Exchanging Information
Individual Consumer Electronics (CE) devices (smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, TVs but also thermostats, home automation systems, doorbells) are acquiring features and processing power at a tremendous rate. However, the usefulness of these devices is limited when they are used in isolation, and are hence limited to the information they themselves can gather about their environment.
A thermostat, for example, typically only makes decisions about room temperature based on the current time (time of day, day of week) and a sensor that measures outside temperature. The user experience would be vastly improved if that same thermostat could know if anyone is in the house, who exactly is at home, what rooms they are in, whether a family member is approaching the house (e.g. based on GPS data)...
Acquiring Information
The information needed by some of these devices may already be available, but captured within the confines of some other device.
Some examples:
The home gateway can deduce presence of persons based on the MAC address of the cell phones connected to its Wi-Fi access point.
- A Set-Top Box knows whether it is turned on and what channel it is tuned to.
- GPS receivers in cars and cell phones can figure out if someone is on the way home.
Tightening Integration
This insight has not gone lost on the Consumer Electronics manufacturers. Many are enabling tighter integration between the different devices they manufacture. All of these efforts have these distinguishing characteristics:
- Reliance on a cloud service to interconnect devices and share information
- Creation of vertical silos: interoperability is typically limited to devices from the same vendor.
For a consumer, this approach presents certain drawbacks:
- Reliance on an always-on internet connection impacts robustness.
- When devices in the same LAN communicate via the internet, needless latency is introduced.
- All of the user's data is transferred to an "unknown" third party in the cloud, which raises privacy issues.
- Vertical silos create a strong vendor lock in.
The Goal of Qeo
The primary goal of Qeo is to dramatically improve the user experience surrounding these devices. It aims to enable horizontal interoperability within the consumer's personal information sphere. This means that devices should be able to share the information they acquired directly with other devices, regardless of manufacturer or device type.
Ideally, this information sharing should be possible
- With no (or as little as possible) user configuration,
- Without relying on cloud services and always-on internet connections,
- With respect for the user's security and privacy concerns.