Transcript: Control4: Enabling Remote Access to Automated, IP-Based Homes

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1858/control4-enabling-remote-access-to-automated-ip-based-homes

Guest: Fred Geiger - Control4
Guest: Ed Ryan - Control4
Host: Brad Baldwin - PodTech

Anchor
This is RockyMountainVoices powered by PodTech.

Fred Geiger - Control4
Your home knows that between 2 o'clock and 3 o'clock, your child should come home, so when the door opens, it will send you an email. In that time window, it says, "Hey, your child's home". Then you can monitor or call them, check in, gives you the ability to find that out.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
This is Brad with RockyMountainVoices, and I'm here today with Fred Geiger and Ed Ryan from Control4. Welcome to the Podcast guys.

Speaker
Good Morning.

Speaker
Thanks.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
I want to talk with you guys a little bit today about a cool component or a cool part of Control4 called 4Sight, but before we jump into that, Ed, why don't you explain your role real quick here at Control4, and why don't you introduce the Control4 product.

Ed Ryan - Control4
Sure, my role here is, I'm the Director of Product Marketing and that comprehends product marketing and product management. So, we work with engineering and building the best products and talking to the market and working with sales to get the message out and get those products out into the market. The Control4 product line, essentially Control4 is home automation for the broad market.

So, our target is to bring the G-wiz, cool stuff that you hear about in Bill Gates home and other things, to the average everyday person that can afford that and put that in their house. We have a thing that we say, "How many people live in an existing home"? Most everyone raises their hand and says, "Well, of course, everyone lives in an existing home". So, also to bring that to, what we call, the retrofit market as opposed to only new construction of high-end homes. So that's really the mission of Control4.

Our products essentially revolve around what we call the five colors of home automation. One is, One-Touch Home Theatre. So, integrating all the components of your home theatre together. Another one is multi room audio, bringing music, radio, throughout your entire house, wherever you are, both digital and traditional analog sources. Lighting, being able to control your lights, wherever you are in the house. Create lighting path, being able to shut lights off when you're upstairs, shut them off downstairs, except when you get up in the middle of the night, you want to go down to the kitchen, so create a lightning path, so where you're going from and coming to. All your comfort and convenience, your security, your temperature in your home. So those are the essential elements that Control4 brings automation in control to.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
Fred, you're here to talk to us a little bit about this 4Sight product. How do you describe it as part of Control4?

Fred Geiger - Control4
Well, the 4Sight component adds the ability to really extend out the control on automation in the smart home that Ed talked about, that Control4 does in general. To expand it out and allow your home to communicate with you when you're not there and then also to allow you to react to what it tells you and adjust things, modify and control your home remotely. So, really giving you access when you're away from the home.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
So this is in a sense, the home owner's interface to a lot of what Control4 can do for me.

Fred Geiger - Control4
Correct, it gives them the ability to get email notifications for example. So, when you're out and about and you have a latchkey child, for example, gives you the ability to find out, your home knows that between 2 o'clock and 3 o'clock your child should come home, so when the door opens, it will send you an email in that that time window that says, "Hey, your child's home". Then you can monitor or call them, check in, gives you the ability to find that out.

Other things that are easy to do that way, for example, keeping track of -- you have a remote cabin, for example, and you want to know if temperature has dropped, your home is aware of the temperature, but with the 4Sight service, it actually allows it to call back to you and say, "Hey, I'm in trouble, the temperature is now down to 40, you may want to send somebody out here to fix it or come out yourself and react". So, giving the home and the home owner the interaction and communication between the two.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
Okay, and what do you guys call that, 'The aware home'?

Fred Geiger - Control4
Yeah, we would call that the smart home. The aspects of that that we rely on are the fact that the home is self aware, it knows what's going on in itself, but not just that aspect, the fact that it can then tell you and communicate with you really adds the intelligence is the interaction between you and the home of knowing what's going on. It knowing that, being able to tell you, and you being able to react appropriately to that or the home in its self awareness being able to react on its own.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
A lot of this stuff gets programmed, Ed talked about the Home For Everyone, I assume that somebody has to program that in. Is that a dealer or is that the home owners themselves? How does that happen?

Ed Ryan - Control4
Yeah, today we sell through value added resellers, are trained in custom installation. We have a large network of those who are worldwide. They come in, we have extensive training and qualification, and we work very closely with our professional services group and our technical support group. Through that dealer arm we're able to do anything from a simple home theatre to a fully automated home with everything in the home automated. So we rely heavily on that dealer channel for us, they're great partners.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
So the dealer sets up the control or the awareness in a sense. There's things that I may want, because I do have latchkey kids, I'm a working parent, I'm a frequent traveler, I'm an executive, I'm always on the road, I want to be able to know what my home is doing. Those are the kinds of things that the dealer kind of has a template or something to put them together.

Ed Ryan - Control4
Right, typically one of the value adds that the dealer brings is kind of the knowledge and expectation of how to program those things into the system. Now the thing is, as life changes, as you move on in different stages of your life, the things that you want to know, change as well. So, one of the very cool aspects of the 4Sight service is, it also makes the dealer more efficient and makes it convenient for him to actually adjust the programming remotely, if you want him to.

So, there's a security aspect that you don't have to have strange people coming in your house to do programming with 4Sight. You don't need to have time out of work to try to schedule. We've all played the game of, "Hey, when are you going to come work in my house?" Yeah, the cable guy, "Well, I'll be there sometime between eight and three". You have to then take the time off and match it. Whereas, with this service, if there are programming changes you want, because now your kid switches to a different school and the times that he gets home are a little different or you want different lighting aspects.

