Hello everyone, I am a sophomore at Vanderbilt University taking a class called Engineering Management 221. Its major focus is the cumulative development of a Technology Strategy Assessment for a frontier-level technology (such as wireless power, OLED, holographic data storage, etc). My group's chosen technology, as you might have guessed, is home automation. More specifically, we are developing a business platform around an imaginary Apple Inc. product line called iBode. We know that it might be far-fetched for Apple to jump into the smart home market, but in many ways they already have: they in some forms dominate the "digital lifestyle" market with the iPod and "cool" computing hardware and OS; with the apple tv and iPhone, their prevalence in this market will grow; they maintain the ability to seem ahead of the competition.
We decided the iBode would essentially be a modified Mac Pro that would serve as the command hub for the rest of the home network. It would most likely be based around a modified (OSX-friendly) X10 protocol, so as to lessen compatibility issues. We have also seriously entertained the idea of Apple partnering with or buying Insteon. Our belief is that home automation is not a frontier technology, it is an existing and refined technology that has simply not reached your everyday Joe. Apple's reputation, creativity, and marketing machine could remedy this inexposure. for how we could approach our technology strategy
So what I ask of all of you here in this Google Group is, quite broadly, what do you think of the idea? How practical is the implementation of such an iBode system? What do you think are the biggest potential problems we might encounter? Do you have any new ideas for how to approach our Technology Strategy that we might have overlooked? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,
Clay Maffett