internet tide, pulling up a banner to engage in smart home, empty shouting slogans, for fear that smart home less him, in fact, there is no landing. What's more, just entering the door of smart home is the destructive role of a cottage in the end, taking cost as the first factor, ignoring the experience and quality of the product. In Tong Hui’s view, smart homes are like family works of art. They should naturally integrate into the home environment and give people a beautiful enjoyment. However, the entire industry is now filled with sloppy, reckless, fast-moving cultures. Both materials and processes are The primary pile, the material on the less grades, less fine workmanship, experience less outstanding.

For a more outstanding product experience, RICI is committed to creating high-end smart homes with the concept of "pursuit of quality, attention to taste, and ultimate experience", combining home and humanities, so that smart homes are no longer cold industrial products. Taking RICI Home Server as an example, this product is a home server for smart homes, which integrates smart home gateways, high-definition multimedia video playback, NAS, and home network security systems. It is positioned in the high-end market and uses the world’s most advanced 14-nm chip. Process, intel dual-core 64-bit core M low-power processor, the product has many first, can be perfectly integrated into the home environment.

"RICI's products not only use top-notch chip components and sensors internally, but also use aluminum alloy materials throughout the entire line. They are all integrated and manufactured by the world's top factories. It is difficult to find such smart home products on the market. But for RICI, It seems to be asking for trouble, because aluminum alloy will affect the antenna signal.” Tong Hui said, “The antenna of RICI products is designed according to the high standard of mobile phone antenna. Each product will get Taiwanese lab to debug, in professional The darkroom is crafted to solve the signal problem.”

RICI did not choose a simple and fast route for each product, and this harsh to almost Apple-style paranoia. For gas detection accuracy, RICI has custom designed the industry's smallest fan for its airfoil to accelerate air circulation. In the same way, in order to facilitate the identification of the keys of the smart switch, RICI did not choose to simply make a hole in the key, but chose a rare process - laser microhole technology, and played in an area of ​​1mm in diameter. 158 0.025mm diameter microholes, no holes, only light, this process is currently only seen on top of Apple products.

Internal heat and cold

Smart home companies are broadly divided into three categories. The first category is home appliance giants such as Midea, Gree, Haier, and TCL. Their advantages are household appliances. Smart homes cannot be separated from smart home appliances. Home appliances are the focus of the entire smart home. Peripheral smart home companies cannot penetrate into the realm of home appliance intelligence, nor can they enter refrigerators, rice cookers, and televisions to enter this market. It is best to open cooperation with these traditional home appliance giants.

Currently, Haier and Midea are playing super platforms and hope to develop a whole set of smart home systems from their own perspective. However, they only have home appliances and peripheral equipment is vacant. If the home appliance company wants to have breakthrough development, it must acquire or integrate some smart hardware companies to integrate other people's security, health, audio and video automation products. Otherwise, the smart home is full.

Followed by the Internet giants, such as Tencent, Baidu, Jingdong, Ali, they do big data, cloud services, advantages in cloud services, hope to establish a standard for other smart device companies to adopt their own standards. These internet companies can get big data through the cloud platform and further improve the ecology.

Smart homes are inseparable from software. Software is about user experience, but it is also inseparable from hardware support. At present, smart home hardware lags behind software. In Tong Hui's view, the heat inside the smart home is seemingly booming, but it can't fall to the ground - no company in this industry can do the whole house intelligent hardware.

Whole house intelligent hardware has very strict requirements on talents, funds and other aspects. It is not easy for any company to do full house intelligent hardware. But full-house smart hardware seems to be the best way out. Because the domestic smart home industry standards are not uniform, Internet giants and home appliance giants game each other.

Before that, Internet companies have introduced smart home appliances such as smart routers, WIFI sockets, and smart switches. However, whether it is an intelligent single product or a smart home platform and system, it stays at the primary level, and it can only achieve local intelligence, and there is still a huge gap with the expectations of consumers.

Peripheral smart home companies are looking for ways to break. RICI put forward a new direction of smart home - series of products and system solutions, trying to break through the ecosystem from the platform, allowing customers to experience true smart home, one-step access to the whole house smart ecology. General Manager Tong Hui of RICI frankly stated that this kind of strategy has great pressure, human resources, capital needs, supply chain and other aspects are facing great difficulties. However, over three years of RICI's insistence, more than 60 models of smart home products have been introduced to the market.

Haier first proposed the concept of smart bathroom. At the Appliances Expo held in March of this year, Haier made a product release for the smart bathroom, sizzling the concept. However, the magazine asked from the informed sources that Haier was very dangerous in this step. In addition to the traditional electrical appliances, the rest of the smart hardware was vacant at the time. To make the bathroom really smart, there must be hardware support, such as lighting , environmental monitoring, human health, smart sockets, etc. This aspect is exactly the advantage of RICI. RICI can help the Internet companies and home appliance giants in their business strategy.

There is a need for uniform standards

Smart homes need all parties in the industry chain to work together. Apart from cloud and big data, they must also have strong hardware support. Only when all parties cooperate with each other, can they enter the fast lane of development. At present, there are still many bottlenecks in the domestic smart home, such as the inconsistency of standards, resulting in different brands of home appliances can not be interconnected.

Some practitioners pointed out that the giants do smart homes, all of which are engaged in various systems, each engaging in various platforms, with a strong exclusivity. For example, if other smart home companies want to implant beautiful home appliances, they must use the smart home modules of the United States to develop technology around the United States. Internet companies are all dead. They all want to build their own closed-loop ecosystem and are unlikely to open up to competitors.

The current situation of confusion restricts the development of the industry. Individuals make the smart home unacceptable to consumers. To make smart homes popular, one is to make each appliance smart, and the other is to connect each home appliance to create a smarter scene. “Now we can only use traditional methods to control home appliances, such as WIFI to infrared.” Tong Hui hopes to cooperate with appliance giants in a modular way, and implant RICI modules in their devices to achieve true intelligent networking.

At present, although there are various associations in the smart home market, the associations are in disparity with home appliance giants and Internet giants and lack the right to speak. Some people in the industry have appealed that China's smart homes should formulate unified standards. The major systems are compatible with each other and the major platforms are interconnected. This way, companies in the industry chain can save time and effort, and the market can become bigger and stronger.

Liu Zijin, deputy general manager of RICI, believes that unified standards are the trend of the times. With more and more smart home companies, the market is getting larger and larger, and the situation for each team is huge consumption, which is bound to end. However, this may be a long process, and the earlier the market is opened, the more favorable it will be to the development of the industry.