 Hello, I'm Kristen Nicole here with Silicon Angle, and we are at the South by Southwest Festival 2014. We're here to look at the Internet of Things space. Smart home design in particular is of interest to me. It's been a very interesting, exciting and growing space. And Austin in particular has been a good place for the startup community. We're here to see what the buzz is about the Internet of Things. We're going to be talking to some of the startups in this space. Startups like Plumb and some other companies like iControl that have also been really innovating and pushing the space along. So we're going to see what some of the new developments are and get ready to explore the festival. Hi, I'm Letz Baldwin, CEO of Plumb. We're a consumer Internet company that's created the first world's first Wi-Fi smart dimmer, allowing you to control your lights directly from your smartphone while you're at home or away. Hi, I'm Greg Roberts with iControl Networks. iControl Networks is a cloud-based software company. We developed a connected home software platform that we offer to service providers, home security companies and other companies that enable them to offer interactive services under their own brand name. GoldFrog is an Internet security and privacy company. We build tools for users to protect themselves online. We were founded in 2009, really out of frustration with the legislative process and seeing that the governments and corporations and a lot of the ISPs are really snooping on consumers and had no tools to protect themselves. So we build tools to help them empower users to protect themselves like ViperVPN is a personal VPN that helps encrypt your Internet connection so users can increase their security and privacy online. As you know, the Internet of Things is a movement. It's connecting machines to machines and humans to machines. We're seeing increased interactivity with humans and their machines and also machine to machine communication. And what this has caused is a new emerging market opportunity for legacy companies as well as startups to really take advantage of the new consumer demand. What we are here to find out at South by Southwest this year is how these companies are addressing that consumer demand. With Plum, if you get home at six o'clock every evening and you turn on a select group of lights, that can happen automatically for you through suggestions. And we're doing that across our entire platform, whether it's in our light pad, our smart plug, or even our electrical outlet. To take it a step further, because our device is essentially an open IP-based user interface found in just about every room of your home, advanced gestures can do even more than simply control your lighting. Imagine drawing the number two on a Plum light pad and not only can we set a scene of light throughout your home to prepare for a party, but simultaneously we can send packets to your IP-based Sonos music system to start a party playlist. And this holds true for any other IP-enabled device, be it your irrigation system, your Nest thermostat, or a host of other IP-enabled devices that are clearly proliferating further and further into the home. The home security industry has roughly 22-23% household penetration in the United States. Our research indicated that when you layer all of those connected home features on top of a security solution, you're likely going to double the size of the market. And that's the kind of mass market adoption that we're starting to see in the marketplace today. And I think what's going to be really important is what is the data retention policies of these companies? Are they going to be transparent with consumers? Are they going to allow consumers to have control and opt out? When every device has an IP address, there's still a lot of data that can be correlated about a person using those from your wearables to your phone to things in your home. And so what our products do, a VPN gives you one IP address. So if you're using our VPN on your mobile phone and you got a wearable that has an IP address, it'll leave and only get one IP address and have less data to really correlate, give you more privacy. What's going to be happening too is people are going to want to encrypt that data, have real high security on that data because it's getting inherently more personal. It's no longer what websites you're visiting, it is what you're doing, what your car is doing, what's happening in your home. A home is already difficult enough to manage. Who has time to add more devices and manage them all from separate applications? A recent Forrester report shows that consumer interest in the smart home is high, but the purchasing of solutions is relatively low, and this is because consumers are wary of the solutions that they don't fully understand. So how are these smart home solution providers making their products not only easy to install, but easy to use? So knowing the user experience is of the utmost importance for what we are building here as a big consumer brand. The form factor that we had to deal with was quite restricted, right? The light switch in North America has a standard size, it's called a Decora opening, so we had very limited area to do anything unique with industrial design. So we decided to incorporate a capacitive multi-touch because we really wanted to prove real machine-to-machine communication, and the only way for devices to communicate with each other is providing a method in which you can interact with those devices. And a simple toggle switch or providing physical buttons just wasn't going to give us enough flexibility that we were looking for. And using the multi-touch allows us to do anything that we can possibly imagine. With a simple gesture flick to the left or right, we could change the light pad from increasing or decreasing the lighting level to increasing and decreasing the music level, the volume intensity for that particular room. So today we're going to show you a demonstration of an eye control solution that has been deployed by Time Warner Cable. Time Warner offers a product called Intelligent Home, which is their connected home solution that includes monitored