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There finally piloting Nokia's Home Control Center in Finland
It sure started out as something promising. When Nokia spun off its Home Control Center technology to There Corporation last year it seemed that easy DIY home automation and power management was just around the corner. Yet here we are, almost two years after first hearing about the effort with nothing but a convoluted mess of unfriendly ZigBee and Z-Wave (to name just 2 "standards") home automation products to choose from. There is hope, small as it may be. There Corporation just announced that it's working with Mitox Oy to conduct a pilot in Finland for customers of Helsingin Energia (Helen) using a There-provided web-based solution built around the ThereGate. It allows individuals to monitor their total power consumption in real time as well as the individual devices and systems that consume energy. Better yet, There Corp employs a "rate control concept" that automatically adjusts power usage to hours when energy costs less based on simple guidelines programed by the user. Unfortunately, There Corporation's focus is on Nordic countries until 2012 before looking to dominate European home energy management in 2015. Call us crazy, but this market seems ripe for domination by a major consumer electronics company right now, not in 5 years.
There Corporation's ThereGate passes FCC muster, Nokia-flavored home automation on the way
After Nokia sold off its home automation assets to another Finnish firm by the name of There, the idea was that we'd finally see some product in the marketplace in early 2010. Well, here we are in the middle of April and there hasn't been anything made available just yet, but we'd chalk this up as a good sign: the so-called ThereGate -- the cerebral cortex of There's system -- just garnered FCC approval. As a refresher, this is a box that packs 6GB of internal storage (expandable with an SDHC slot), a 4-port gigabit router, 802.11n WiFi, and a GSM / 3G radio -- which is all interesting in itself, but the real magic comes into play when you notice that it supports the Z-Wave short-range mesh networking protocol as well. Though There's focus is on "energy saving and efficiency" with support for things like power meters, the Z-Wave radio should allow it to interact with a variety of compatible modules to control lighting, security, and the like -- and naturally, There's Nokia roots mean that you'll be able to access the box remotely using your phone. We don't know when this will be released exactly, but it's got support for both European and US Z-Wave frequencies, so we might see a coordinated launch on both sides of the pond before too long.
