Interview with 4Home's Speaker

Jim Hunter, CTO and Chief Architect of 4Home, shares more about his organization...

What is your company's/division's newest initiative?

4Home is new in the area of conservation management, but we are quickly establishing ourselves as a leader. Conservation management not only encompasses the SmartGrid as defined by NIST standards today like electricity, and soon gas, but also water management. Our platform allows us to easily add these new services that equip utilities, property managers, and home dwellers alike with usable interfaces and information necessary to make a positive impact on this planet. We’ve been working with some of the brightest minds in high-tech and look forward announcing some of our partners and trials shortly.

What is your company's biggest challenge?

The fact that 4Home is a software-only ingredient platform is both a great advantage, as well as a source of big challenges. Our platform is used across multiple markets, protocols, and applications. For this reason we must have both a wide and deep level of support for devices in these various ecosystems. We are consistently pushing our ecosystem partners to bring more energy, health, and home control devices to the market.

What are your company's long term goals?

Our goal at 4Home is really simple. We are striving to make technology more usable to the average consumer, by equipping mass market providers with affordable and intuitive services.

What is your company's most successful product/service?

Our most successful product is the one that everything is built on top of, the 4Home FLUID platform. A great deal of thought and design went into our platform architecture. Because of this, we are able to provide a lightweight software solution that can easily be leveraged anytime a service is needed to connect an end user to information in an intuitive way, be that setting a thermostat in the their home from their PC at work or a notification to a mobile device to warn the user that they are about to exceed the daily energy usage setpoint they determined for themselves.

What do you perceive as your company's greatest strength?

That’s a tough question, hard to pick only one. As I mentioned before, the ability of the 4Home product to remain a pure software offering has proven to be a tremendous advantage against many of our competitors. However, I think our biggest strength is the quality of our team. We’ve brought together an eclectic and talented team with proven track records at leading high-tech companies such as Polycomm, Intel, Motorola, Covad, and 3Com. Each day I am excited to come to work to be involved in the planning, strategy, debate, and ultimately execution of our vision. We work hard but we also take time to celebrate our victories.

Jim will be speaking on June 3rd at 1:30 PM on the panel, New Applications and Services in Home Monitoring & Controls.