Makers of the first generation of connected devices — as if they already didn’t have enough to worry about — had, at the outset of their work, a crucial design decision to make: What communications system should I design into my hardware? The theory was that a new device would need to be interoperable, right out of the box, with the other devices on the market by being compatible with whatever home networking solution became the most popular.

Everyone thus believed that choosing the “wrong” networking system, the one that wasn’t the marketplace winner, would doom a product to the same sort of failure that would await a consumer software developer who chose to write exclusively for something besides Windows or the Mac.

That resulted in the sort of religious wars that are too common in technology. Z-Wave? ZigBee Smart Energy, ZigBee Home Automation? Wi-Fi? Power Line Communication? Companies have invested considerable mental bandwidth in following these debates, time that would have been better spent on what they knew best, the actual design of their product.

But that is all on the past. Now, integration happens almost effortlessly, thanks to the package of ready-made connectivity solutions known as “the cloud,” along with the growing popularity of smart smartphones. These two forces work together to make old-fashioned interoperability in the home irrelevant.

Some of the best examples of this integration in the cloud involve data. One is Zillow, which makes it easy to check on the latest real estate prices in your neighborhood. Behind the scenes, Zillow is “mashing up” disparate data from real estate listing services, assessor and tax office records and proprietary home price estimate vendors, and then overlaying the information using the familiar interface of Google Maps — including on a smartphone. The fact that the information is being piped in from many different sources is hidden from the user.

When it comes to connected devices, today’s consumer only cares about one thing: Can they can see it or control it from their smartphone? As long as they can, they could care less what low level networking protocol the device uses, just like Zillow users don’t particularly care which data vendor is supplying home prices. The cloud puts Z-Wave, ZigBee, Wi-Fi and the others on a level playing field. Any product using any of these can be controlled on the same smartphone as well as any other; a fact that in turn makes heterogeneous home networks a reality.

That’s the premise of the Green Button data initiative, an government-industry effort to allow consumers to access the data from their home power meters via the Web, either on a smartphone or a computer. Utilities taking part in the program — and already, 12 million homes are being served by it — format household power meter data according to a set of standard protocols. Any application using the Green Button APIs can then access the information, and use it to help homeowners maker smarter energy decisions.

Integration efforts like Green Button are the future of home automation. The hardware networking issues associated with the first four ISO layers used to be a manufacturer’s biggest headache; now, they scarcely need to sweat the issue. Instead, they simply have to get to the cloud in the easiest manner possible.

Which is precisely what Arrayent’s web services API can do. No matter what networking hardware you choose, we make it simple for you to get online and accessible via a smartphone. The time and energy you save can be better spent on doing what you do best: Your actual product.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

Most consumers regard connected devices as the height of simplicity. After all, when they want to turn up the temperature in their house, they simply launch an app on their mobile phone, and the room gets warmer.

But device manufacturers appreciate that behind the scenes, a lot of complicated things need to happen to make that experience as effortless as it seems to be.

The thermostat itself needs to be designed, of course, but with an added hardware requirement built in: some sort of radio transmission capability. That radio signal needs to then be captured some place in the home, and then retransmitted to the central servers that will handle the mobile application; what these days we call “the cloud.”

In addition, a mobile app has to be written, debugged and distributed. After that, network technicians must be monitoring both the server and client ends of things 24/7 to make sure there are no hiccups that bring the entire system down, leaving the customer stranded.

That’s quite a daunting list of skill sets. Little wonder why many traditional device manufacturers are so cautious to get into the connected device market — even with all the publicity it is getting on account of the popularity of the iPhone and Android.

But in fact, it doesn’t have to be hard at all. The connected device ecosystem has specialized companies — like Arrayent — that can handle the parts of the job that your engineers can’t.

We see these sorts of arrangements everywhere. Consider the auto market. General Motors (not an Arrayent customer, by the way) offers OnStar, the communications and security system that is built into most GM automobiles. GM features OnStar in much of its marketing, but the company relies on many different partners to actually offer the various components of the service: LG Electronics, Verizon, Hughes Data and EDS among them.

Which makes perfect sense; GM’s skill set involves making and selling cars, not running the sort of data center and marketing operations necessary for keeping consumers signed up for what is, in effect, a data subscription service requiring periodic charges to a debit or credit card.