The dealer can simply connect into your home, change those things, all based on your permissions though. Again, it's your home, so you control the security, the aspect of them to get in. All of this communication is done securely over the Internet, using the same security methods that Internet banking things are done with, to keep your home secure, but give the flexibility that you need.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
I've never had home automation yet, although I'm hoping to get it after I speak some more with you guys. I think it'll be cool to be able to have that kind of facility for my first month or two months. I don't know what I want my home to do yet, and I could listen to a dealer tell me what I think I wanted to do, but this 4Sight technology that you guys have built in here, this seems like a fantastic way for the home owner to be able to learn and essentially make the system adapt to their needs. Is that one of the reasons you did that?

Ed Ryan - Control4
One of the easiest things you can do with our system is, once the home owner gets in and they start using the product, like you said, they'll think of things that they want to do, that they hadn't thought of. A keypad button, they want to have turn on a particular audio scene or they want to change that during a different time of the year to represent a holiday. We can easily have that home owner contact their dealer and the dealer doesn't have to come out to their home, he can quickly make those programming changes via 4Sight and respond to that customer on a regular basis. In fact, some of our dealers set that up as part of a support package, where they have this ongoing relationship with their customer and their customer can be serviced, because it's so efficient for the dealer to be able to service the customers through 4Sight.

4Sight is a subscription based program, so it's much like many other subscriptions that you buy, your cable subscription, et cetera. This allows you to have continuous access from your home, speaking out, and then others, yourself and your dealer, to have access to your home. We use standards throughout that, so any email client, any Web browser provides you this access. So, it's a very simple standards based service.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
So one of the things that, as we've been talking, I'm really interested to learn more about how the home can work for me, it can make notices, send email, all these kinds of things. One of the examples that comes to my mind is, I used to have a pool when I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I got this huge bill once because I forgot to turn off the heater in the middle of the winter. You only do that a few times, but unfortunately I would have liked to not have to pay that bill even once, because it was too big. Is the 4Sight system, is it setup to help me in that kind of a way?

Ed Ryan - Control4
Yeah, one of the key aspects of the 4Sight service is the Web Navigator Interface, which gives you a standard browser based interface into the system, that gives you all of the same controls for thermostats, for lighting, for other control devices that you have while you're in the home.

So, in your example, what you could have done is connect simply, log into the Website, you could see your thermostat on your pool controller or your home, for example in Utah, when you go on vacation, it's hot, you don't want to run your air-conditioner the whole time. You can simply adjust it down and then before you come back, you want to go swimming as soon as you get back in, so you can exercise right before you fly out. You simply connect in, readjust the temperature to where you want it, temperature will be perfect when you get home, but you've got a huge energy savings, cost savings, while you're gone.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
Got it. What about some of the security and convenience factors, how are other people using this?

Ed Ryan - Control4
Well, there's a good example of, as the population, atleast in the United States, gets older, as the baby boomers grow up, that there's a concern about assisted living and those kind of things. If you have elderly parents, which I do, so when they're home, they want to have the independence of being in their own home and staying there, but they also need some care. So, with the Control4 system it's very easy to leverage your security system, the motion sensors through your house, contact sensors and seeing if doors are open or medicine cabinets are open.

So, you could have the system monitor and alert you if say your mother didn't get up before 10 o' clock, if the motion sensor in her bedroom didn't fire, that you could be alerted or assisted, care people could be alerted as to what's going on there. So it keeps the privacy there, but it also provides some information to those that are concerned people outside their home, as far as, is everything okay, is everything normal?

Another good example is with the hearing impaired. If the doorbell rings, with a Control4 system all the lighting in the home can be tied to any kind of a WAN, any programming, and so rather than having a device in a couple of places in the home that alerts the hearing impaired person to someone's at the door, all the lights in the home could flash, You could have them flash at different times or different sequences based on which door the doorbell is rung at. All these kinds of things just provide quality of life to different user communities that wasn't available before.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
So truly, it's all about convenience, it's all about comfort, it's all about making your life more enjoyable at home. People I imagine don't want to go out much, and when they do, they feel very secure in what they can do with their home. Feels to me like, from what you're telling me about 4Sight, it's a real critical component to the overall system. You mentioned it was available on a subscription basis, do you update it from time to time, is it automatically delivered to them?

Ed Ryan - Control4
4Sight is -- the capability of 4Sight is built at every Control4 system. The end user basically subscribes to that and enables that service to be activated within their home. As much like any other technology, 4Sight is updated from time to time and that automatically happens in the background, so the service in the backend is updated. Also we provide software updates that are available to the home owner as well.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
Fred, one of the things that we talked about here a minute ago was, the home would be secured if the system is secure. How do I know, as the home owner, that my dealer isn't creating a backdoor into my home?

Fred Geiger - Control4
There's a couple of ways that we control that. We actually give the end user a lot of control over who has access and when they have access. For example, we talked about the dealer being able to do remote programming, but that's only available if you, the end user, on the Website have said, allow my dealer access.

The same thing is true for other users of the system. For example, you're going out of town and you want to have your brother who's in town, be able to control things as well, you can add them as users to your system or remove them as you want to. So, the end user has complete control over who has access and all of that access is based on user names and passwords and logging in, so it's all very secure.

Brad Baldwin - PodTech
I think it's pretty obvious that the vision that you have for the smart home, actually it's pretty big, theatre integration, the lighting integration, the comfort and security, the convenience. I really like the benefits when you start looking at how the home could work with me, notifying me, make me aware of what's happening and then actually take steps based on rules that I've created in my home, I think it's very powerful. Fred, 4Sight feels like something that every home owner, if they're looking to have truly a smart home, not just an automated home, but a smart home, would see a big benefit in.

This is Brad Baldwin and I've been speaking with the product experts here at Control4, Fred Geiger and Ed Ryan. Thank you very much gentlemen.

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