Interview with Homeseer

[Chris P]

Hello everyone. I am not sure where to post this, the General Discussion Area seems most appropriate. Homeseer doesn't offer a general contact us email and our attempt through the sales email didn't work out.

I'm in a group of university students doing a research project on home automation platforms and innovation, especially on Homeseer and its strategies. We are trying to set up a skype interview with someone from the company for our paper, to have an extra source on top of our online findings.

We want to discuss the following:
- History of Homeseer and how it was founded
- The first product that Homeseer entered the market with (HS1)
- What were the most important changes or events in the history of the company
- Discuss Homeseer's decisions on working with third party appliances and making their own smart home appliances
- Product categories covered by the company
- Do Homeseer's own home appliances also work on other platforms?
- How did Homeseer decide to focus on using Z-wave and other open communication protocols (versus proprietary)
- Is there any company Homeseer sees as their primary competitors and if so how are they competing against them.

It would be great if someone from Homeseer saw this, but I am not sure how the forums are checked. If someone here is a journalist reporting on home automation products or has some other official position working with such products we might want to interview you instead/as well.

Thanks for reading! And even if you are just a long time user of the company's products, feel free to comment here with your experiences.

[sparkman]

They have a phone number. I would just call them...

[jon00]

How about Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeSeer

[macromark]

Hello everyone. I am not sure where to post this, the General Discussion Area seems most appropriate. Homeseer doesn't offer a general contact us email and our attempt through the sales email didn't work out.

I'm in a group of university students doing a research project on home automation platforms and innovation, especially on Homeseer and its strategies. We are trying to set up a skype interview with someone from the company for our paper, to have an extra source on top of our online findings.

We want to discuss the following:
- History of Homeseer and how it was founded
- The first product that Homeseer entered the market with (HS1)
- What were the most important changes or events in the history of the company
- Discuss Homeseer's decisions on working with third party appliances and making their own smart home appliances
- Product categories covered by the company
- Do Homeseer's own home appliances also work on other platforms?
- How did Homeseer decide to focus on using Z-wave and other open communication protocols (versus proprietary)
- Is there any company Homeseer sees as their primary competitors and if so how are they competing against them.

It would be great if someone from Homeseer saw this, but I am not sure how the forums are checked. If someone here is a journalist reporting on home automation products or has some other official position working with such products we might want to interview you instead/as well.

Thanks for reading! And even if you are just a long time user of the company's products, feel free to comment here with your experiences.

Chris - here you go...

• History of the company is on a Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeSeer
• Our milestones often involve the introduction of new products. You can see the arc of this on our 'about us' page here: https://homeseer.com/about-us/
• As the market preferences began shifting from a software-only solution, we adapted by creating our own hubs starting with the PRO-100 back in 2005. HomeTrollers were introduced in 2007. We added sensors, wall switches and water valves beginning in 2014.
• Product categories include smart home software, hubs, lighting, sensors, water mgmt.
• We added support for Z-Wave in 2003 to accommodate new products that were being developed by ACT (one of our early hardware partners)
• Do a search on "home automation software" or "smart home hubs" or "smart lighting" or "smart sensors". The results would include our primary competitors.

Hope that helps. If you need more info, please feel free to email me directly (mark at homeseer dot com).

[Chris P]

Thank you very much for your reply! Your wikipedia has certainly been a great resource for us! We do mostly know the answers to our questions from reading up but hearing it from someone actually in the company also has value.

[RoChess]

HomeSeer devices are also supported on competitors platforms as I often come across posts at Samsung's somewhat closed SmartThings with users on their forum shocked at how well HomeSeer devices work for them with support.

Google is doing the reverse at the moment with shutting down developer access to Nest devices as they try to strengthen their marketshare.

HomeSeer not forcing big-data cloud on their users like Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, etc. is a major reason why others and myself use them.

[Pete]

Here have automated since the late 1970's and went to Homeseer 1 in the late 1990's. A happy camper here with Homesee 1,2 and 3.

New with Homeseer 3 is running in Linux with Mono. Homeseer was the first company to port their HS3 to Linux Mono using the RPi 1.

I got it and tried it on every flavor of computer running Linux and it worked great.

First Homesseer plugin that I tried using Dockstar Debian (Seagate Dockstar) with Mono worked great.

[langenet]

I can't believe it's been 16 years for me. Started in 2003 with v1.6, then HS2, then HS3 and just recently purchased HS4. My my systems have always been rock solid.