You may well find yourself in the same boat. If you are in, for example, the thermostat business, you most likely have little or no experience with the wireless radio transmitters that are a prerequisite for a connected device. You also don’t want to hire Google engineers and start your own data center, or scout around for (very scarce) Apple IOS programmers to design a mobile app and then get it approved by Apple’s occasionally capricious App Store screeners.

The good thing is you don’t need to. And you don’t even need to gather up all those vendors yourself. At Arrayent, we handle the “back end” part of the system; getting your device connected with the cloud in the first place. We also work closely with a small group of very trusted partners who have expertise in other parts of the puzzle, such as annual customer renewals. We put the group together as part of our work for you.

As far as your customers are concerned, they’re dealing with a single company: Yours. But behind the scenes, we can divide up the labors, with highly skilled and specialized operations handling their respective pieces.

So while it’s certainly true that a connected product involves a lot more engineering than one of its old-fashioned standalone predecessors, the good news is that there is plenty of folks standing by to help. Arrayent, of course, is at the head of that line.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

At Arrayent, we work with many different companies. As a result, we’ve acquired our share of experience watching them as they tackle new product designs. Most of the time, things work out, and the product reaches the marketplace more or less as everyone planned.

But too often, a development project stalls out before reaching fruition. Hardware engineering might finish a prototype, but the smart phone application developer wasn’t informed of firmware changes. Or, the contract manager is using the out of date firmware, or lacks skills to do RF testing. The company has put in a lot of resources, but has nothing to show for it.

There are many possible explanations for these hiccups. At Arrayent, we’ve come up with a theory that accounts for all of them. Our conclusion is that projects stall when they lack a “Steve Jobs.”

The move towards intelligent devices and connected customers — the heart of Arrayent’s mission — can be a difficult one for many companies to make, because it requires them to think about old and familiar products in entirely new and unfamiliar ways. Which is all the more reason that a project needs a strong leader: to be its champion, to preserve its momentum and to be the final arbiter in the inevitable intramural disputes that new and potentially disruptive projects engender inside the companies making them.

That’s what our “Steve Jobs” project leader does. In other word, we aren’t talking about a design genius; those, after all, don’t come around all that often. And we certainly aren’t talking about a moody, mercurial authority figure who humiliates subordinates into submission.

Instead, we are talking about a person with unambiguous authority over a project; a person who can, after listening to the wise counsel of his advisors, set out a battle plan and then insist that everyone do their best to carry it out.
It may seem like we’re simply talking about “a boss.” But a company can have plenty of bosses without having an actual leader. That’s what we tend to see when projects to take longer than they need. Different teams working listlessly with no real coordination, often at odds with each other over basic questions, like how the new product needs to fit in with the company’s current offering. At the last minute, some C-suite executive might step in force the issue, but that’s hardly the optimal way of doing business.

Faded jeans and black turtlenecks aren’t necessary. Leadership and decisiveness are.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

With all the interest in connected devices, established manufacturers are looking for ways to make their products “Web-aware.” That usually partnering with startups who know this landscape. But that needn’t be a scary proposition.

Everyone likes to sing the praises of start-up companies, especially those in Silicon Valley working in technology. The problem is that the same people who like the idea of start-ups in theory might not be very keen on working with them in practice.

We at Arrayent are very much a Silicon Valley start-up, and since we often deal with venerable manufacturing companies that are in some cases more than a century old, we run into this issue all the time. Usually, it’s in the form of the question, “So how do we know you guys are going to be around the year after next?” We think we have a very good answer to that question, and so we thought we’d spend a little time talking about it here.

The first thing we tell people is that connectivity is all we do. We literally live and breathe it. This isn’t some sideline for us, or one of several items in a multiple-choice business plan. It’s our whole company, and we spend 24/7 making it a success. That means you’ll never have to worry about is charging off in some new direction and leaving you high and dry.

Second, Arrayent has been around since 2002. We’ve made it through the worst economic times since the Great Depression. Our tires have been kicked a lot, by some every big companies, and they all ended up customers. Chamberlain. Mattel. Monster Cable. Other big house hold named brands under NDA. No one ever accused these companies of not knowing their businesses. They spent many weeks and months doing due diligence on us, and came away convinced that we had all the connectivity solutions they needed to move fast to add their product to the growing list of “connected devices” that are becoming must-haves in households everywhere.

Related to the above: Arrayent’s solutions aren’t simply a PowerPoint deck or vaporware. You can walk into a store and buy a garage door opener that is Arrayent Internet-Connect powered. Our customers are shipping now, and as a result, we’re ready to help you do the same.

