Alexa
Blurring the Line Between Retail Stores & Vending Machines
September 7th, 2020Giving Every Building a Voice in the IoT Age
January 8th, 2020
This is the House Alexa Built
You can buy almost every element of a smart home from Amazon so, “would it make sense that Amazon take it to the next level and simply start a construction company to build smart homes?” asked customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author, Blake Morgan during a speech back in April. It is a topic […]

In This Age of Smart Workplaces, Is it About Time We Had Smarter Desks?
Office workers are Increasingly finding themselves surrounded by smart technology in the workplace. High-tech access control systems, personalized environmental controls, even circadian lighting systems that mimic the rhythms of the sun to support better health and wellbeing. However, the vast mojority of office workers spend their days sitting at dumb old workstations made of four […]

The Smart Home Was Supposed to Be Simple But…
The smart home promised to make our lives more straightforward. To automatically set lights and environmental controls to your exact preferences, to alert you of visitors or intruders, even to remember your shopping list and send it to your mobile phone. In reality, however, the smart home has become a minefield of complexity and compatibility […]

Amazon Partner with Marriott Hotels to Launch Alexa for Hospitality
In Netflix new cyberpunk science fiction mystery, Altered Carbon, the somewhat dystopian urban future is dotted with AI hotels – that is a hotel run entirely by an artificially intelligent system and no human staff. Whenever guests have a request they can say it out loud and wherever they are in the hotel the “virtual […]

Would you Live in a Smart Home Built by Amazon, Apple or Google?
Through product development and acquisition retail colossus Amazon now provides consumers with almost every element of the smart home, aside from the bricks and mortar itself. This situation led customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author, Blake Morgan to ask, “would it make sense that Amazon take it to the next level and simply start […]

Amazon Underlines Ambitions to Dominate the Smart Home with Latest Acquisition
In 2013, during episode nine in the fifth season of entrepreneurial reality TV series Shark Tank (a show like Dragon’s Den for our UK readers), James Siminoff pitched his smart doorbell invention ‘DoorBot’ to the show’s panel of experienced investors. During the pitch, Siminoff sought a $700,000 investment for a 10% stake in DoorBot, valuing […]

“Alexa, Would You Like To Go To Work With Me Today?”
Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri or Google Home, have become an increasingly common sight in homes across the world through smart speakers. Like cyber personal assistants they are connecting with residential systems, such as lighting and thermostats, to automate and simplify the way we run our homes. These assistants have also […]

Who Is The Internet Of Things Actually For?
“There is a clear philosophical position, even a worldview, behind [the internet of things]: that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in a technical system, without bias or distortion,’ highlights Adam Greenfield in his book entitled ‘Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life’. […]