New Samsung Platform

Samsung has released a new Robot called Otto that is said can control your Smart Home. Why does this mean for SmartThings. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/meet-otto-samsung-cute-personal-104555118.html

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Otto is using the ARTIK platform. Here is more on how this is connected to SmartThings:

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It certainly looks like there’s some internal competition going on at Samsung. For more Artik discussions look at this thread: Samsung Artik Cloud adds Echo and IFTTT integration!

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One might wonder if it’s competition or Samsung’s plan to convert its IoT business model into an expensive fee based model?

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It’s Samsung. They are very well known for two things…

Fee based and expensive!

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Ouch, this doesn’t look promising for the SmartThings family.

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I find it curious that Ubergizmo claims that SmartThings have been absorbed by ARTIK.

From a high level, ARTIK now encompasses every Samsung IoT efforts, going from hardware to software to data hosting and processing. ARTIK is an end to end label that represents Samsung’s current IoT push. All the names such as Smart Things, Smart Things Cloud, SAMI… are now part of ARTIK.

Yeah, they likely got that part wrong. “SmartThings” is likely to still be the brand for consumer-facing efforts, including the new TV feature.

The same article said:

With ARTIK(2016), Samsung is pulling together all its non-consumer IoT efforts under one, more coherent effort with a unified branding.

Which sounds more on point.

They probably got confused by the fact that the “SmartThings open cloud” did get absorbed into Artik, but it never had anything to do with the SmartThings hub anyway. :sunglasses:

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Exactly @JDRoberts.

Artik is more about device on boarding into the Samsung IoT ecosystem.

A good way to think about this is:

SmartThings = The Home
Artik = Full stack IoT product induction

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And not only they. Samsung has been very successful confusing everyone. :smiley:

Samsung also owns SmartThings, and lots of people like SmartThings things! So how does SmartThings relate to Artik? Guess what — it’s confusing:

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All this conjecture is completely false.

I saw a lot of confusion about this during the week, and will consider a post to clarify. But in a nutshell:

Artik is fundamentally about creating new connected devices, from scratch (from silicon up), and aims to make that simpler. It spans industries and verticals. It doesn’t provide a consumer app or platform or channels.

SmartThings is focused on consumers and their smart homes. We are open to products spanning multiple underlying technologies (of which Artik will just be one of many), and aim to make them smarter through our engine for SmartApps and services.

The two are complimentary. SmartThings loves seeing more devices getting invented (which Artik helps). Artik wants to help the subset of device makers using its tools who are creating consumer products to bring their products all the way to market and let them interconnect with other ecosystems and consumers (which SmartThings enables).

Hope that helps.

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On the other hand, ARTIK promotes openness in terms of connecting any device to their cloud via industry standard protocols: MQTT, HTTP or web-sockets, while SmartThings is effectively closed to third-party devices. I.e. the only supported methods of connecting third-party devices is either using the hub as a bridge (very unreliable and buggy) or via custom HTTP endpoint, which is also very limited and quirky. No server push, no web sockets, no MQTT. This is not what I’d call a modern and forward-looking IoT platform.

The two are complimentary. SmartThings loves seeing more devices getting invented (which Artik helps).

I understand that ARTIK is targeted at OEMs to help them connect their gadgets to the cloud (as do at least a dozen other IoT platforms available on the market today). What I don’t see is how SmartThings is complimentary to that objective. If I (an OEM) decide to use ARTIK cloud for my connected gadget, I’ll probably develop my mobile app to connect directly to ARTIK. It provides all necessary tools - device management, APIs, storage, etc. Why would I want to pull SmartThings with is own incompatible API into the mix?

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