Google Home is an absolutely fantastic product, but like its competition, the Amazon Echo, I’ve always felt that it is most useful as a hub for home automation. Unfortunately, unlike its competitor, Google Home is not compatible with most smart home products. However, today the list expands with official support from Wemo.

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We’re right around the corner from Google’s October 4th event where, among other things, the company is expected to launch the Google Home, its Amazon Echo competitor. We know the price and basic functionality of the Home device already, but the biggest question is compatibility.We now know one major platform that will be compatible at launch.

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Update: Samsung has issued a statement to us, which just expands on its earlier response. You can read it below the video.

Computer science researchers from the University of Michigan have shown how malicious apps could take control of Internet of Things devices in Samsung’s SmartThings platform – including the ability of an attacker to unlock a front door to gain physical access to a home.

The main weakness identified is that way that the SmartThings platform grants apps more privileges than needed to perform their stated functions, reports The Verge.

The researchers demonstrated this finding with a proof of concept app promising to monitor battery life on various devices. If the user agreed to let the malicious — but seemingly innocuous — app access their smart lock, the researchers could then not only monitor its battery, but perform the lock’s other functions, including unlocking the door. The researchers found 42 percent of 499 analyzed SmartApps are currently over-privileged in a similar way … 

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Revolv, a home automation device company, has announced that it will be officially be shutting down next month. Alphabet’s Nest Labs purchased Revolv back in 2014 and the duo had worked toward bettering out the Works with Nest platform since then. After the acquisition, Revolv’s products continued to function as expected, but today’s shutdown announces that neither the hub or app will be functional any longer after May 15th.

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Announcing a new version of its SmartThings Hub, Samsung co-CEO BK Yoon said that every piece of hardware the company makes will be a connected device within five years.

By 2017, 90% of all Samsung’s products will be Internet of Things devices, and that includes all of our televisions and mobile devices[…] Five years from now, every single piece of Samsung hardware will be an IoT device, whether it is an air purifier or an oven.

Yoon also said that the company was committed to open connectivity, rather than the walled garden approach the company has previously taken, where its devices only talk to other Samsung devices …  expand full story

Nest’s smart thermostat is getting smarter, thanks to a number of new additions to the Works With Nest connectivity program, ranging from your car to your washing-machine.

Some of the applications are obvious, such as your August smart door lock setting the heating or cooling to Away mode when you leave the house. The Kevo lock goes one better, letting Nest who is home and away, so that their preferred temperatures can be used …  expand full story

Today, Samsung announced a new set of SDKs for its Digital Health and Smart Home platforms during its ongoing Developer Conference in San Francisco. Similar to offerings from Google and Apple, the Korean company’s fitness-focused initiative uses wearable and mobile devices to track a person’s exercise and diet habits by syncing their information with its cloud servers.

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Nest recently announced a new sales partnership with Irish utility firm, Electric Ireland that will give the energy provider’s customers an option to receive a free smart thermostat from the Google-owned company after signing a two year service contract. This partnership give’s Mountain View’s growing home automation arm a shot at Electric Ireland’s rather large customer base.

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Today, Nest announced that it has acquired home automation device maker Revolv for an undisclosed sum. It’s believed that the Google-owned company made the move to acquire the firm’s developer platform. Nest recently acquired Dropcam for $555 million as part of its continued push into consumers’ homes.

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Despite the Fire Phone’s unfavorable reception from critics and consumers alike, Amazon isn’t scaling back its hardware efforts. The company’s Lab126 division that develops Amazon’s mobile products is reportedly increasing its staff in order to further pursue its interests in home automation and wearables. According to Reuters, Amazon is in the process of testing a WiFi device that can be added to a closet or cupboard, allowing consumers to order relevant products like detergent with the press of a button.

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About a month ago, word broke that Samsung was interested in acquiring home automation firm SmartThings and today the two companies have made things official. A blog post by the company’s founder and CEO, Alex Hawkinson acknowledged the deal and stated that SmartThings will continue to act as an independent company under Samsung’s Open Innovation Center group.

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Wouldn’t it be cool if you could tell your watch to change the temperature, turn on/off lights, or perform various tasks on your computer? Well, thanks to Android Wear and some third party services, you can transform existing smart devices around your house into fully automated tasks using a device like the Samsung Gear Live, Moto 360, or LG G Watch.

The process will slightly vary between different Android devices and “smart” devices in your house, but we’ve put together the groundwork necessary so that you can build on these ideas in your own home. The setup procedure is a bit more than some people would like to go through, but in the end saying simple commands from a smartwatch to control things in your house is absolutely worth it.

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Wifi and Bluetooth may work fine for today’s limited number of smart home devices, but neither is ideal for future homes in which every switch, socket and lightbulb may be a connected device – that’s the claim of a consortium of companies that includes Samsung, Nest and ARM.

GigaOM reports that the companies have jointly created a new radio system which they believe is more suited to smart home networks than existing systems.

Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6. The standard is built on the existing radio hardware used by ZigBee devices (802.15.4), which means that a company could update their ZigBee devices to support Thread with software if they chose …

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Is was bound to happen, and it looks like it’s here. On the day that the first Android Wear device began shipping and only a few days after Google I/O attendees were given a free device themselves, one developer has demoed a home automation system using an Android Wear smartwatch to control it. And even more interestingly, it runs on Android applications that are already on the Play Store.

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If you love the idea of smart home technology like Nest, but are concerned about the cost of replacing half the appliances and devices in your home, Nest CEO Tony Fadell has some good news. Speaking at the Re/Code conference, he said that while “you need new hardware to allow things to flourish,” there are many things that could be done with software alone.

 Just like your smartphone has many many apps on it, we think there [could be] many apps in your home but you don’t necessarily need new hardware …

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Earlier this year Google acquired smart-thermostat company Nest, and according to a new report out of The Information, the company is not planning on stopping its quest to enter the home automation and security market. The report claims that Google has “considered” acquiring Dropcam, the makers of a system that streams live footage directly to phones and computers.

The report goes on to say that the status of talks and negotiations between the two companies is unclear at this point and that spokespeople for both companies did not reply to requests for comment.

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If you use Android, then download this app. That’s the recipe popular automation service IFTTT, or If This Then That, hopes you will follow as it debuts its software on the Google Play Store for Android users for the first time. The service has long had a web component for programming automating functions between a number of supported services, and it delivered an iPhone version about a year ago, and now it’s finally available on Android.

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Samsung is generally one of the best companies to visit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. The Korean giant arguably puts on some of the best shows and has one of the largest individual display areas for any company in attendance. That’s all well and good, but a new post by the company’s “Samsung Tomorrow” blog is capturing our attention.

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Back in May, we reported on a new piece of Glassware that controlled your Nest thermostat via Google Glass, and last month we saw GLASSTESLA, an app that lets you manage your car with Glass. Now home automation company Revolv has taken it a step further. The company has released a teaser video of a new technology developed by their Sr. Engineer that lets you control all sorts of things via Google Glass. Specifically in the video you can see office lights, Philips Hue lights, Yale Lock, and a Sonos player all being controlled with Glass. In addition to simply turning the Hue Lights on and off, the video also shows how you can change the color of the lights.  The app can be controlled with either gestures or voice commands.

It’s unclear when or if this technology will be released to the public, as it is simply the “side project” of Revolv’s Sr. Engineer.  expand full story