Belkin lets you play God with home gadgets

Speaker 1: Hey everyone. I'm Sharon Vaknin for CNET.com at CES 2012 at the Belkin booth. Belkin, the popular accessories maker is now trying to bring you the connected home. Now we see the connected or automated home nearly every year at CES but they say they've got the pieces to do it right. I'm here with general manager Kevin (Ashton?) to ask him a few questions about what Belkin's plan is. So tell us... exactly what your approach is this year. Speaker 2: I think there's one word that sums up what's different about what Belkin is doing with the connected home and that's easy. We've developed a range of products kind of like Lego bricks. We call it WeeMo and we use Wi-Fi. So it uses the home's existing Wi-Fi router, your existing smartphone to control everything. You just plug it into the wall, it connects to your wireless network, use your phone to set it up. Very easy, very simple, very cheap. Speaker 1: So this is one of the first times I've seen such a plug and play approach but what other need are you filling for the general population. Speaker 2: So this is definitely aimed at everybody. We're really thinking about families. Moms at home who are busy and our objective is to make it just a little bit easier to live your life. So for example we have a system that... very cheaply, very simple, it lets you know whether you remember to close the garage door in the morning, it lets you lock and unlock your door from the office. It lets you turn off the TV when nobody is watching it. So a while range of things to make your home a little bit more efficient to take away some of the little pressures and stresses of everyday life. Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time and now let's check out one of my favorites from Belkin. We're looking at a concept model but with this light bulb and this light bulb switch you could control your home lighting with your smartphone. Now this might look like a regular light bulb but this LED bulb actually has built in Wi-Fi. The idea here is that you don't have to build the infrastructure in your home to get a connective device. Now these are just a couple of examples of how Belkin is bringing the connected home to the average consumer and with a little luck we might actually see these on store shelves. For CNET.com, I'm Sharon Vaknin at CES 2012.