SmartThings joins Z-Wave Alliance’s board of directors, so what does that mean?

By Jenny McGrath February 5, 2015

smartthings becomes z wave alliance board of directors member smart home starter kit — Image used with permission by copyright holder

At CES 2015, Samsung CEO BK Yoo said all the company’s products will be Internet-connected by 2020. The company is betting large on the Internet of Things, and now SmartThings, the Samsung-acquired maker of smart-home kits, has joined the Z-Wave Alliance board of directors.

Z-Wave is a wireless home automation protocol that’s been widely licensed, meaning there are lots of smart-home devices that use its “language” to communicate with each other. But it’s not the only game in town, which is why something like SmartThings’s hub is necessary to translate between devices that aren’t operating on the same protocol. In fact, Samsung and Nest unveiled their own protocol, Thread, last summer. Unsurprisingly, the next generation of the SmartThings hub will support Thread, as well as Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Bluetooth Smart. That way, consumers can feel relatively confident that their smart locks, lights, and cameras are all compatible.

Related: What the heck are ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Insteon? Home automation standards explained

“The SmartThings home control platform, which works with Z-Wave, is at the forefront of connected home systems that are bringing this technology to a rapidly growing audience and making homes more intelligent,” said Mary Miller, senior director of corporate marketing for Sigma Designs, another Alliance board member. “With SmartThings now on the Alliance Board, we have another powerful Z-Wave advocate working to ensure that Z-Wave continues to grow and expand its leadership role in the Internet of Things for smart home industry.”

While some think eventually many of these protocols will fall by the wayside and consumers will be left with their smart-home devices speaking one language, it seems Samsung, which is also a voting participant of the ZigBee Alliance, is keeping its options open.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…

Smart Home

Samsung SmartThings integration brings smart home control to Mercedes-Benzes

you can control your home directly from mercedes samsung smartthings benz smart

Everyone knows the feeling: You're halfway to work, stuck in morning traffic, when you realize you can't remember if you turned the oven off or not. Well, if you're a Mercedes-Benz owner, you know longer have that worry.

Today, Samsung announced the integration of its SmartThings platform into Mercedes-Benz vehicles. It will give users the ability to use their car as a control center for their smart home. Thanks to this new feature, users can directly control their home from their vehicle without the need for a phone to act as an intermediary device.

Emerging Tech

Forget the Internet of Things. Here’s what IoT really stands for

Intelligence of Things Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) 2017

IoT is just terrible as an acronym. It can’t be pronounced unless you say “eeyot,” which sounds like a drunken insult you toss at a buddy, and spelled out, “Internet of Things” doesn’t really have any meaning. What things? And what’s “Internet” about them?

Fortunately, there’s a growing movement to change the definition of the tech term, to give it more meaning and set us up for the next decade of innovation. Tomorrow, IoT will mean Intelligence of Things. Here’s what that shift will bring – and how everything’s going to change in the decade ahead.
Put a sensor on it
“Imagine my surprise when I entered a restroom in a small [Ethiopian] town outside of Addis Ababa, the capital, and found urinals with sensors – the kind that know when you’re, um, finished,” wrote the well-regarded technologist Shawn Dubravac, describing a 2013 trip in his excellent book Digital Destiny. “In Ethiopia, where indoor plumbing is considered a luxury and a lot of folks live on less than a dollar a day, self-flushing urinals catch your attention.”

News

Leviton and Alarm.com partner to release new Z-wave lighting controls

The Lutron Decora in a dining room.

Most people think of a home security system and smart home appliances as disparate products, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The majority of modern home security systems integrate with smart home devices and make it possible to expand the utility of a home security system farther than you've ever imagined. That's the case with a new partnership between Leviton and Alarm.com.

Leviton is now an approved provider of Alarm.com Z-Wave lighting controls. This means you can control the lights in your home from your Alarm.com control panel without pulling out your phone and finding the app. It streamlines the experience. It also gives you a single control point for any compatible, connected Leviton device inside the home.