SmartThings Wants To Make Samsung Work Harder In Your Home
Home automation platform SmartThings unveiled Wednesday new modules for support for Samsung devices. This in itself is not surprising, given that Samsung acquired SmartThings in August. What’s new is the extended functionality it lends to your home appliances.
See also: Samsung Buys Smart-Home Outfit SmartThings, Reportedly For $200 Million
With SmartThings integration, your fridge isn’t just a fridge.
It’s a central hub that takes the features a refrigerator usually uses for keeping your food cold, and utilizes them for the additional tasks of monitoring the humidity and temperature in your home. If there’s a leak in the basement, your fridge will know—and alert you on your phone.
Neither is your vacuum simply a vacuum. Thanks to the Roomba boom just about everyone is familiar with the convenience of a tiny robot that cleans your floor, but SmartThings takes it a step further. It utilizes the robot’s ambulatory abilities as a security guard. When SmartThings detects unexpected movement around your home, it can deploy the vacuum to investigate, and use the vacuum’s camera to monitor what’s going on.
Additional modules include support for a Samsung air conditioner and laundry machine, which will be utilized to monitor and conserve energy use. Aside from remote controls and alerts for using the appliances for their original purpose, you will also be able to track energy usage and control the temperature in the house when you’re not there.
See also: Why Samsung Buying SmartThings Should Have Us Worried
Our appliances contain sophisticated computer mechanisms, and may already be smarter than they seem—we’re just not using them to their full potential. SmartThings’ goal seems to be to make each Samsung appliance a multitasker, utilizing them in unexpected ways.
SmartThings devices are currently on sale in North America, but expected to make their way to the global marketplace sometime in 2015.
Photo via SmartThings
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FCC May Reject The White House's Stance On Net Neutrality
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may be a Democrat like Barack Obama, but political ties won’t keep him from considering a flat-out rejection of the President’s position on net neutrality.
Hours after the President urged the Federal Communications Commission to declare the Internet as a utility, Wheeler told representatives from Google, Yahoo and other giants of the Web that he wouldn’t simply go along with it.
See also: President Obama Supports Net Neutrality, For All The Good It Will Do
“I am an independent agency,” he reportedly said repeatedly, the Washington Post reports.
The White House has fallen firmly on the side of net neutrality ever since an FCC document leaked this spring indicated the FCC was considering allowing ISPs like AT&T and Verizon to continue offering preferential treatment to some Internet users over others.
See also: Why Net Neutrality Became A Thing For The Internet Generation
Both Democrats, Wheeler and Obama have been longtime allies. Before Obama was elected, Wheeler raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote his campaign. Now, however, the FCC’s Democratic member majority may do little to sway it toward the White House’s stance. For now, Wheeler is hoping to placate everyone—Internet users and ISPs alike.
“What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business,” Wheeler told officials from major Web companies, according to the Post. “What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.”
Lead image by Flickr user tlsmith1000, CC 2.0
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Mozilla Is Working On A Firefox Browser Just For Developers
Mozilla has a new Firefox browser in the works that isn’t just for anyone. According to the company’s announcement Monday, this upcoming project will be “the first browser dedicated to developers.”
The new browser will integrate some of Mozilla’s most popular developer tools, WebIDE and the Firefox Tools Adapter. These tools are currently available for download to anyone on up-to-date versions of the Firefox browser, but the average user never touches them. This developer-specific browser will put them front and center.
“When building for the Web, developers tend to use a myriad of different tools which often don’t work well together,” the announcement on Mozilla’s blog reads. “This means you end up switching between different tools, platforms and browsers which can slow you down and make you less productive. So we decided to unleash our developer tools team on the entire browser to see how we could make your lives easier.”
Apart from a video that rehashes the words of the announcement, there isn’t a lot of information available yet on the new browser. However Mozilla promises that all will be revealed on its launch date, November 10.
Photo by Nayu Kim
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