American products like Amazon’s Echo may seem to have a virtual monopoly on the smart home marketplace, but French startup Netatmo is looking to get in on the action. Last week, the smart home company unveiled its new Connect platform, which allows developers to delve into its connected kit ecosystem, including the Welcome indoor camera, thermostat, and weather station.
This means that developers will now be able to integrate both software and hardware with Netatmo products, which could in turn lead to more communication among various smart home products.
Rather than relying upon other company’s platforms (think Apple’s HomeKit or the aforementioned Amazon products), Netatmo is looking to capitalize upon its own set of application programming interfaces, which have already proven popular in the developer world. Indeed, some 20 companies and 14,000 developers are already using the company’s current APIs, and this latest move should boost the existing ecosystem.
Netatmo currently focuses on three main areas — first, there’s a weather station, used by companies like AccuWeather to give us our forecasts. Netatmo’s new Weather program allows developers to utilize this data. Then there’s the company’s Smart Home platform, which includes the smart thermostat, indoor, and outdoor camera. And finally, Netatmo is looking towards larger enterprise-level customers to boost the company as a whole. Partnering with groups such as the multinational electric utility company Engie, Netatmo is providing largescale data from its thermostats for analysis of energy consumption.
As smart home devices and the Internet of Things becomes all the more ubiquitous, Netatmo’s latest decision doesn’t come as much of a surprise, especially given the success of other competitive platforms. So if you’re looking to control your whole house with the touch of a button or voice commands, you may want to look into developments from folks like Netatmo, Nest, and the like. Because walking over to a light switch is so last year.