home security, remote home monitoring, home control, energy management all wrapped into one unique user interface that's very easy to use that they market under the Intelligent Home branding. It gives you the ability to arm and disarm a home security system, lock and unlock doors, see live video from any of the cameras that are part of the system, change lights and thermostat settings all at the touch of a button. South by Southwest is a great place for startups to meet and share ideas. With the introduction of crowdfunding, small companies can launch big ideas. So let's hear from some of the companies that have been down this path. So crowdsourcing has really allowed startup companies a great experience in being able to validate the acceptance of the product prior to having production. We were very fortunate to work with a great group of backers on our Kickstarter community and through pre-orders. We've exceeded over half a million dollars in sales from 2,000 customers and it's been a very insightful experience for us. The Kickstarter experience had a profound effect on both of us because we were quite engaged with the campaign from day one answering our backers in real time and they were as enthusiastic about the company as they were about the product and solution. They really wanted to see this product come to market and we learned so much from them through our interactions. They gave us ideas on new features that we hadn't thought of before. They influenced the industrial design and they helped promote the brand, the team and the product to other, you know, to their friends and family which really helped us succeed. So we've developed the Connected Home Developers Garage here to recruit device developers and application developers that we can bring into the iControl Open Home Partner Program, give them our DDKs and our SDKs and allow them to go drive the next level of innovation in the Connected Home space. It's a $71 billion projected industry and they want to be a part of that and that's why we're here at South by Southwest, is to educate them, show them what the market opportunity is, show them what their go-to-market strategies can be and to help them along the way. In the past, you'd have to be a millionaire to afford a smart home and then go through a lengthy custom installation process. Now, solutions are as easy as plug-and-play and they're much more affordable. So what are the legacy companies doing to survive this democratization of home automation? So we have then built the platforms to be able to accommodate these different types of connected home solutions and as a software company we offer those to tier one service providers and home security companies and that's why now you're seeing Comcast launch products under their Xfinity home brand. Time Warner has launched Intelligent Home, ADT has launched ADT Pulse. There's a number of different tier one service providers in North America that have launched connected home solutions powered by the iControl software platform. I've designed and installed thousands of control systems. I've developed thousands of user interfaces for these touch panels and control systems and I've got a really good understanding of how consumers want and expect to interact with technology. And in developing connected home systems where you're dealing with a lot of disparate systems and a lot of interoperability, more importantly a multitude of users, right? Husband, wife, teenage kids, visiting mother-in-law or grandmother. They all interact with these devices and you have to have empathy and consider them when developing any technology. Our consumer research continues to tell us that the way to get to the mass audience with a connected home solution is through service providers, through professional installation and utilizing platforms that not only enable connected home or smart home solutions but layering those solutions on top of monitored home security to really drive the mass market adoption. But we know with the proliferation of connectivity and intelligence into endpoint devices that the days are numbered for central controllers and the future of the connected home is not just about interoperability of devices communicating with one another but analytics and getting a better understanding of how devices are functioning, how you interact with devices. The Internet of Things is a market still in its infancy but we already have a range of solutions from smart sprinkler systems to intelligent coffee makers. I'm curious to know, though, how far can this market expand? What are some cool developments that already are available and what can we expect to see in the near future? If other devices in the home begin to communicate and interact with the consumer in a way that hasn't been done before, you could be informed of how many hours a week your kids are watching TV, who's coming home when and make decisions on how you interact with the technologies around you based on that information. And, of course, learned behaviors will simply help automate things so you don't have to really think about them on a day-to-day basis. You know, it's the Internet of Things that's going to encrypt all things and that's coming, I think this is going to be the year of encryption so I think that is going to track along with, you know, the one thing consumers really should do. Now you can have your home automate itself. You can have the home actually manage itself. For example, at 7 o'clock this morning, thermostats and lights automatically adjusted because the home knew that it was not occupied or that when my wife and I got within a mile of our home, the house recognized that through these applications and adjusted the thermostat setting and the lights and even unlocked the front door and disarmed the home security system. So everything reacts automatically without us having to do anything. Everything in your home will be connected. Thousands of sensors and control points. If I had to choose something, I guess it would be some type of an RFID mother-in-law early warning system. But in the meantime, visit plumlife.com and pre-order your light pad. And change the way you connect with your home.