Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee Alliance Announce New Smart Home Working Group
Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian are also on board to join the working group and contribute to the project.
The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable and seamless to use. By building upon IP, the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps and cloud services, and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.