Finally, we’ve thought through all the possibilities, and even have a contingency for an absolute worst-case scenarios. We’ve set up a software escrow service for our software, meaning that in the event something should happen to us, all our source code will immediately become available to our customers.

Of course, we are not expecting that to happen. Far from it: We keep adding customers and sales people; every month our code grows more robust and fully-functional. The “Internet of Things,” is definitely one of the big trends occurring in technology and consumer electronics. At Arrayent, we are gratified that more and more very large companies rely on us to help them exploit the connected devices opportunity.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

Gadgets reviews are a staple of the Web. There are places like Gizmodo that do nothing but review the latest smart phone or gaming console; even mainstream sites like the New York Times add in a heap of tech coverage to their mix, since the public seems to have an insatiable appetite for it.

Attentive readers may have noticed than in recent weeks, gadget reviewers have turned their attention to a new device, one that most people would consider too pedestrian for anyone to care about. It’s a thermostat; specifically, a thermostat designed by Nest Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up formed, appropriately enough, by veterans of Apple’s iPod team.

The reason for the hubbub is that like the iPhone, the Nest Labs product sports eye-catching industrial, along with behind-the-scenes software that re-imagines the entire “user experience” of controlling a household temperature. It’s common for these reviewers to contrast operating the Nest Lab product, which is usually described as painless and intuitive, with trying to figure out a traditional thermostat, which invariably suffer greatly in comparison.

Suddenly, it seems, thermostats are a sexy tech gadget. In becoming so, they are being held by journalists and others to just about the highest design standards imaginable, those of Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. The humble plastic devices that had been good enough for decades of dependable home use are suddenly being dismissed as cheap, clunky and impossible to use. Traditional thermostat makers probably don’t know what hit them.

Welcome to the new world of Web-connected devices, where the DNA is entirely different than it is in the traditional electronics world of thermostats — not to mention garage door openers, security alarms, irrigation systems and just about every other device that manufacturers are trying to make Web-aware.

Right now, products like the Nest Labs sell at a significant premium to the thermostats on the shelves at the average big box hardware store. But even low-cost manufacturers are going to have to start upping their design game as consumers get used to sleek and cool products like Nest Labs’.

This won’t be easy, since great design is both difficult and expensive. But manufacturers can make the job easier on themselves by leaving tasks that are outside their specialty to others.

In the world of connected devices, building communications infrastructure is the best example. There is nothing easy about setting up an internet connection for gadget that doesn’t have a key board to enter passwords, or sending a command from your iPhone at work to open your garage door for a delivery man. There are any numbers of companies that have seen great products languish in-house because they couldn’t handle the communication part of the design process and could thus never go to market.

At Arrayent, though, communications is what we do. Our solution is both hardware and software, and does everything that needs doing to get a product connected to applications. That means your designers and engineers can spend the time on the things that are going to make your product stand out in the market. And increasingly, that is going to mean world-class design.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

We’re surrounded by so many connected computers, especially notebooks and smartphones that many engineers and product designers think that the design problems for connected devices have all been solved. Want to bring a thermostat, or a washing machine, or a garage door opener online, so that it can be controlled remotely by a mobile phone? No problem. Just do what the computer guys do.

That assumption is a common one, but not only is it incorrect, it may be the single biggest obstacle preventing the growth in the population of convenient connected devices in homes and offices.

Computers — a category that for us includes smartphones and tablets — have unique communications characteristics. Chief among them is that they must transfer enormous amounts of data, in real time, with a very high degree of accuracy. Think of the sheer number of bits flying back and forth as you chat on your iPhone or Android, or as you lean back and watch a streaming Netflix movie on your notebook. (An activity, by the way, that now makes up roughly a quarter of all Internet traffic!)

The behind-the-scenes protocols used for these communications are a smorgasbord of acronyms: TCP/IP, HTTP, RTSP, SSL, XML, SOAP, NTP, XMPP and more. All of them were architected to handle the sorts of robust messaging involved with computing. And because most engineers are familiar with them from their everyday exposure to computers and the Web, they are the same protocols and approaches that engineers first turn to when they start thinking about connected devices.

But that’s a big mistake, and it’s the reason a number of high-profile corporate efforts at connected devices have quietly stalled.

The protocols you use to send video from a server to a computer are not the same want you want to use to bring connectivity to, say, a washer or an air conditioning system. What might work with computers will be too expensive, too complex and too energy-inefficient for a consumer device; it would be like using a big rig truck to deliver pizza.

