Plume Pods

Most current Wi-Fi solutions stumble when everyone is home with a few devices streaming 4K content, game systems trying to connect, a few portable devices roaming the house and your neighbor's router competing for channels.   A single router can no longer meet the Wi-Fi demands of most homes today.  It’s easy to promise full coverage WiFi when conditions are perfect but with today's multi storied homes it's becoming almost impossible.

Plume is the only WiFi solution powered by the cloud, which means it can adapt to real life in real-time—ensuring every room and every device has a reliably fast connection today, tomorrow, and years from now.  Rather than relying on a router that sits in one place and hopefully covers all the space we need, Plume takes a different approach and offers something it calls pods that can be plugged directly into wall sockets around the home.  Plume Pods are beautiful but you don’t have to see them, they plug into any wall outlet, leaving your surfaces free of hardware. And the best part is that you get to keep your neighboring plug space.

Plume's technology uses Adaptive WiFi that is able to respond to varying conditions around the home. Plume maximizes your WiFi by optimizing the flow of data. The low frequency 2.4 GHz WiFi band has a longer range but slower speeds than the high frequency 5 GHz band with higher speeds and shorter range. Plume strategically figures out which band to use for each device based on where it is and what application it’s running.  Plume recommends a pod for each room of the house to give complete coverage. The Pods are controlled by something called the Plume Cloud to provide more speed and connectivity than you get with a single router network.

The system is setup using a mobile app and will allow for guest access.  The pods will launch in the fall and will sell for $49 each at that time.

Plume 

Samsung Otto

At the Samsung's annual Developer Conference in San Francisco, the company introduced a prototype "digital personal assistant" called Otto similar to Amazon Echo.   Samsung said the Otto is a "reference design" and won't be available anytime soon.  Instead it will be used by developers to introduce other concepts of home automation.
Many companies are developing products for the smart home and being able to walk into a room and say "lights on," without having to locate the wall switch will be very useful.  Changing the room temperature without having to physically get off your couch or touch the thermostat would be pretty neat.

Otto has a rotating head that swivels and moves up and down which presumably will be useful to give it a little personality. The rotating head has an HD camera that can be used for facial recognition.  It might be able to recognize who's talking or entering the room and respond accordingly.  Otto could also be useful as a security camera to detect an intruder walking into a room if the front door was locked and none of the owners mobile phones were in range.  Otto could send out a text message with an attached photo.