[IFA 2015] SmartThings key to Samsung’s smart home push

BERLIN -- Top management of SmartThings, a U.S. smart home platform developer, is upbeat on its ties with Samsung Electronics.

“Our partnership with Samsung is great. Many Samsung people are now working at our head office,’’ SmartThings founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson told The Korea Herald before Samsung’s news conference at the IFA electronics trade show in Berlin on Thursday. 

The company is one of the dozens of start-ups overseas that Samsung has aggressively acquired over the past few years to push for the creation of a hub for smart home devices.

The Korean tech giant has launched the initiative, hoping that it will kickstart the still nascent Internet of Things, or IoT, trend in the home appliance market.

And at the core of the Korean tech giant’s big push is SmartThings that Samsung acquired in April last year for $200 million (238.3 billion won).

After the acquisition, the company moved its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Palo Alto, California, possibly for better communication with Samsung’s Open Innovation Center there.

“Vice chairman Lee Jae-yong often visits our office as Samsung is making a big push on software recently. I also visit Korea every few months,” he said.

The company is still a legally independent entity and has continued to seek its goal of making the most open and accessible platform in the smart home market based on Samsung’s vast product lineups and distribution channels around the world. During the media event, Hawkinson took to the stage to introduce the SmartThings Hub, its second generation home automation hub that works along with a pack of sensors.

The hub connects everything at home to allow light switches, toasters and washing machines to talk to each other for automatic, more efficient control and monitoring.

The updated Hub has added new radios and the ability to carry out automation tasks even if the home is disconnected from the Internet. It also allows users to monitor their homes remotely by connecting to cameras.

While he participated in last year’s IFA to introduce the futuristic trend, this year, he said, things get easier for more penetration. The $99 hub will hit the market from this week. It takes just a few minutes to install the sensors.

“Together with Samsung, we will grow and create a completely open IoT ecosystem all around the world,” he said.

On Thursday, Samsung’s consumer electronics division president Yoon Boo-keun also reaffirmed the company’s commitment that all its appliances would be connected to the Internet by 2020. He predicted profits will grow from this year.

By Lee Ji-yoon, Korea Herald correspondent (jylee@heraldcorp.com)