Seamless by Anders Sorman-Nilsson

Author:Anders Sorman-Nilsson [sörman-nilsson, anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730332862
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Nesting in action

My love affair with Nest began when part of the Thinque team and I went for a work trip to New York and Boston. Just like the chalet in Sainte Foy Tarentaise, our apartment in Williamsburg was booked on Airbnb. In this case, our lovely host Mai left us an immaculately looked after fourth-floor penthouse. When we arrived in NYC from Europe and Australia, the city was hot and humid. It was a true Indian summer. I have been an avid Airbnb user, for personal and business travel, since 2011, and the brand's promise of ‘belong anywhere' is something that resonates for someone like me who averages 240 international travel days a year. The downside of NYC is that very few apartment blocks have elevators. Not good when combined with heavy Rimowa suitcases, 33°C and the hygrometer showing 88 per cent humidity. Luckily, our colleague Anton, who had flown in from Stockholm before the rest of us, had already figured out the intuitive Nest Learning Thermostat so that by the time we entered the apartment in hip Williamsburg a cool 67° Fahrenheit (around 19.5°C) was chilling us back to normalcy. We were then beautifully coached by the green leaf indicator on the thermostat so that we could optimise our energy consumption during the stay. While we did our bit for the environment and for creating sustainable futures, another synergistic winner was Mai, who by encouraging her guests to use the Nest was able to save on her quarterly energy bill, meaning her margins on the Airbnb business became a little more lucrative. As you can likely tell I am a bit of a technophile, so my colleagues often had to remind me to come back to physical reality and human conversation in the apartment instead of continually being mesmerised by Nest's beautiful interface and intelligence.

This and other associated types of computer intelligence are not necessarily natural, human-style intelligence, but instead fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning. Artificial intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software, and is also the name of the academic field of study that looks at how to create computers and computer software that are capable of intelligent behaviour. Major AI researchers and textbooks define this field as ‘the study and design of intelligent agents', in which an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chances of success. After working with our friends at Cisco in Miami, during their and Tech Data's Ignite program, Cisco's Internet of Everything gently made its way into my alpine retreat in France. How? Well, courtesy of these clients, I received a Christmas present in the form of an Amazon Echo. This looks similar to the multitude of wireless music speakers on the market, but the cloud-connected Echo is different in fundamental ways. It doesn't just project sound, for example, but also listens to its surroundings. Constantly. While Amazon allays privacy concerns by saying that its

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