In January of this year, Samsung made a bold promise.
By 2020, everything the company makes will connect to the internet.
For companies that only make a handful of products, that wouldn’t seem like a big deal. But Samsung makes a lot of stuff. TVs. Irons. Phones. Computers. Humidifiers. Washing machines. If it runs on electricity, Samsung has it.
So when the company’s CEO BK Yoon stood on stage in front of hundreds of people at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and told the world that all Samsung gadgets will be controlled over the internet within five years, it sounded crazy.
It didn’t help much that Samsung’s pitch for the so-called “Internet of Things” — which included examples such as smart chairs and a rambling speech by the famous economist Jeremy Rifkin — was way off. The keynote ended without a clear answer as to why we need to connect our everyday gadgets to the internet.
But there’s a lot more to Samsung’s “Internet of Things” initiative going on besides what we saw in January. Much of it is fueled by a company called SmartThings, which Samsung bought last year for a reported $200 million.
SmartThings is now an independent subsidiary of Samsung, operating out of a former local movie theater in Palo Alto, California under CEO Alex Hawkinson. The company only makes a few products, and its main one is a hub that connects to your home’s internet connection so it can control all of your “smart” gizmos.
On Thursday, SmartThings and Samsung announced an update to the hub: It’s now more powerful and can run your appliances even if you temporarily lose power or an internet connection. It also supports video monitoring from a variety of web-connected cameras from companies like D-Link and a new app for managing all your connected devices from your phone.
It’s the first big step in Samsung’s radical vision for a future where every appliance, screen, and gadget we own connects to the internet and talks to each other. And the people behind SmartThings have a pretty good pitch for how that vision could and should become a reality. It’s much better and more coherent than what we saw at CES.
But the question still remains: Do we need all our stuff connected to the internet? Samsung made it sound like we do, but the real answer is much more nuanced than that.
SmartThings came to Samsung through the Global Innovation Center (GIC), an incubator of sorts for pie-in-the-sky projects that could eventually be spun into Samsung’s larger ambitions. GIC’s boss David Eun, helped put the SmartThings acquisition together.
Within a few months, SmartThings became the focal point for Samsung’s biggest initiative following smartphones. Hawkinson, the SmartThings CEO, even appeared on stage during the Samsung CES keynote.
“I think you’ll see more homes and devices with that built-in connectivity,” Eun told Tech Insider in a recent interview. “What SmartThings saw was most people will mix and match. Instead of an app for each device, why don’t we create one platform that’s open?”
That’s the unique pitch for Samsung’s smart home initiative. It’s totally open.
Right now you can buy a bunch of smart home gadgets, but you need a separate app or service to run them. SmartThings is designed to talk to those gadgets and control them from a single app. It even works on devices made by Samsung’s bitter rival Apple.
The idea isn’t to immediately convert every appliance in your home to a smart gadget either. SmartThings sells starter kits that include devices like motion sensors and wall plugs. But the overall philosophy of the company is to let people convert their homes into smart homes at their own pace.
“People get started with a simple problem and then expand from there,” Hawkinson told Tech Insider in an interview.
So just because Samsung’s vision earlier this year made it sound like our homes will suddenly become connected by 2020, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how it’ll happen. Hawkinson says people will focus on things that matter most like security and home monitoring.
From there, they can move on to smart lights, door locks, or whatever else. The SmartThings hub and app will help all those things talk to each other. And if something doesn’t fit into their lifestyle or they have privacy or security concerns, they can live just fine without it.
That’s the real vision. You don’t need to trick out everything in your house to have a smart home. A few gadgets targeting a few key areas can go a long way and will likely be enough for most people. But if you want to go all in, you’ll be able to do that too.
“People don’t buy all at once,” Hawkinson said. “They start with an individual solution. They start in, and then look for things that are compatible for what they got. That influences downstream purchases of other products.”
But Hawkinson is also realistic about where the connected home is going. Not everyone is going to suddenly adopt smart gadgets in their homes, which is why SmartThings is remaining focused on key areas like security, the kinds of things most people will care about before they take the dive into buying appliances like smart washing machines or humidifiers.
"We're building a pretty big business now. It's not so early adopter," Hawkinson said. "The timing feels good. It's still going to be millions of house holds, not billions. But it's not that far out. For me, the race is that this tech is available now and it solves real problems."
