Brightstar’s inaugural Insights event: The future of smart home

As smart home technology continues to dominate the market, complex connectivity issues and significant cost pressures of owning a smart home has led to a disjointed customer experience. Hosted by a panel of industry leaders, Brightstar’s inaugural Insights event: The future of smart home, discussed the pain points consumers face today and revealed the underlying benefits of simplifying the consumer’s smart home experience.

Held at Melbourne’s new WeWork location on Tuesday 18th of June and hosted by Brightstar, the panel included Matt Gaskell, Director of Google Hardware Partnerships ANZ, Dr. Tansu Alpcan, Associate Professor at The University of Melbourne and Brightstar’s very own Julian Dennis, Director of Brightstar Insights.

With over 70 attendees, the event compared Brightstar’s recent smart home adoption research against the audience’s current consumer pain points.

Brightstar’s Insights Director, Julian Dennis, said the high upfront investment of owning smart devices currently hinders smart home adoption.

“At Brightstar Insights, we’ve spent a lot of time mapping out the customer journey and costs associated with smart home,” Mr Dennis said.

“With smart home start-up costs reaching almost $10,000 combined, there’s a bunch of different things we are doing with carriers in this space—like creating subscription services—that will alleviate some of these costs to consumers.”

While kitting out your smart home does become quite expensive, Matt Gaskell, Director of Google Hardware Partnerships ANZ, believes vendors need to start making these transactions non-threatening.

“If we want to help smart home come into fruition then we need to look at the value of the service we’re offering,” Mr Gaskell said.

“I think once you start to see truly helpful technology, technology that anticipates rather than automates – that’s where it starts to get really exciting.”

Dr. Tansu Alpcan, Associate Professor at The University of Melbourne, said he’d love to see Australia to be at the very forefront of smart technology.

“The goal of smart technology is to make my life simpler,” Dr. Alpcan said.

“It’s a difficult task, but it’s not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.”

Brightstar will be holding their next Insight Series event later this year.

To make sure you get at seat register your interest here.