To a smarter future!

Consider the following scenario, and then try to guess which year this took place:

Monday morning, you get out of your house. As soon as you reach your parked car, at the other side of the apartment society, you get out of your home wi-fi range. Your smart phone detects that and switches on the Bluetooth which then automatically connects with your car stereo. Forty minutes later, you reach your office parking, and your smart-phone detects the geotagged location and turns your phone to silent mode. I can go on and on about the phone smartly shifting to silent mode when calendar shows meetings, to launching music app when headphones are plugged in, sending a text to my spouse when the battery went below 20% (and an ‘I love you' text every 3 hours between 10 and 5 pm :P) and so on and so forth!

If your guess is anywhere after 2015, I am afraid that is quite off! Imagine if my standard (but rooted) android phone could do all this in 2013 with a tasker app, what all can all the smart products available these days can do now!

Just to give one of the most hilarious examples I have witnessed this year – if you have a mesh of Google home minis or any smart home speakers throughout the house, you can shout at all your kids at once to come down to the dinner table! :D

-     The Question

Do we actually NEED need a smart device in our home and in our lives? Well the answer to that is a little philosophical. You know as they say small things matter in lives, it’s the small actions, small decisions that actually wear us out during the day, rather than the big things. If we can offload a little bit of workload to smarter devices, it may not transform our lives but can substantially increase the quality of our living. Plug your cooler or air conditioner to a wi-fi connected electrical socket and switch it on from your phone 15 mins before you arrive home, and see the difference it makes.

As Peter Drucker famously said, “you can't manage what you can't measure.” I realized the importance of this quote as I started my journey to be fitter as a new year resolution on 1^st Jan 2018. Of course, you can track the kilometers and speed on the machine, but was my cardio health improving? That is until I introduced to the world of Smart Wearable! I have a smart MI band that shows me the full graph of my heart rate, sampled 50 times a day, as well as a chart of evolution of my resting heart rate for this whole year!

#GetFitWithFlipkart  #SmartHomeRevolution

Oh, and I know whole the smart lights are on the expensive side as of now, but no money can replace the comfort of not hitting your little toe as you stumble towards the washroom, courtesy the smart motion sensing night lights we put up in our house. As I said it is the little things, such as delta in brightness level between day and night makes such a big difference that most of us didn’t even know we needed!

-   The Answer

I realized that there are a few moments in life which divide your life in a before and an after era. Like one of those pictures where you see in 1980, everyone in a morning train with their head buried in a newspaper, compared with the picture in 2018, with everyone staring in their phone. Smartphone was that decisive factor which divided the two eras with early 2000s being the transition period. 

We may or may not realize that we are currently in another transition where we are moving towards  another era of smart products – where the next 10 years will witness a myriad of connected devices improving our lives in small but significantly meaningful ways.

PS: In case you disagree with my post, ask your Alexa to discuss it with my Google Home to sort this out :D