Yet engineers often choose these solutions because of their familiarity. Their attitude is along the lines of, “I have TCP/IP, HTTP and SSL in my den; why shouldn’t I have it in my kitchen, laundry and garage, too?” Usually, they give up even before the project is finished, overwhelmed by cost and complexity.

By contrast, a less-is-more design approach is at the heart of Arrayent’s approach to connected devices. That’s because, for one thing, data transfers in the world of connected devices tend to come in frequent short bursts, rather than long, continued streams. Everything we do, starting with our choice of simpler UDP protocols instead of those with origins in the TCP/IP world, has been chosen with appliances and devices, rather than full-blown computers, in mind.

Our simpler-the-better approach to communications affects a lot more than the communications protocols we’ve adopted. We also have built our systems to take as much of the complexity as possible out of the design process. We’ve hidden it away “in the cloud,” in our servers. Your engineers aren’t experts in digital communications. With Arrayent, they can work on the consumer experiences that they know best, and leave the technical heavy lifting to us. We may not know a lot about thermostats, garage door openers or washing machines, but when it comes to simple and effective communications, no one is better.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

High-end Internet routers and high-speed office copiers don’t seem to have much in common. But as it happens, the latest versions of both these devices often have a built-in “Call Home” ability that electronics manufacturers have realized can be a crucial differentiator in product design, customer satisfaction and much more.

“Call Home” is the ability of a device to use the Internet to report its vital statistics back to its manufacturers, in the background and without normal operations being interfered with. Cisco routers, for example, routinely report back traffic information to Cisco’s engineering team, assuming, of course, the customer has consented to the data being transferred in the first place. Many copiers do the same, checking in not only with regular usage patterns, but also the occasional hiccups, like paper jams.

Companies are finding that these real-time reports from the field are of enormous value to engineering teams as they contemplate the design of new products. They know what works and what doesn’t in their current models, and can thus quickly figure out exactly what to zero in on for the upgrade.

And once they began designing in internet-connected “Call Home,” companies realized it was useful for many other things besides product feedback for engineering teams.

One of the best examples involves using the information to forge closer customer relationships, not to mention additional and new business opportunities. With a well-designed Call Home system, you’ll have the information you need to alert customers when they are due for regular product servicing and maintenance sessions. This could be anything from replacing the filter in a home heating and cooling system to getting a garage door re-lubricated after it’s been opened and closed as many times as manufacturer suggests.

Call Home functionality presents another advantage to manufacturers: It can reduce the number of visits necessary to provide warranty service.

Usually, a service truck needs to roll twice in connection with a repair job: The first time to diagnose the problem, the second time to do the actual repair. But if the company was getting real-time diagnostic information from the internet-connected device via Call Home functionality, that first visit could often be skipped, saving time and money for company and customer alike.

Arrayent solutions allow manufacturers to add wireless connectivity to every day products, so that a home security system, for example, can be controlled from a mobile phone. For Arrayent’s customers, Call Home is yet another feature they can implement quickly and easily, with a minimum of engineering work. There can be multiple pay-offs, more than enough, as they say, to call home about.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

Thermostats, garage door openers, lawn sprinklers, home theater surge protector: Those seem like a random list of items from your average hardware store.

In fact, they’re a few of the growing number of common household devices that are being re-engineered to take advantage of the connectivity revolution made possible by the Internet and smartphones. Clearly, the Web is not just for computers any more.

Consider LiftMaster, the best-known name in automatic garage door openers. Its new line of openers comes equipped with “MyQ” technology. Working in parallel with a traditional “clicker” on your sun visor, MyQ can warns owners when their garage door didn’t close properly. The LiftMaster smartphone app allows them to close the door, even when far from home remotely from anywhere in the world.

LiftMaster users love the peace of mind of never having to worry about whether the garage door closed properly after they hurried off to work. But MyQ is good for LiftMaster, too. Being online gives the company a new way of staying in touch with its customers, providing them with easy tech support and alerting them to new services and improved products.

The ongoing live “conversation” between LiftMaster and its customers is a far cry from the old days, when the company only heard from the small fraction of users who bothered to return their warranty cards.

Thanks to Arrayent, LiftMaster was able to bring these next-generation capabilities to its product line without needing to hire a team of experts in sever architecture, networking, or wireless connectivity. At Arrayent, we solve the engineering challenges involved in making a product Web-aware, leaving your engineers and designers to work on the exciting consumer experiences that they know best.

