Smart home

Building your Smart Home doesn't have to be a costly up-front task. Yes, it's true that most gadgets will set you back over $100 at a time, but Rome wasn't built in a day and neither does your home. Without going in dollars and cents, I want to show you how to build a functioning smart home over time and how to determine what works best for your home.

Come along as I consider a fun selection of smart home product ideas that will help you to make the most the various upcoming holidays. In today's blog I cover some excellent smart lighting options & explore a few fun ways that you can use them to decorate both for the current Halloween festivities & the upcoming Christmas season. If you enjoy decorating for the holidays, click on through & let the celebrations begin!

Smart Homes are becoming easier than ever to set up, thanks to the different platforms available that allow all your connected devices to work and communicate together. In previous blogs of this Smart Home System Series, I looked at other home automation frameworks, such as Apple HomeKit and Z-Wave. In this edition, I’ll tell you all about Google’s smart home tech, and what Works with Nest.

Our smartphones are really technological marvels, aren’t they? They’re little handheld supercomputers that let us surf the internet, text, email, take pictures and videos,...

They're curious and eager to jump into the wild world of the internet, but you want to keep your kids from getting in over their heads. The Circle with Disney is a potential solution for striking the right balance between internet freedom and safety. I took it for a spin and wrote up my thoughts on it.

I think it is kind of crazy that Smart Home technology hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. I mean, the basic idea behind the...

No matter how much you deny it, technology is a very crucial part of our lives. It can be a fun part of it too. During Smart Home month in October, you're going to learn all about a lot of exciting products and home automation "systems," both physical and through software partners. Take a look at some of the exciting and fun tech you can add to your home from the avid DIYer to the practical gardener.

The latest burgeoning digital trend is the convenience concept of “Smart Homes,” where various appliances and objects (like lights, blinds, cameras, locks and thermostats) are connected, monitored, and manipulated remotely through a Wi-Fi network and internet connection. In this second installment of my ongoing Smart Home System Series, I’m going to tell you all about Apple HomeKit, which is a framework for home automation that makes it easier than ever to integrate and control multiple Smart Home technologies from different manufacturers.

Google didn’t just unveil its two new Pixel smartphones and the Chromecast Ultra this week, it also intimated its focus on the home, and how different devices can factor into that vision. One of these was the Daydream View VR headset, designed to work with the Pixel (and other Android phones), and the other was the Google Home, a hub that uses the Google Assistant artificial intelligence platform to help with various tasks on command.

Our homes are becoming more and more futuristic. Thanks to the so-called “Internet of Things,” where our everyday and mundane household objects get new functionality with a connection to the online world, we are entering a new world of “Smart” homes. This Smart Home concept allows us to monitor, control and discover our living spaces in completely different, or fun new ways, from practically anywhere. As the first part in a series on Smart Home tech, I’m going to fill you in on the Philips Hue and Lighting Control system.