Shell Oil wants to help control your home's heating--and not by lowering the price of oil. The company will be at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to demonstrate its upcoming Web-based home automation system, hoping to carve out a business with a type of service that has so far been slow to catch on.
Called Shell HomeGenie, the service will let customers adjust their central heating, switch small appliances on and off, and monitor their homes with a wireless security camera, all while on the road. Customers control the home equipment through a PC browser or a cell phone with Internet access.
A residential gateway acts as a central control for the system and hooks up to the Internet through a home PC broadband connection. The system includes a programmable thermostat that Shell says works with most heating systems and power switches that connect to home appliances, and can be turned on and off wirelessly. The thermostat, power switches, and security cameras hook up to the gateway using a radio frequency wireless module.
Coming Soon
The system will be available in North America in the first half of 2004 and retail for less than $1000, plus the cost of hiring a third party to install the thermostat, says Robin Gaeta, general manager for Shell HomeGenie.
Customers also pay a monthly fee of "less than $30," he says, which includes a personalized Web site for viewing security camera images and other services.
The system is designed to provide people with convenience and peace of mind by allowing them to check that they have turned off the toaster oven, for example. They can also program lights to switch on and off to make burglars think someone is home.
Are Consumers Ready?
Executives from Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, and other IT firms have promoted the idea of home management systems at past Consumer Electronics Shows, but for the most part they have been slow to catch on. This time, Gaeta argues, things will be different.
Consumers these days are more Internet savvy, technologies have improved, broadband and Internet-enabled mobile phones are more widespread, and costs have come down, he says. "Timing is very important for this type of service," he says.
Shell has been developing the system for three years in conjunction with Sun, which provided Java software and servers to run the system. HomeGenie also uses technology from Motorola and Xanboo, which makes Internet-enabled devices.
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