Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Cozify now and tomorrow

Controlling home appliances and smart devices with smartphones and tablets is finally becoming mainstream. This development has been enabled by the decreasing price of connectivity and widespread utilization of the advanced features of smartphones. 

However, these are usually separate islands of functionality and therefore a link between them is needed.  

In this blog post we are going to take a peek into the great features of Cozify hub.

Cozify home automation is a new way to control the appliances and smart devices at home. You can automate things to happen based on time, movement, start or stop of an appliance or many other triggers.

We have paid special attention to the set-up process. You don’t have to hire an electrician for the installation, since everything is plug and play.

When you start the application for the first time, it searches for smart devices and connects them automatically. It also comes with pre-installed themes and rules that are typical for us all: home, night and away. It is very easy to add rules to the themes, or create new themes according to your preferences. 

BelowI've listed a few examples how you can improve your life using beautiful Cozify home automation.

Pleasant wake-up

Pleasant wake-up

Tired of being woken up abruptly with an unfriendly alarm? Just set the Cozify Hub to start gently raising the brightness of your smart lights in the bedroom. After a while the system can start playing your favorite music from Sonos loudspeakers. 



Worried about leaving the iron on?
Worried about leaving the iron on?

Never mind, now you can check the status of all electric appliances that are connected to the smart wall plug even if you are not at home. If you want to automate this, you can set the maximum time a smart plug can stay on thus eliminating the danger of overheating of the iron or any other electric appliance. 

Welcome home

Welcome home 

Lights turn on and music start flowing when you come home. Your home welcomes you the way you want. 





Motion guard

Motion guard

You get notification when your child comes home from school. You can also set the system to notify you if it detects any movement when nobody should be at home.

Party or romantic moment?

Party or romantic moment?

You can set the color of lights, brightness and music to match your mood.





What next?

All of the above will be available at the time of launch. However, we have no intention to stay put. 

The first new area to be covered later this spring is home security. By adding window and door sensors, cameras and smoke sensors you can increase security significantly. A smart water valve can sense even a small leak and shut down the water supply in order to minimize damage while Cozify Hub sends a notification to you. 

Later on we’ll expand to energy efficiency and heating. Smart thermostats benefit from the information Cozify Hub can provide about the usage of the house and external conditions. 

All of this will be added to the existing system thus creating a truly silo-breaking solution. 

Supported devices 

Cozify has no intention to re-invent the wheel when it comes to smart devices. Quite the contrary – we support the best-of-breed products that you would be buying anyway. For the moment we have chosen to start with Sonos wireless speakers, Osram Lightify lights and bulbs, Belkin Wemo smart electricity plugs and Philips Hue lights. 

We have not limited the number of devices that can be connected to the system. If you already have connected devices, chances are they are already supported. 

In fact, the Cozify web shop is open, so hurry up and get a sample of our earlybird edition. 

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Cozify and the IoT Hotpot

The Internet of Things (IoT) is like a huge kettle with a big fire underneath and too little soup in it. It bubbles like crazy and droplets fly across to other kettles nearby.

In this metaphor, the fire is being fed by venture capitalists and corporate acquisitions that want to get a piece of the soup. Nearby kettles are industry verticals that are effected by the phenomenon: either by threat of new entrants with new value propositions or by the desires of the incumbents to reinvent their business models. The effects range from simplest consumer products like coffee machines to giant industrial equipment like locomotives.

Some experiments will certainly fail as standalone connected products if the value proposition to the Average Joe is not appealing enough. Some smart devices will only prevail if their standalone functionality can be enriched by intelligently linking it with other smart devices, and thus automating their actions.

Even in the area of home automation there are now several waves of companies. Some have taken the physical hub approach – like Cozify, and others rely on the intelligence residing in the cloud or in the handset. All of the approaches have benefits and drawbacks. However, we believe that the most important factor for widespread acceptance is the customer journey from interest to education and from purchasing to set-up, not to mention the daily use.

Our aim is to exceed expectations in all those phases. This means making sure the sales channel knows how to best sell our product. It means that they are fairly compensated for their efforts. It means that our logistics process takes into account the information we have received from the customer in order to personalize the hub before it reaches the customer. It means that consumer is not confused by a complicated set-up process which would result in a distressed call to the support line of the channel partner. Furthermore, it means that the user is not left alone when starting to use the system but first themes and rules have been thought out according to usual daily habits of people.

The user journey has become the focus of the development recently at Cozify and we are so proud of the result that we will be showcasing it at the giant CeBit exhibition in March. Oh, did we forget to mention it? We were awarded a booth at the Internet of Things –hall by Code_n organization.

If you would like to become our reseller, please let us know by sending an email to partners@cozify.fi. We’ll even give you an entrance ticket to CeBit.

See you there!

Cozify’s blog covers topical issues related to smart living, construction and property management. Articles come from our own team as well as other experts in the field.

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