What is a Smart Home?

Smart Homes for Dummies is the essential guide those of you who want your home equiped for 21st century technology. The book tells you what ou need to know about networking your house for audio/video entertainment, telephone, computer & security systems, & making them all work together.

Planning for the new home and remodeling options are covered. Practical tips tell you exactly what components are needed for various levels of automation, including what it will cost and how to stretch your budget.

The book also offers a glimpse of technology to come, how to prepare for it now and what is worth waiting for. Specific brand name products now on the market are analyzed with warnings about conflicting standards. For those who want to find out about specific topics, the book provides lists of web resources and print publications. This book will help you understand what is available in home automation and how to make it a reality in your own home

Find out more and by Smart Homes for Dummies on Amazon

Excerpted from Smart homes go mass market: Builders aim to woo new buyers with high-tech habitats By Michael Rogers on MSNBC

smart home, with automated lighting and intelligent climate control, whole-house audio-video and similar digital luxuries. Yet these high-tech habitats have mostly remained the province of either gadget-happy do-it-yourselfers or multimillion-dollar custom homes. But last week about 150 homebuilders from around the United States gathered at a posh resort in northern San Diego county - a hotbed of suburban construction-for a digital home conference. These were, moreover, mass-market home builders - the big firms that build hundreds or thousands of new homes each year with prices in the $250,000-$800,000 range.

Another important new feature is the Web-enabled house - the idea that wherever you are in the world, you can call up a Web page that lets you check on the status of your home, lock or unlock doors, and adjust lighting and temperature. Or your house can send you messages. Door sensors can tell you when (or if) the kids have arrived home; a motion sensor can tell you whether Grandma got out of bed this morning. One speaker claimed that the most commonly stolen item in homes is prescription drugs, often by workers such as cleaners or baby-sitters. "Your house can text you," he said, "that your medicine cabinet was opened at 10:45 this morning.

Both Microsoft and Intel sent top executives to meet the home builders, Intel to push its Viiv brand of chips for home electronics and Microsoft to extol a vision of the smart home with the Media Center PC as the central control interface. Brands familiar to home builders - Leviton, Honeywell, Lutron - were also much in evidence, explaining how they will fit into this new digital world. The familiar names were important: building large residential developments is an assembly-line operation. Anything new or untested can throw off the schedule, so the mass-market builders are more comfortable with brands they know.