Smart House

You

're on your way to work when suddenly you realize that once again you forgot to turn off the coffee pot. Turn around and head home and show up late at the office for the third time this month? Why not just use your mobile phone to tell the appliance to shut itself down? Later, when your boss isn't looking, you can use your office PC to monitor your child and the babysitter at home and even video-conference with your ailing out-of-town grandmother.

Driving home, your two-way wristwatch pager flashes a message from the refrigerator telling you that you're out of milk. You ignore it. The trash can has been keeping track of what you have been throwing out and has already placed an online order for delivery of refills. As you pull into the driveway your car alerts an electronic network in your home, activates lights and thermostats, and turns on the radio.

You decide not to go out tonight because so many indoor activities beckon. An intelligent navigator hooked up to your TV automatically downloaded your favorite show, and your computer is reminding you of an invitation to party in one of the hottest virtual clubs, where bouncers are replaced by extra password protection to keep out the untrendy.

Welcome to the networked home. Bill Gates spent millions to automate his. The rest of us won't. Over the next few years a panoply of new technologies promises consumers cheap and easy networks linking their PCs and any electronic device in the house. With that will come myriad services designed to turn today's couch potatoes into tomorrow's house potatoes.

Gates spent a bundle for digital artwork, but soon networked pictures will be commonplace. The charger for your mobile phone may come equipped with a picture frame that will house an ever-changing display of online photos e-mailed by family and friends. The webphone in your kitchen or the screen of your interactive television could be used for the same purpose.

That's not all. Wireless technology installed in homes will enable portable devices--like pocket-sized electronic checkbooks, book-sized reading tablets and digital kitchen assistants--to interact. Egg-like devices may act as monitoring systems so we can see what is going on at home when we are not there. Dishwashers will e-mail their owners when their filters are clogged and repairmen will diagnose washing machine troubles online. A homeowner may even be able to e-mail appliances with an order to work together to ensure that the electricity bill stays below a certain sum per month.

The genie which will help make this possible is, well, Jini. But though it's pronounced the same way as the mythical spirit in a lamp, this one is software developed by Sun Microsystems. It is designed to enable any type of electronic device to interact and connect to the Internet. New local area networking technologies are also emerging, such as wireless and powerline connections, which allow consumers to link appliances without installing new wires.

The new home networking technologies will arrive just in time to link up with long-awaited high speed Internet connections. As more consumers move to faster, flat rate services such as those delivered via cable modem (see story, page TD18), they will leave the Internet on all the time, spawning a whole new category of services such as remote maintenance of home appliances and controlled energy consumption. And Internet access will increasingly come through the new breed of Net appliances (see story, page TD12).

By 2002, tech consultancy Gartner Group predicts, most people will no longer access the Web via PCs. Sun is now working with America Online and an as-yet-unnamed manufacturer to develop an "AOL anywhere" Internet appliance--a decision taken after an AOL poll revealed that 40% of subscribers bought expensive PCs only to e-mail and surf the Web.

Jini-enabled devices will share data and instructions via the Internet, a cable or an infrared light beam without the need for a PC. Until now, connecting devices like a mobile phone and a Palm Pilot required that their software and hardware be designed to work together. Given most devices weren't designed to interact, the only solution was to link up via a PC--a task requiring lots of patience and a computer engineering degree. Soon, with a $30 cable bought at a hardware store and a simple Jini adapter, a consumer could directly connect a new digital camera to an old printer and make it work. Jini software, announced in January, already has the backing of 37 technology and consumer electronics companies, such as Philips, Nokia, Ericsson and Bosch-Siemens.