Is iPad Mini the ‘Perfect Size for Home Automation’?

No big surprise that Apple introduced the iPad Mini, a 7.9-inch display that is pencil-thin at 7.2 millimeters. At 0.68 lbs., it weighs about half as much as its big brother. Other than its smaller form factor, everything else appears to be the same as its 9.7-inch counterpart. Apple SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller would disagree. He said today during Apple’s media event, “This isn’t just a shrunken down iPad.” To the home automation, audio/video and custom electronics industries, however, that’s exactly what it is—just a smaller version of the original. But that might be exactly what our industry needs. It’s small enough and light enough to be held with one hand, making it better than a big iPad for use as a remote control. At $329 for the base 16GB Wi-Fi-only model, the iPad Mini isn’t ridiculously cheap like an Android tablet, but it is in line with a decent universal remote—I mean, if you want to wake up the device to launch a command, and then jump from app to app. Yes, it still has all the flaws of the bigger models when it comes to home control. Clearly, the original iPad stimulated sales of home control systems because it was adored and well understood by the masses, and a cheap alternative to tradition home touchscreens. Does the iPad Mini substantially open up new opportunities? At CEDIA Expo 2012 in September, iPort showed a prototype LaunchPort charging mount for the iPad Mini, complete with a mocked-up Mini. CEO Ari Supran declared, “We want people to hold it and say, ‘Hey, it’s the perfect size for home automation. Then they’ll get a bunch, and then they’ll need a place to put it.” http://www.cepro.com/article/is_ipad_mini_the_perfect_size_for_home_automation/

Hon Hai begins automation of its manufacturing process

Taipei, July 13 (CNA) Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world's largest contract electronics producer, said Friday that it has begun automating its manufacturing process throughout its global operations. Automated production techniques have been gradually adopted in the production of smartphones and tablet computers, the company said. It declined, however, to provide specifics on which parts of its business or what regions of operations have seen the introduction of automated manufacturing processes. During Hon Hai's annual shareholders' meeting in June, company chairman Terry Gou said Hon Hai was planning to enter a so-called "Smart Age" and complete the automation process in the coming years. He believed that replacing workers with machines on assembly lines, where the work is boring and repetitive, would help build the competitiveness required by manufacturers in the future. Hon Hai's main automation R&D base is in Taipei, the company said, and the office is responsible for developing and testing the related equipment. The company has also invested in Taichung-based Foxnum Co., an automation specialist, to strengthen its capabilities in the field. http://focustaiwan.tw/ShowNews/WebNews_Detail.aspx?Type=aECO&ID=201207130036

Home Automation Making a Comeback

Home automation is back on the upswing, and builders could be the direct beneficiaries of the rebound. Consumers are rapidly embracing connected devices and technologies across multiple aspects of their personal lives, including their cars and even their workout routines. So it is only natural that they are becoming more inclined to want such technologies in a familiar place in their lives--their homes.
With the release of its annual State of the Builder Technology Market Study, CEA (Consumer Electronics Assn.), www.ce.org, Arlington, Va., uncovered some interesting results related to home technology. According to the results of the 10th annual study, installed home technology is strongly solidified in builders’ portfolios of services and offerings, with things like entertainment and automation solutions allowing builders to differentiate their businesses.

"This year's study confirms CEA's long-held belief and prediction that home technology would make a positive contribution to the inevitable housing market recovery as home buyers' digital lifestyles and desires for energy efficiency factor into purchasing decisions," says Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis, CEA. "For example, home automation and lighting controls tap into buyers' rising concerns regarding energy costs, while a focus on home theater and multi-room audio demonstrate that builders can meet the growing homeowners' demands to access entertainment anywhere in the home."
Part of the appeal to home automation includes the ability to offer homeowners an automated way to manage energy consumption. So it comes as little surprise that energy-management solutions, such as automated lighting controls, reached an all-time high with 12% installation in new homes.
Also high on the list are technology features focused on entertainment. Tried-and-true options like multi-room audio (23%) and home theater (29%) showed strong rebounds in number of installations. Both categories had been down in recent years, according to CEA.
Of course, the "consumerization" of technology, as some like to call it, has contributed to a renewed interest in home technologies. As devices like smartphones and tablets continue to permeate the mainstream, and service providers and automation companies rollout home-automation services that leverage the functionality of such devices, it is only natural to find the connection between the two. In other words, homeowners seem to be more willing than ever to embrace the idea of a connected home due to the fact they use similar type technology on a daily basis in other aspects of their lives.

http://www.constructech.com/news/articles/article.aspx?article_id=9284&SECTION=1

Decide Takes The Guesswork Out of Purchasing Electronics and Appliances with Opscode

 Opscode®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Decide, the only shopping service that predicts when to buy consumer electronics and appliances without regret, has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef® to automate its entire cloud infrastructure, from build environments to monitoring servers in its Amazon EC2 cloud. With Hosted Chef, Decide has automated its entire production site, as well as a range of dynamic development and testing environments, enabling continuous application delivery throughout these environments without the need for any IT operations staff.
"Our business model is primarily online service-based, meaning our website and mobile shopping apps need to work all the time, no matter what," said Kate Matsudaira, VP Engineering, Decide. "We knew automation would be key to maintaining near-100% uptime, making Hosted Chef the clear choice for automating our infrastructure. Today, we run just about everything we do with our infrastructure through Chef, ensuring we're always up and available."
Decide utilizes over 100 terabytes of product data and predictive algorithms to tell shoppers when to buy products with confidence, or to wait for a newer model or lower price. To power its innovative e-commerce platform, Decide leverages Amazon EC2 for everything from its application development and testing to its production website, allowing services to be reliable and scale easily.
Customer Benefits:

• 99.999% Uptime: Hosted Chef enables Decide to automate its entire production environment, from server roles to monitoring, providing the resource consistency necessary to keep its website up and running at all times.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Using Hosted Chef to automate its many different cloud-based environments enables Decide to easily and continually move applications from development to test to production, reducing the time necessary to deliver these applications to market.
• Maximize Cloud Resources: Hosted Chef is purpose-built for the cloud, ensuring Decide can quickly and efficiently access, configure and leverage the power of its Amazon web services with a few simple commands.

Being a startup with no dedicated IT operations staff, Decide needed to ensure its development team could easily manage infrastructure resources. By deploying Hosted Chef early in their environment, Decide has created a highly available and redundant service-based infrastructure that its development team can easily leverage to support growing customer demand. With Hosted Chef, Decide's production website can be hosted, updated and operated consistently with minimal overhead, enabling its development team to focus on innovating and delivering customer value.
"Decide is helping the average person easily make informed decisions about purchasing consumer electronics," said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "By deploying Hosted Chef to move the needle forward in e-commerce, Decide is setting an example for any company looking to get the most from the cloud."
About OpscodeOpscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.
Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
lucas@opscode.com
206-745-0000  
SOURCE Opscode
http://www.technology-digital.com/press_releases/decide-takes-the-guesswork-out-of-purchasing-electronics-and-appliances-with-opscode