Arrayent’s turn-key technology gets you online, fast, with minimal reengineering or redesign. It’s where your customers are expecting you to be.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

If today’s engineers had a motto, it might well be, “Honey, I shrunk the computer.” Semiconductors have become so inexpensive that the average house now contains dozens of devices containing microprocessors, software and memory; in other words, computers.

We’ve gotten so used to “ubiquitous computing” that engineers working on bringing wireless connectivity to even the simplest household devices — thermostats; security systems; irrigation controls — all too often start the design process by choosing which Linux distribution they’ll use and which 32-bit chip they will use it on.

In other words, they start by designing a computer. But they are making a big mistake, as there are many easier ways of going wireless.

General purpose computers, by their very nature, need to be extremely complex. Even a seemingly simple Linux-based embedded system has hundreds of thousands of lines of code; writing, debugging and verifying such a system takes considerable time, and odds are high that even with the most experienced programmer, something will be overlooked along the way. That’s why we occasionally need to reboot our computer. But who has ever rebooted a thermostat?

Many engineers believe that this sort of complexity is the inevitable price to be paid to internet connect a device. That’s because they may only be familiar with the standard techniques used in PCs. But at Arrayent, we offer many internet connectivity options that don’t require upgrading to the added cost and complexity of advanced microprocessor designs. While we fully support all manner of microprocessors, many of our customers continue to use 8-bit CPUS even while they make their products accessible via web applications and smart phones.

One of Arrayent’s most important design philosophies is the computing complexity belongs “in the cloud,” and not in the device. If you are in the business of, say, home lighting, there is no reason you should have to master all the intricacies of radio communications before you can make a product your customers will find useful. With Arrayent, you don’t; we’ve solved all those technical challenges for you, but in a way that keeps your core products exceedingly simple and that’s the best path to reliability and a great price point.

While early personal computers like the Apple II were 8-bit machines, no one would dream of using such a computer today. But the same dynamics aren’t true in the rest of electronics. Big computer companies might boast about their fancy 64-bit machines, but at Arrayent, our goal is for you to be able to brag about how you’ve managed to do more with eight bits than anyone every thought possible.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent

Today’s manufacturers face a brutal marketplace, with global competitors hammering them on costs, and big retail chains too often having the upper hand in crucial issues like pricing and display.

Manufacturers have become too lean to afford the marketing efforts companies once used to have to “build their brand” with customers.  As a result, when customers are shopping in a store or on a Web site, they often make decisions on price alone. Brand loyalty often means nothing, a severe disadvantage to companies who have been in their industries for decades, if not generations. And except for the few shoppers who mail in registration cards, you have little idea who your customers are, meaning, among other things, that you have nothing in the way of leads for future sales.

The news here isn’t all bad, though. “Internet-connected” devices are giving companies the chance of starting over. If suddenly your customers are logging into your web site — say to control their thermostats or configure their household lighting system — then whole new worlds are opened up for you, assuming you’re flexible enough to take advantage of the opportunities.

As IBM said in a recent report about “The Challenge of the Connected Consumer,” manufacturers benefit the most from a Web or mobile presences are those who can “shift their mindset from one-time transactional product sales to building relationships with individual consumers.”

There are a long list of ways you can do that, many of them borrowed from the emerging field of “social media.” (It goes without saying that you need to respect your customer’s privacy and get permission from them before attempting to build any sort of relationship.)

Say you’re in the thermostat business. It’s safe to assume that your customers care about utility bills, and will appreciate whatever smart, new energy savings information you can pass along. No matter what your product is, your in-house experts, or those at your trade association, will surely have tips about “best practices” your customers will appreciate knowing.

This includes whether or not they are getting the most of the product they already own. If you can tell from usage data that your customers aren’t taking advantage of a particularly helpful feature, you can alert them to what they are missing via some follow-up education on their product. (And you could also get your designers involved, in case they want to change the design to make the feature more apparent in a new release.)

Web communications are useful during replacement cycles, like letting the owners of carbon monoxide detectors know that it’s time to swap out their old units for new ones. They can also be the launching pad for new services your company might be offering — say an “energy audit” that will help homeowners insulate walls or ceilings, or weather alert that will use text messages or emails to warn about sudden freezing or drought conditions.

And a Web site with a smartly-executed Help section and carefully-written FAQs can help reduce time-consuming and expensive calls to your help desk.

In short, think of a sale not as the end of a transaction, but as the start of a conversation.

By: Shane Dyer, President of Arrayent