CES 2022: Inside the French Postal Service's IoT God Mode

'Voyeur' is a French word, but surely it means the same thing in France as it does here, right? No respectable business would want to be associated with such a word, as I had ever assumed, to the lowest degree of all a mail service.

CES 2022 Bug However, as I trudged upward a flight of stairs at CES 2022 with a lawmaking unscrambling filter in my hand, I realised how wrong I had been.

My destination is a movie theater built into the booth of La Poste, the French mail service. This is no ordinary theater, though. The screen had been embedded in the booth'south floor, and the audience stood on a catwalk above it, looking downward through the rectangular filters that we are given on the manner in. Most immediately after the movie started, it became clear that this is going to be the nigh unique thing I experienced all week, fifty-fifty at a trade show known for its quirks.

The film is designed to present La Poste'due south vision of the connected home and the Cyberspace of Things (IoT), called simply Le hub numérique (Connected Hub).

La Poste is fully aware of ZigBee and Amazon Alexa and all of the other devices and services that can make smart home products talk to each other, simply its vision is far grander: the mail service wants to build another layer of integration on peak of all of the competing protocols that can unify every single consumer IoT device and command everything through a single app. In other words, it wants to create an IoT God Mode.

Le hub num�rique (Connected Hub) The pic I watched provided a practical demonstration of La Poste's ambition.

It's filmed entirely with a camera bending perpendicular to the ground, so all you lot see are the tops of the heads of a French family as they get most their day. Each fourth dimension they interact with an electronic device, from a video game panel to an alert clock to a PC at the begetter's function cubicle, a little blurb of text appears side by side to them, explaining what data their device is sending to the Connected Hub. The refrigerator, for case, sends the expiration date of the milk inside information technology, while the lamps shows how many hours remain until a seedling burns out.

Here'south the rub: all of the text blurbs in the movie are scrambled, meaning if you want to read them to understand what data a device is sending, you lot accept to hold your rectangular decoder over information technology.

The metaphor is unmistakable, though very clever: La Poste is positioning its Continued Hub app as the missing piece of the puzzle that lets you get the information broadcast from every IoT device in i place.

La Poste did non discuss what it's doing to protect users' data, though the app has a fairly standard privacy policy.

The concept is non new, of form.

Amazon has the same goal with Alexa, as does Google with its Assistant. However, as the picture came to a close, I couldn't help but experience that the software engineers at the French mail, of all companies, had nailed the concept of the connected home better than whatsoever demonstration I've seen.

Even though the app is yet in its early stages, information technology tin can already display an immense multifariousness of data. Assuming you have the requisite sensors, information technology can show your home's energy consumption, monitor your concrete activity, alert you lot if the ambience air quality is unhealthy, close your windows, and plow any device that's connected to a smart electrical outlet on or off.

You lot can practice many of these things with third-political party Amazon Alexa skills, but you tin't visualise information technology all in i place—you lot'd accept to ask Alexa to read you that information once you get home. Although that volition be changing with the Huawei Mate 9, the first smartphone with Alexa built in. Let's face up information technology, home automation is mostly for nerdy enthusiasts, and it's much more efficient to browse data from dozens of sensors and devices in a smartphone app than by asking Amazon'southward artificial intelligence.

Le hub num�rique (Connected Hub) 1 problem with the Connected Hub is familiar to any emerging technology: information technology requires device manufacturers to become on board. Right now, there are a few large names in the IoT space that support it, similar Withings smart scales, Fitbit fettle trackers, Netatmo cameras and weather condition stations, and even Parrot drones.

All of these have been on brandish outside La Poste's CES theatre, and spokespeople I talked to eagerly espoused their adoration for the Continued Hub concept.

The far bigger problem for Americans, though, has nothing to do with applied science. It's simply the fact that this is the brainchild of the French post role, hence information technology only operates in France. Tin can y'all imagine the United states of america Postal service coming up with an idea like the Connected Hub? I can't. The deviation is partly due to the fact that La Poste is semi-privatised, and so information technology has an obligation to its shareholders to make money. It's besides due to what Axelle Lemaire, France'south Minister of Digital Affairs, described every bit the "ethos of French innovation."

"Data culture is very potent in French republic," she said during an interview at CES. "It's finally cool to exist an entrepreneur."

As La Poste demonstrated, apparently it's too cool to add together a lilliputian voyeurism to your entrepreneurship.