TECH TO GO

Digital home is not dead,
it hasn't been born yet

By Andy Walker, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

RIP: 3Com's Audrey Internet appliance

It reminded me of the birth of a baby.

In a 3Com boardroom sat Gino Ortuso, director of home technology for 3Com Canada and communications manager David Morelli, showing off Audrey and Kerbango, two shiny new product offerings from the network gadget company.

They were full of hope and glee: the two devices were quite ingenious. They were going to be the first offspring of 3Com's digital home strategy.

Audrey was a comely Internet appliance the size of a loaf of bread, designed to be a family's information hub. "We're targeting Palm users," said Ortuso. The device, wired to a high-speed Internet connection, could synchronize a family's schedules from their handheld computers. It could also access the Internet, record voice messages and store stylus-scrawled messages on its screen.

People who already have a computer were the target audience.

Kerbango, Audrey's fraternal twin, a similar-sized device, was used to tune in Internet audio broadcasts, again using a high-speed broadband Internet connection.

Then came the sad news in March. Audrey and Kerbango were cancelled. Audrey had been launched in the U.S., to underwhelming response. Kerbango was to follow, but never did. In Canada, neither had hit store shelves. It was a technology stillbirth.
"I'm sure a lot of people were disappointed but at same time that market is just not there yet," explained Ortuso. "The uptake on broadband was not as quick as most people expected."

Part of the problem is Audrey was priced at $749 CDN ($500 US) with Kerbango at $549 ($375 US). A budget-level PC can be had for $1,000 ($700 US) or so these days. The consumer wasn't going to pay almost as much for something with less functionality.

An astute colleague, also at the 3Com baby shower that day, pointed out that Audrey wasn't waterproof, a real design flaw for a kitchen device.

So the digital home, where all home devices are connected to the Internet, is still an elusive dream. It's hard to say whose dream, though. Consumers aren't hungry for it. But technology companies would love to wire the home and upgrade appliances to connect to the Internet. Connected gear means new opportunities for paid services.

The popular vision, besides a connected TV and computer, is the Internet fridge, the usual coldbox with smart features that scan groceries when they go in and out of the appliance. It orders milk when it gets low, perhaps from an Internet-based grocery store, for delivery to the doorstep.

Jack Burke, author of the forthcoming book, Relationship Aspect Marketing (Silver Lake Publishing), calls it "insult technology:" consumers will reject a milk-buying fridge and similar so-called smart home technologies because they insult the owner's intelligence.

However, he said, "Do we want a digital fridge that monitors the internal temperature and notifies us when there's a problem? Yes! That's beneficial to me."

Still, home monitoring is perhaps the killer application for the digital home, though no homeowner would pay to make it more efficient for the power company to read your meters. Perhaps, a home monitoring service from a security perspective is enticing.
In the absence of absolute need, there's little demand. If the consumers don't want a product, no one is going to shove it down their throats. Times have changed.

"When business was in the driver's seat, they could build a product and market it and slam in front of the customer. But, we have a better-educated and informed population today," Burke contends. "The consumer is in the driver's seat. If a business does not listen to the consumer, they are not going to last long."

And no one seems to want a digital home, at least not yet.

The connected home won't happen without an Internet-connected network. Today, most homes don't have one. Consequently, Audrey and Kerbango failed because there was nothing to connect them to. Nobody is going to go out and install a broadband Internet connection and wire it to a home network just so they can run their Audrey.
But the networked home will come. And when it does, so will networked appliances.
Meanwhile, a new class of gadgets - home gateways - is selling really well.
These devices wire computers together, share the Internet, and protect home computers from evil hackers.

In the last quarter of 1999, vendors sold about a thousand of the devices in Canada. A year later, in last quarter of 2000, 29,000 were sold, according to Evans Research.
"It's been a wild success story. They seem to address the needs of the consumer, Internet carriers and employers of the consumer," said Albert Daoust, network analyst at Evans Research.

Daoust believes many telecommuters are buying them. Their employers, concerned about the security of corporate data, are also encouraging their purchase.
The high-speed Internet carriers like them because only one IP address is used per household. All devices need their own IP numbers, the Internet equivalent of phone numbers. The gateways use one publicly known IP, acquired from an Internet provider, and assign private IPs to devices inside the home. The gateway acts like a traffic cop at the digital door of a home network to direct data traffic to various devices in the house. Since there's a limited supply of IP numbers, the Internet carriers like the idea of gateways.

So perhaps the digital home is not yet dead. Perhaps it's waiting for wiring. What will drive it even faster is the arrival of wireless networks.

3Com has a new wireless device, called the 3Com HomeConnect Wireless Internet Gateway, connecting computers using either cables or a wireless link. The wireless portion of the technology has a range of 300 feet to handle up to 35 devices. Data travels through the air up to 11 megabits per second, faster than an entry-level wired network and more than 11 times faster than today's high speed Internet connections. The $525 base station is relatively easy to install for a confident computer user, though the $275 wireless cards that go in a PC or notebook are a little more ornery. Linksys and D-Link make similar products.

It will have to become easier to install them for the technology to become as widespread as the television.

It's likely this kind of wireless network device may start arriving in the home as a fixture in another product, perhaps built into a router provided by a high-speed Internet company.

If the wireless network gateway becomes the cable box of the future, the digital home may stand a chance after all.