home security

The home of the future may be coming to a neighborhood near you.

A number of companies, including AT&T, Comcast, Lowe's, and Verizon are intent on making your home a smart home.

Imagine getting an alert when you leave the garage door open, or when your elderly parents fall down, or when your liquor cabinet is breached by wayward teens. Connected homes give residents the ability to remotely control thermostats, lights, and door locks through mobile devices.

The selling point is convenience; and routine.

"Every single day you get up in the morning and you leave … Read more

NEW ORLEANS--AT&T is proposing some serious branching out with its new services for securing your home, and managing its appliances remotely from your smartphone or tablet.

At CTIA 2012, AT&T showed off its concept with a demo house equipped in the Big Easy's lovely Garden District.

Let's tackle security first. AT&T lays physical sensors on the doors and windows. If they trip, or if the smoke detector trips, a couple of things happen. First, any response you've programmed goes into effect. For instance, you might decide to set it to blare the radio or TV, or sound an alarm or flash a strobe light.… Read more

In today's show, it's time to Hangout with the world, seek out new smartphones and take a ride on the Yahoo drama train:

Your Google+ Hangout video chat sessions can now broadcast live to the world. Google made it easy to share the live stream of a Hangout on your Google+ page, or embed it on another Web site. You can see how many people are watching, and once the live show is done it can be uploaded to YouTube.

Google has been working with some television shows to broadcast their Hangouts live. If you want to check it out, … Read more

There's a famous Sherlock Holmes story in which Holmes uses a wax bust and some clever lighting to make it look like he's at home.

For $35 and a lot less effort, you can pull your own fast one with the FakeTV, a gadget designed to mimic the light from a television set.

The FakeTV comes with a built-in light sensor and timer. It uses LEDs to output light equivalent to a 27-inch HDTV. The pattern of light and color shifts to make it seem like you're at home and glued to the latest episode of "The Bachelorette."

The idea is to deter burglars who are prowling around your neighborhood after dark, even when you're away on a business trip or out on the town for the night. It won't stop a truly determined thief, but it could discourage a casual robber.… Read more

Comcast is getting into the home security business.

The company plans to announce tomorrow that it's expanding its Xfinity Home Security service. Last year the company began testing the service in Houston. Now it's adding six more cities. Additional cities that will get the new service include parts of Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Sarasota/Naples, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Nashville.

The Xfinity Home Security service offers traditional home security features, such as police and fire alarm protection with 24-hour monitoring. It also offers some home automation functions, such as the ability to adjust thermostats and lights remotely. … Read more

My apartment dates from the 1920s. Fortunately, the lock is somewhat newer. But it's a joke compared with this touch-screen dead bolt with voice command. It's kinda like KITT for your door.

The Arrow Revolution Touchscreen Deadbolt is handy if you're always losing your keys. It's also impressive for that postprandial let-me-show-you-my-etchings part of a date.

Once you enter one of 25 access codes that can be stored in it, you can lock others out from the inside for privacy. There is a key override for emergencies, though.

The Revolution has voice-guided programming in English, Spanish, or French. Too bad it doesn't talk to strangers who come a-knocking.

The simple, weather-resistant touch screen sits in a housing that can be added to a standard, prepared door in less than 15 minutes. Batteries last about one year.

The Revolution Touchscreen ships in July and is expected to sell for about $250. There's also a push-button version for less. … Read more

In the 20 years I've been covering digital home technologies, I've only seen a few houses with any kind of Internet-connected essential systems, like energy monitoring or security. Considering the number of homes that have broadband, I find this a conceptual disconnect. But outside of the few super-geeky or rich, people just don't seem to be into the idea.

Unlike the dynamic and shifting market for gadgets, fed by consumers' lust for technology and the requirement for marketers to keep innovating to fuel that need, connected home innovation comes to the homebuilding and renovation industries slowly. Maybe this is because consumers just aren't excited about setting their thermostats from their iPhones, or that they don't really want to spend money on a security system that's of value only in an emergency, not day to day.

But the video-monitoring company Avaak is still trying to break this market open. Avaak's Dan Gilbert tells me that at CES next month the company will announce an update to its Vue camera system that has a necessary feature that was missing from its initial product that launched in March 2009. Finally, the system is getting motion-sensitive cameras. Previously, you could tap into a Vue camera in your home from anywhere on the Web, making them usable only for checking in on your house, kids, or pets, but not for getting any kind of alerts. The new product should ship in January. … Read more

Last August, I wrote about converting a Webcam into a home security tool, and truth be told, the results were underwhelming. Sure there are services and specialty hardware that let you do it with very little setup, but there continued to be a notable gap in what you could do with some consumer solutions versus the considerably more expensive, professional surveillance gear.

One company that's tried to find a happy medium between those two groups is Dropcam. Based in San Francisco and founded by former Xobni engineers Greg Duffy and Amir Virani, Dropcam turns a fairly standard Webcam into a home security tool with an elephant's memory.

The hardware, which retails at $199, is actually made by another company, Axis Communications. Dropcam's service, which goes along with it, is where things get interesting.

Instead of offering just a live feed, as people are able to get with most IP Webcams, Dropcam's video can be sent to the cloud (actually a concrete bunker in Texas) for safe keeping. Compared to storing recordings on a computer that's located inside the place you're surveilling, this makes for a much more secure solution. And unlike some do-it-yourself solutions that use FTP to send video or photo stills to the cloud, Dropcam handles all those settings, so that you essentially just plug the thing into a wall socket.

Video can be viewed online, on any computer with Adobe's Flash player installed. The company also recently released an iPhone app that can pull up the live stream of your camera, and a handful of sample cameras.

On the Web, Dropcam can store up to 30 days of nonstop video. This appears as a timeline, which can be scaled anywhere from one second all the way to a week. It also makes it easy to see when things actually happened. Times when the camera sensed motion are marked as yellow dots, and when a user mouses over one of these dots, it pops up with small thumbnails of what was captured. The same thing happens if you hover over any part of the timeline.

Right now there's not much you can do with these images and video clips, but in the near future Dropcam plans to roll out a notification service that will send an e-mail or SMS text message to users, that includes a clip of what's been captured, every time one of these events occurs. Some of the software and Webware solutions we looked at last year did this, and it's definitely a must-have feature for people who want to use it for security purposes.

Dropcam is mainly a consumer solution, but the service has a pro service plan too. The basic service is free, but users at that level don't get any recording storage. The plus plan, which costs $8.95 a month saves a week of footage, while the pro plan, at $24.95, saves 30 days. That ends up working out to 50GB of video on the high end. Both of the higher-end plans also let you use two cameras instead of one.… Read more

I got into the whole "smart house," home automation (HA) thing about 11 years ago when reading about how I could get some of the lights inside and outside my house to be controlled automatically. I did some research, and a friend recommended an installer. The timing was perfect, because we were renovating a 100-year-old house that was badly in need of everything. We stripped it to the bones, which was a real treat when it came to running Cat 5 and video cable throughout the whole place. This was before Wi-Fi, before iPods, before LCD TV screens! … Read more