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For most of human history, we’ve accepted that keeping a home clean and filled with essentials is a burden that we must bear. But are we on the cusp of witnessing a technological revolution where our homes will take care of themselves and manage our lives for us? In the final episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew paints a picture of what life in our future homes might look like and explores how smart homes will use personas and Artificial Intelligence to fulfill our needs before we’re even aware of them. Interviewees Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS | More

If you’re incredibly proficient at using your Amazon Echo, you might already being giving it directions to order more toilet paper or laundry detergent. But how long will it be before the home is communicating directly with Amazon or Walmart and it places an order with no verbal cue or even involvement from you? Will Amazon use their own delivery people to stock your refrigerator? Interviewees Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS | More

Over the past few years, the public has mostly come to associate the voice activation capabilities of Amazon’s Echo and Google Home with smart speakers. But in fact these devices and others like them can be viewed as Trojan Horses being used by the world’s biggest technology companies in the war of home operating systems. From devices like the Echo and Google Home, users are now able to control their thermostats, blinds, cameras, locks, and entertainments systems. Will the company that develops the winning operating system for the smart home enjoy similar monopolistic power to that of Microsoft with desktop computing in the 1990s or to the market share Android and iOS hold in mobile devices today? Interviewees Episode Excerpt Microsoft & The Keys To The Castle Long before there was Google Docs and longer still before there were Microsoft Word and Excel, there was a dominant word processing program called WordPerfect and a dominant spreadsheet program called Lotus123. Those products are long gone, and not necessarily because Microsoft built better programs with Word or Excel. In the 1990s, Microsoft controlled over 90% of the market for operating systems for desktop computers. Through their relationships with PC manufacturers, they made …

The most influential companies in lighting are reimagining one of the most fundamental features of our homes: the light switch. Will the smart home of the future understand our lighting needs without us needing to flip a switch? In the fourth episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew explores whether there’s a place for light switches in the future of smart lighting and why the winner of the space is far from obvious. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Is The Light Switch Doomed? What are the benefits of having your home’s lights on the network? The most obvious use case is that, when you’re away from home, you can turn your lights on or off. But you can also imagine how a really smart system knows that, when you get into bed, it should turn off the lights in the rest of your house. Or you can imagine how, in a security context, if a sensor on the outside of your house notices suspicious movement, it might turn on the lights to mimic your presence. In the case of smart lighting, the fight for supremacy won’t simply be a function of user interface or distribution. Instead, …

While Nest wasn’t the first company to offer a smart thermostat, its first product quickly developed rock star status. Nest helped turn the thermostat — a relatively forgettable device — into a sexy offering that made consumers excited about other devices that would be offered as part of the smart home. Honeywell, a company that has long dominated the traditional thermostat market, is now going head to head with Nest in selling smart thermostats. In the third episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew examines how an industry titan is able to maintain its lead in the smart thermostat space and what this means for manufacturers of smart home devices in other verticals. Interviewee Other Leaders Consulted for this episode Episode Excerpt The Birth Of Smart Home Cool In the mid-2000’s, Matt Rogers started as an intern on the engineering team at Apple that worked on the iPod. At the time, Tony Fadell was running the iPod group that Rogers reported into. Rogers went on to work on the iPhone and the iPad, and then, in 2010, in what must have seemed like a crazy move at the time, both Rogers and Fadell left …

The David and Goliath story of startups entering an entrenched industry and disrupting its leading players isn’t a new one. Yet within the smart home space, an unlikely development has birthed a particularly startup-friendly environment. Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have provided the right financing dynamics and access to early customers for startups to successfully launch smart home products. In the second episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew investigates the evolving role of crowdfunding for smart home startups that have been making waves with innovative hardware devices. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Crowdfunding: A Success I Didn’t Bet On My personal relationship to Kickstarter is not one that I enjoy repeating. I met Perry Chen in 2007 when I was introduced to him by Sunny Bates, a long-time friend and Kickstarter’s first investor. While Chen’s initial idea was around getting fans of bands to fund the bands’ music, he quickly came up with this idea that people would pay for a product in advance simply because they wanted to see that product created. He offered me the chance to invest and I turned him down. Why would people devote their time offering to buy …

The idea of a home that can take care of its inhabitants has been around for over 100 years. But only in the last few decades have we seen technological breakthroughs that can make smart homes a reality. In the first episode of a 7-part series on the future of the smart home, Andrew traces the history of the smart home and presents a vision of its future as a multitude of devices are being connected to the Internet. Interviewee Episode Excerpt The Long Awaited Smart Home Revolution It’s the dead of winter and you’re driving home. In my case, it’s to my house outside of New York City on the eastern end of Long Island. I remember coming home in the dead of winter and huddling with blankets on the couch until the place warmed up. The use case for a thermostat that could be accessible over the Internet was so obvious, I wondered why it took until 2011 for Nest to launch. It would have been prohibitively expensive for me to heat a weekend home throughout the week, and a timer wouldn’t work, as I was never really sure I was going to be at the house on …

In the United States, there are over 500,000 elected officials. In the overwhelming majority of elections, less than half of eligible voters participate, resulting in one of the lowest levels of voter engagement of any Western democracy. In this episode, Andrews asks and tries to answer: What can be done to increase turnout for elections conducted every year in the U.S.? Can the security risks of implementing online voting be overcome? If online voting did become available in the United States, what might it look like? Which companies would be the winners? Sponsored by: SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Improving Voter Turnout for 500,000 Elections On November 2nd, 2016, I went to my local polling station in Brooklyn and voted, even though I knew my vote wouldn’t really count. In New York, it’s long been …

