Most digital companies live comfortably within internet protocol (IP) domains such as WiFi or cellular. From digital banking to digital marketing, consumers interact with products over IP-based networks, and connectivity is rarely (if ever) considered a burden. Most digital companies have the luxury of operating on unconstrained servers. Whether on-premises or in the cloud, compute power hasn't been a concern for most digital companies for decades.
The companies bringing the first digital products into the physical world faced much tighter constraints. IoT devices have always been expected to be as low-power and as cheap as feasibly possible. IP networks were too expensive (physically and computationally) to satisfy consumer expectations. In the late 1990s, it was understood that IP wouldn't be ready for the then-fuzzy notion of "IoT" for twenty years. As such, companies had to adapt. Networks like Zigbee and Z-Wave materialized to fill this connectivity void, eliminating the wait to bring intelligence to the physical world. These non-IP protocols enabled fast, efficient connectivity between devices following the same protocol.
Over the past twenty years, IP networks have become increasingly compatible with IoT devices. Companies naturally gravitated towards the ubiquity of IP, and left a balkanized mess of protocols and standards in their wake. Consumers are forced into deciding between WiFi, Zigbee, or Z-Wave ecosystems. Picking WiFi introduces further fragmentation; consumers are forced into deciding between the application protocols powering Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant.
During smart home's inception, companies competed over the limited pool of tech-adept consumers capable of setting up a smart home ecosystem. Keeping this relatively limited pool loyal was crucial to continued success. As IP networks become the IoT standard, however, a standardized application protocol on top of IP would radically decrease the time to mass adoption and exponentiate devices' consumer base. The most striking example of this effort is Project CHIP. CHIP's goal is to put the litany of competing standards to rest, fostering a development experience comparable to building a website or mobile app. Build product once, run on any (IP) ecosystem.
As CHIP levels the playing field for interoperability and connectivity, consumers will be freer to select devices based on features and quality, without worrying about compatibility. Context-awareness is a logical next step. Devices that sing together should be able to intuit when you want coffee without requiring consumers to program routines into a device or hub. Without a privacy-nullifying global AI to figure out the coffee machine exists and guess which other inputs in the consumer's unique system indicate awake and wants coffee, it is understood that the fuzzy notion of "context-awareness" won't be ready for twenty years. We are in another IoT conundrum where technology tails demand. This is where Supertype comes in.
Just as Zigbee and Z-Wave filled the interoperability void of the previous decades, Supertype fills the intuition void of the 2020s and beyond. By providing device makers a virtual map of the user's home, Supertype allows talented device developers to make educated assumptions about what a consumer wants, as it pertains to the device. By giving developers access to observations, not predefined routines, intuition can be directly baked into the app experience, with minimal overhead.
While a Jetsons-esque global AI is still years away, smart home and the broader IoT space have made enormous leaps over the past decades. From fragmented, high-touch ecosystems into ubiquitous interoperability, and from siloed predictions into context-awareness, the line between the digital and physical world is becoming increasingly blurred - for the better.
