To create and promote the adoption of a new royalty-free connectivity standard to make smart home products more compatible with security as a design tenet, Amazon, Google, Apple and the Zigbee Alliance unveiled a new working group. Zigbee Alliance board member companies like IKEA, Samsung SmartThings and Silicon Labs, among others, are also on board to join the working group to make contributions to the effort, according to the Dec. 18 announcement.
The organization will take an approach that is open source to the creation as well as the implementation of a new unified protocol. The project looks to use contributions from smart home technologies that are market-tested from Apple, Google, Amazon, the Zigbee Alliance and others. According to the announcement, “The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.”
The Connected Home over IP project’s goal is to grow compatibility for consumers and make development simpler for manufacturers. It is created around the idea that smart home devices should be seamless, reliable and secure. The announcement noted, “By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.”
The project looks to make it easier for manufacturers of technology to create devices that are compatible with voice and smartphone services like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. The planned connectivity standard will complement technologies already in existence, and “working group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today” per the announcement.
In October, Google announced new products for its Made by Google event, which included a new phone, devices and earbuds for the Google Nest brand, to help facilitate a smart home. Google said, according to past reports, “This year’s Made by Google products are designed to help you in your everyday, without intruding on your life.”
And, in the latter half of the decade, voice emerged as the new commerce ecosystem that will power the connected economy of the 2020s, Karen Webster writes as the 2010s come to a close. In four short years, the world has seen the rapid adoption of voice-activated speakers and the rapid emergence of ecosystems as well as apps that have grown up to support both Google Assistant and Alexa.
The shift was so quick, in fact, that it took half the time for 25 percent of the population in the U.S. to own a voice-activated speaker than it took to have broadband installed in their homes. Based on our own research, today, over 30 percent of consumers report owning a voice-activated speaker. That figure is three times the number of consumers who reported owning one over the three years PYMNTS has been tracking the information — and almost as many noted using it to make a purchase.
Voice is, in many ways, the great equalizer in payments and financial services. It is the most ubiquitous and natural of all methods to communicate and trigger a transaction. Voice commerce and the virtual assistants that enable access will, over the decade to come, speed up the growth of the everyday app ecosystem in addition to the consumers’ embrace of the everyday ecosystems that will simplify their lives as well as the payments and commerce experiences that support them.
A group of investors led by Elon Musk reportedly submitted a bid to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday (Feb. 10) to buy the nonprofit that controls the company for $97.4 billion.
The unsolicited offer was submitted by Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided to WSJ by Toberoff, per the report. “We will make sure that happens.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a Monday post on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” referring to the Musk-owned X by its former name and offering one-tenth the price the group offered for the OpenAI nonprofit.
Musk and Altman are already engaged in a court battle over the future of OpenAI, which they co-founded as a charity in 2015, according to the WSJ report.
After Musk left the company and Altman became CEO, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary that has enabled it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors, the report said.
Now, Altman is turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit, which would own a stake in the for-profit firm, per the report.
Musk’s bid sets a high valuation on the nonprofit and could mean that the operator of the nonprofit would have a large and possibly controlling stake in the for-profit firm, the report said.
Toberoff told WSJ that the investor group will match or exceed any higher bids offered for the nonprofit, per the report.
It was reported Feb. 4 that Musk’s suit against OpenAI might proceed to trial, as a judge said parts of the case can move forward.
“Something is going to trial in this case,” U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said. “[Elon Musk will] sit on the stand, present it to a jury, and a jury will decide who is right.”
Musk has argued that OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit company goes against its original mission, while OpenAI has countered that the switch is necessary to help it land the type of investments it needs to develop the best AI models.