This article does a decent job of explaining the big characteristics of what successful products in this area will look like, but interestingly, it doesn't mention (maybe the first) really successful thing that already exists. The Nest thermostat is already a couple years old and it hits literally every single positive point mentioned in the article -- especially that of being a data driven device. I guess my takeaway is that this guy is definitely not wrong, but he didn't say anything new by a long stretch. IMO, he should've stuck with the first thought in the article: any given device is secondary to our ability to make all the devices play nicely. Just like developing for warring browsers has had terrible lasting effects, I think there needs to be a real effort to lay some really basic ground rules for inter-"thing" communication...