When couples have issues communicating, they go to a relationship counselor. When all the Internet of Things products in a home require 17 different apps to operate because they don’t communicate with each other, who do they go to?
If creator Urlich Frerk has his way, they will go to JUCEBOX, a universal device communicator capable of translating between the four main communication langagues used to code the IoT products. This allows those invested in the increasingly fragmented IoT ecosystem to take comfort knowing anything they have bought or will buy are all usable together with JUCEBOX, future-proofing homes for the foreseeable future.
How exactly it all functions, outside of mock-ups of an app and web portal through which everything is controlled, remains to be seen. For $640, backers can skip the speculation and get their very own JUCEBOX in April 2016. The campaign hopes for $168,000 by August 19th, 2015 to make it happen.
JUCEBOX will compete with other smart home hubs such as Revolv (acquired by Google’s Nest division). If it functions as described, is potentially the holy grail of IoT. Increasing fragmentation due to the lack of interoperability between devices and platforms plague the golden promises of a connected life, turning more and more of the mainstream off to what it can do. That potential remains to be seen, though, with JUCEBOX’s campaign being extremely vague at how this is done besides saying it’s possible.