At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference today, David Eun, president of Samsung NEXT i.e. Samsung’s investment arm, has expressed the ambitious IoT vision of the company. “Samsung is very focused on the Internet of Things. We think this could be the third wave, where you have programmable objects blanketing your home”.
And Samsung is already putting its money where its mouth is. With the ARTIK platform the South Korean enterprise has already inspired many competitors to follow its move and set foot in the IoT/maker/rapid prototyping domain with a flagship development board – first examples that come to mind are Sony’s smart sensing Arduino-compatible board and Asus Tinker board.
But beyond the region of hacker boards there’s a world of traditional appliances and devices that are yet to be connected: the smart home. A world where Samsung has heavily invested since 2014, with SmartThings acquisition. SmartThings is not just a family of smart home devices: at its heart beats the SmartThings Cloud, which is set to become Samsung’s new unified IoT platform as well as the one and only Samsung cloud platform.
According to David Eun, Samsung’s ace in the hole is the tight integration between hardware, software and services. While Amazon’s and Alphabet’s AI rely on third-party mobile phones and devices, Samsung is in the privileged position to both produce the software and the hardware that will run it. Given the ever-nagging problem of IoT – you know which: interoperability between different devices – Samsung could have a very good hand for the smart home poker game.
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