Latest news with #The Verge
The Verge
6 days ago
- The Verge
How to save a smart home company
The smart home can be scary. It seems like every other month, we hear about another smart home company going out of business, leaving you scrambling for a new way to turn on your lights. Why is it so hard for smart home manufacturers to keep the lights on? And what can they do to stay in business, so we can continue to enjoy the benefits of home automation? This week on The Vergecast, The Verge's smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, chats with Ken Fairbanks, a longtime customer of Insteon who ended up buying the smart lighting company when it went bankrupt. They trace the rise and fall of the early smart lighting protocol, born in the post-X10 era when home automation shifted from wired to wireless, and how he and a group of former employees — who were also users — revived it. He shares lessons learned on how to keep the lights on, from fostering customer loyalty and managing the realities of subscriptions, to navigating new tariffs and musing on how closely some IoT hardware companies come to resembling pyramid schemes. Then, in a special and supersized (and we mean SUPER) Vergecast hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]), Jen is joined by Richard Gunther, cohost of The Smart Home Show podcast, to tackle a bunch of your burning smart lighting questions. They answer everything from how to move your smart home lighting, to how to choose smart switches or bulbs, to which Thread border router you should buy for your Matter setup. Plus, they run down how they have smart lighting working in their own homes. For more on the topics in this episode, here are some links to dig into: Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Podcasts Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Smart Home Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Vergecast
Forbes
10-07-2025
- Forbes
Ikea Bets Big On The Matter Smart Home
Ikea's smart home hub is also getting a big Matter update Ikea is seemingly set to go all-in on Matter, and in true Ikea fashion, it's doing it with a truckload of affordable, no-fuss gear designed to play nicely whether or not you own its native hub. Starting in January next year, the Scandinavian furniture giant will launch more than 20 new Matter-over-Thread smart home devices; think lights, sensors, remotes, plugs, and air-quality monitors, with prices set to start at less than $10. The announcement, revealed in an interview with The Verge, comes hot on the heels of the news last week of a beta update to the Ikea Dirigera hub, which has turned it from a simple Matter bridge for Ikea's own devices, into a full-blown Matter Controller with Thread border router skills. That means Ikea's smart home hub can now talk directly to Matter devices from any brand, not just Ikea's own, with users able to manage them all through the Ikea Home Smart app. This being Matter though, there is a caveat... Ikea doesn't yet support all of the Matter device types (which is now over 40), so you won't be able to sync up your robot vacuum cleaner for example, nor your smart lock. That's not an issue that just affects Ikea's hub though, Matter device type support across all the major players is still very much hit and miss. The update brings support for Matter 1.4 and Thread 1.4 (no relation, purely coincidental numbering), enabling features like energy monitoring and support for joining existing Thread networks. The hub can still act as a Matter Bridge for Ikea's older Zigbee gear, which means Tradfri-era devices aren't getting orphaned, at least not yet. According to The Verge's report, Ikea is also keeping Zigbee's Touchlink feature alive. That lets devices like bulbs, remotes and motion sensors pair with each other directly, with no hub or app needed. Ikea's raft of new Matter-over-Thread devices will, of course, also work with any other Matter Controller with Thread border router functionality, such as an Apple TV box, an Amazon Echo smart speaker or dedicated hub from the likes of Homey or SmartThings. It also means they'll work natively with all the major ecosystems including Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings, and even Home Assistant. There's also news from Ikea on the audio front; the brand is rebooting its speaker range after quietly retiring most of the Sonos-powered Symfonisk line earlier this year. The $50 retro-styled Nattbad Bluetooth speaker went live last month and a new speaker-lamp hybrid called Blomprakt - with Spotify Tap skills - is set to land in October. It's a big move from Ikea and one that could help to take Matter more mainstream. The smart home platform - backed by all the Big Boys of Tech including Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung and more, has stuttered a bit since it first went live in late 2022, but the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) - the group behind all things Matter - have made great stride in the past 18 months or so to make it easier for brands and ecosystems to embrace and use Matter in the way we all hoped it would be. For example, Matter 1.4.1, introduced in May, adds support for a multi-device QR code, meaning brands can place a single code on the box that can onboard several devices at once. This should be a big time-saver once the major players like Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung allow it within their respective ecosystems. The 1.4.1 bump also added Enhanced Setup Flow, and support for embedding onboarding data into NFC tags, meaning you'll soon be able to tap your phone to a device to begin the setup process, with no camera or QR code scanning needed.