In a 2016 testimony addressing the House Committee on Space, Science & Technology, Dan Wallach warned that the country’s voting infrastructure was vulnerable to hacking by foreign governments. Computer scientists have long spoken of the dangers of electronic voting machines, and now they’re warning against adopting online voting. But is there a fundamental difference in the way that academics and entrepreneurs approach the risks and benefits of online voting? How might the introduction of online voting change the way that we conduct American elections? Sponsored by: SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt An Exercise In Frustration: Testimony Before Congress Dan Wallach is a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. On September 13, 2016, he testified before …

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a little over a half of the voting age population cast their votes and the candidate who won the presidency lost the popular vote. Is the problem with low U.S. voter turnout due to culture or lack of accessibility? Without amending the U.S. Constitution, is there a way to use technology to improve voter turnout and overcome the effects of the Electoral College? Sponsored by: SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff into a different folder so the only messages in your inbox are the ones you actually want to see. They also have a feature called BlackHole where you can relegate a sender’s messages to obscurity. For Predicting Our Future listeners, visit sanebox.com/future and receive an extra $25 credit on top of their two-week free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Every time I see a protest against Donald Trump, I wonder whether the protesters were there when progressives needed them most — namely, on Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. On the day of this last Presidential election, only 54.7% of eligible voters showed up to vote. Is it only now that people have seen Trump’s policies that they have begun …

Have we hit a tipping point for residential construction where the cost and quality of a factory-built home always compares favorably to the cost and quality of a conventionally-built home? Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists beginning to train their sights on this mammoth industry? In the sixth and final episode of a series on the future of homebuilding, Andrew discusses how entrepreneurs eager to disrupt this space might conceive of building and financing a modern homebuilding factory. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt SCG Heim – The Factory of the Future If you’re interested in what the process looks like to build a house in a factory, you can get a pretty good idea just by searching on YouTube for the company that owns the factory. Most companies engaged in this type of manufacturing are proud to display their factories’ capabilities in videos. Amazingly, most of the factories in the United States are not what you …

In 2012, six single-family homes were made by a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that technology is now working on a 3D printer designed to construct buildings on Mars. Does this technology have a future on Earth? Or does the future of homebuilding involve modern factories that leverage robots to build wood or steel framing similar to the types of machines you might find in modern automotive plants? Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt 3D-Printed Homes In January of 2015, a company revealed a six-story home that they made with a 3D printer. The best to way to explain how a 3D printer works is to contrast it with a typical printer that uses ink to print on a sheet of paper. The thickness of the ink is so infinitesimally small that if you held the paper up to your face, you likely wouldn’t be able to see any elevation of ink on the printed area …

In the summer of 2016, the world’s tallest modular building at 32 stories high was completed at 461 Dean Street in Brooklyn, NY. Once the building’s apartment modules were completed at a factory located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they were transported to the development site and essentially stacked one on top of another into a high-rise building. To the dismay of its original backers, the building was delivered years late, riddled with construction problems, and the subject of a costly litigation. Still, excitement about modular construction in New York abounds with new projects under development. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt U.S. Multi-Family Building If you were paying any attention to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, you would think that just about every factory in the United States has either left for China or is about to leave. But when it comes to factories that are currently building apartments, or will soon be building apartments, we’re probably …

If a trillion dollar market opportunity exists, you can bet the people at Google are thinking about it. Within X, Google’s most secretive lab, they’ve been working on solving the problem of how to make building construction more efficient in order to deal with the world’s severe and worsening urban housing shortage. By the year 2050, the global population is expected to grow by 2.2 billion people, and 90% of that growth is expected to take place in cities that are in dire need of new housing. In China, one company has figured out how to deal with this challenge by prefabricating components for skyscrapers inside of a factory. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Google & Flux When you hear the word Google, you first and foremost associate it with search. You have a disagreement with someone: let’s Google it. You want to know where to vacation: Google it. You want to know what a company does: …

Modern homebuilders have taken the art of prefabrication to new heights where they can construct entire rooms complete with insulation, plumbing, and electric wiring all within a factory. These rooms, called “modules,” are then transported from the factory to the building site and stacked to form a home in mere days. In the Hamptons, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a number of other major cities, it’s now possible to build a beautiful modern home modularly for dramatically less than the cost of building with local contractors. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Episode Excerpt Modular Homebuilding When it comes to homes built in factories, people use the term “prefabricated” to mean a number of different things. In a history spanning hundreds of years, which I briefly covered in the last podcast episode, people have long assembled house components off-site and then shipped those components to sites along with instruction manuals for assembly. Prefabrication has been used for everything from …

Between 1908 and 1942, Sears sold 100,000 homes that were delivered in kits consisting of 12,000 pieces. While Sears is no longer in the business of making prefabricated homes, a number of technology-driven startups have picked up the mantle and are now delivering new kinds of kits, which, once they’re put together, make modern homes. In the first episode of a 6-part series on the future of homebuilding, Andrew interviews some of the most innovative companies that are reinventing the way we think about prefabricated housing. Sponsored by: If you’re a startup, apply for DigitalOcean’s Hatch program, where if selected, you’ll have access to their cloud for 12 months, in addition to technical training and mentorship. You can also go to do.co/predictingourfuture and ask the sales team for a free trial. Interviewees Other Leaders Consulted for this Series Episode Excerpt My Home Renovation My interest in homebuilding began a few years ago when I renovated a summer home in the Hamptons at the end of Long Island in New York. My plan was for a total gut renovation: new kitchen, three new bathrooms, new plumbing, electric, insulation. I acted as my own general contractor and quickly learned why people aren’t …