Different standards of derivatives

Tencent technology Xiuxian Qian reported on May 15

A broad category of connected gadgets appears in the broad category of smart hardware, such as WiFi-enabled smart sockets, steering wheel assist hardware for on-board scenarios, and OBD.

If you make a general overview, they can call it a "middleware" hardware product. The common feature of these networked products is that based on the inconsistency of the standards of the underlying control system or the gradual upgrading of the system, the traditional system can be made smart by simple overlay for the convenience of users.

Right now, they are really hot. The industry's judgments can also be simply classified into two categories: one is optimistic, because of light and easy to use, there will be their own room for existence and commercial value; the other is to see the decline, which is a transitional hardware products, Once the platform providers into this area, or the standard unification, middleware hardware value immediately lost.

Different standards of derivatives

Smart socket is a standard smart home control platform derivatives. Small smart socket deal with different brands and different appliances to achieve unified control management.

The concept of smart home hot, entrepreneurs bet smart socket generally divided into two reasons: First, smart appliances embedded intelligent networking module cost is high, the market has not yet formed the scale of the case, the appliance manufacturers can not significantly Main smart home appliances products, only a small test of water, or just introduced the concept of products; Second, even if the smart home appliances to solve the cost problem, there is no unified operating system for different brands of smart appliances appear. Networking between different brands of home appliances interoperability and interoperability is not well, each appliance manufacturers want their products to become a standard, is also doing its own brand of home appliances can be coordinated with each other standards.

It can be well understood that, regardless of whether the appliance is smart, through a unified control of the WiFi socket can be achieved on the overall control of home appliances.

Crowdfunding site name time on the home page, the top 20 projects have three WiFi socket products in crowdfunding. At the heart of these Wi-Fi outlets are the WiLink, reduced battery and electromagnetic radiation (Linsocket), smart control and forfirst, and one of the key tenets of this WiFi socket is this simple, cost-effective smart home control product , The user's ordinary household appliances instantly upgraded to intelligent Internet devices.

More early than these projects have a production called "hard candy" smart socket, hard candy smart socket where the company, Beijing Network Technology Co., Ltd. Li Qin, CEO revealed that as Qualcomm smart home low-power platform project The first beneficiaries, hard candy OEM production by Foxconn, is now regarded as the world's smallest smart socket. , You can move the App and the computer web page home appliance management control, is expected to mass production by the end of May.

Intelligent upgrade slow grounding gas

Similar to the dilemma faced by smart home, when traditional cars are starting to take the concept of smart cars, the challenge they face is the long cycle of renewal of automobiles and the high cost and the rapid iteration of Internet service. On-board products are smart products that Internet services want to get into cars but slow to upgrade.

Xia Jun, CEO of the car enjoying the platform frankly, a new product development of the car, which did not take a year or two of the cycle can not get there, without billions of financial support can not get it, if such a price and time to develop, with the Internet Time users experience the rapid changes in product requirements, certainly can not keep up.

One recognition is that the car is about to wake up the giant, once withdraw into the market, the opportunity will become very large, will become the main force of the market. But before the car prices woke up, how to do car internet service?

Ma Zhe, vice president of Tencent believe that the solution to this contradiction is "ground gas." He believes that the evolution of technology, industry, game and platform conversion, take a longer path. Can find the way to ground gas, allowing users to experience the car networking faster fun.

"Use the Internet first ground then, let the user to use and then quickly iterate, the hardware is always slow, the service is always fast," Ma said.

May can be described as the car hardware get together month. Didi taxi, fast taxi and Gordon launched a single grab the hardware release date in May. Tencent technology was informed that the fast grab the single hardware has been exposed, insiders said that only the size of the cap, you can bind the steering wheel to help drivers grab a single. High German on the navigation of the steering wheel hardware products have also been opened, will be released in the near future.

Tencent Road treasure box in early May also formally launched at the Global Mobile Internet Conference, a wave of automotive diagnostic systems and entertainment systems products are emerging.

Challenges and risks

The pursuit of capital and entrepreneurs does not eliminate the emerging risks.

"Smart socket products only solve part of the general availability of intelligent hardware issues, the function is relatively shallow, the operating system problems have not been solved, once the system like Android Wear into a climate, the smart socket is not too much value." An investment People said.

The commercial value based on time difference is also reduced. According to the current WiFi smart socket pre-sale price, generally set at 2-3 times the normal socket, how many consumers will pay for their own taste?

For cars, the issues of versatility and standards are more complicated.

For example, the on-board diagnostic system is based on the OBD2 international standard and is uniform in fault code reading. However, no other standard can be followed after reading other data except the fault code. In limited car space and scenes, it is unrealistic to place multiple pieces of hardware that read a single piece of data. This falls into a small scale to see unity, large-scale single closed loop.

The good news is that similar to the Android car version is expected to solve part of the standard unity of the problem. "Android car version can do the standard authorization, which can avoid the problem of car safety accountability." The above investor said.