Midea, Alibaba team up on Internet of Things open platform
March 29, 2014 Leave a comment
Midea, Alibaba team up on Internet of Things open platform
Staff Reporter
2014-03-20
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Midea, an electrical appliance manufacturer, signed an agreement on March 17 under which they will jointly build an open platform for the Internet of Things, allowing people to control home appliances by remote control and enabling communication between devices.=
Midea also introduced its first air conditioner that connects to the internet, which was launched on Taobao’s Tmall on Wednesday. The company stated that it plans on having at least half of its air conditioning models connect to the internet.
Users can give their orders verbally through a mobile phone app and the air conditioner will turn itself on and adjust its temperature settings. The app will also allow users to check the utility costs generated by the air conditioning and enable different temperature settings for sleeping hours, according to a summary of product features mentioned at the launch ceremony in Hangzhou.
Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma had said previously that the company’s strategy was aimed at tapping into cloud computing technology. Ma also said that the technology was the key for the future of the mobile internet, as, in future, all data and computing will be run on “clouds.”
China Economic Daily, the website of the Beijing-based Economic Daily, reported that the collaboration between Midea and Alibaba would monitor information on consumer behavior, such as what time they usually turn on the air conditioning unit and what temperatures they normally set, which will be gathered on Alibaba’s cloud platform.
The processed data will be utilized by the home appliance manufacturers.
A UBS report said that the market scale for smarthome appliances would reach 304.1 billion yuan (US$49 billion) in 2015 and exceed 1 trillion yuan (US$163 billion) by 2020 when the penetration was expected to exceed 50%.
A research center for the Internet of Things pointed out that the domestic market’s scale was expected to reach 138 billion yuan (US$22.2 billion) in 2015 and jump to 2 trillion yuan (US$322 billion) in 2020.
The smarthome appliances sector can only be developed rapidly, however, when an industrial standard is established through which home appliances of different brands can be controlled through a single app.
Some also warn about the safety of smart appliances as many cases involving Internet of Things cyber attacks have been reported.
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