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12 Influential Smart Home Inventions, and Why They Matter

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Being influential doesn’t always translate to direct commercial success.

This pattern is the most visible in the music industry, in which many trendsetting bands often fail to achieve mainstream popularity. Artists like the Dead Kennedys, Kraftwerk, and Captain Beefheart all pioneered genres, but this translated to limited amounts of fame and fortune.

Such a paradigm can also be seen in technology, where it’s simply not possible for every new product to become the next iPhone. Like music, some tech products are well before their time, while others serve as important sources of inspiration before they ultimately fizzle out.

Influential Smart Home Inventions

Today’s infographic from The Zebra looks at the smart home inventions helping to define the future of the nascent home IoT market.

The devices listed below may not all be massive commercial successes like the Google Nest, but many of them will be cited as influences in helping shape the smart home.

12 Influential Smart Home Inventions

The above smart home inventions range from inactive projects like the Jibo social robot, which ran through its $73 million of funding, to more commercially successful and widely available products like the Sonos smart speaker and the Google Nest smart thermostat.

While they’ve had differing levels of adoption and success, all of the above products are expected to be major influences on the smart home market going forward.

Smart Influence

To see why these products are so interesting, let’s take a deeper look into some key spaces:

1. Utilities

Before smart technology, most home utilities were controlled inefficiently and crudely.

However, devices like tado° and Nest have shown that temperatures should be optimized based on the habits of the people that occupy the home, rather than via manual controls. To accomplish this optimization, tado° adjusts air conditioning or heating based on how close a user is to returning home, while Nest programs itself based on the users’ schedule.

Theoretically, these both allow for significant savings on energy bills, and future smart home inventions will likely follow in similar footsteps.

2. Security

In the past, if you were gone for a long time, your best option may have been to have friends, family, or neighbors check up on the property.

In the smart home era, security is quickly becoming a priority so that keeping an eye on your property can be easier, safer, and more effective. App-controlled smart locks like August can grant access to visitors via “virtual keys”, while Cocoon senses disturbances in the home and alerts users via smartphone.

3. Health and Entertainment

You do most of your living at home, and the smart home aims to make this experience healthier, while also making it convenient and pleasurable.

Smart home inventions such as Awair will allow you to monitor and analyze your home’s air quality, while detecting harmful allergens and irritants in real-time.

On the entertainment front, it’s worth noting that one of the most influential devices in this category — the Jibo social robot ⁠— has gone belly up. Despite this, it is commonly speculated that the robot was well before its time, and there are now a variety of companies working on similar ways to bring AI and robotics to the home.

The Future of the Smart Home

In the next decade, the smart home is expected to grow even more autonomous.

New products will be responding to trends pioneered by many of the above products, such as voice control, homeowner data sharing, appliance connectivity, AI integration, sophisticated security systems, and smart kitchen devices.

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Ranked: Largest Semiconductor Foundry Companies by Revenue

Most of the 10 largest semiconductor foundries in the world, are headquartered in just three Asian countries, accounting for 90% of the entire industry’s revenue.

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A cropped chart showing the largest semiconductor foundry companies by their percentage of global revenues in Q1 2023.

Ranked: Largest Semiconductor Foundry Companies by Revenue

They’re in our phones, cars, planes, and even fridges.

Semiconductor chips have become critical for the modern way of life, and the biggest semiconductor foundry companies rake in billions of dollars from widespread demand.

This chart shows the largest semiconductor foundry companies by their percentage of global revenues in Q1 2023, using data sourced from Trendforce.

ℹ️ We highlight data for companies that only operate foundries (fabrication plants) that manufacture chips for clients, also known as a “pure-play” foundries, as well as companies that design and manufacture their own chips, known as integrated device manufacturers. “Fabless” manufacturers that only design and don’t manufacture their own chips are not included.

Semiconductor Foundry Companies by Revenue

At the top of the list and dwarfing every other company by revenue share is TSMC which earned 60% (or nearly $17 billion) of the entire industry’s revenue in Q1 2023.

Founded in 1987, TSMC is a pure-play foundry that has become Taiwan’s largest company and manufactures products for a host of clients including Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD.

RankCompanyCountryRevenue
(Q1 2023, USD)
1TSMC🇹🇼 Taiwan$16,735M
2Samsung🇰🇷 South Korea$3,446M
3GlobalFoundries🇺🇸 US$1,841M
4UMC🇹🇼 Taiwan$1,784M
5SMIC🇨🇳 China$1,462M
6HuaHong Group🇨🇳 China$845M
7Tower Semiconductor🇮🇱 Israel$356M
8PSMC🇹🇼 Taiwan$332M
9VIS🇹🇼 Taiwan$269M
10DB Hitek🇰🇷 South Korea$234M
Other$556M
Global Total$27,860M

Note: Revenue based on the following conversion rates: USD 1 = WON 1,276; USD 1 = NTD 30.4.

Well behind TSMC in foundry revenues is integrated device manufacturer Samsung, the biggest company in South Korea, which made $3.4 billion (12.4% of the industry’s revenue) from its semiconductor manufacturing business.

GlobalFoundries from the U.S., UMC from Taiwan and SMIC from China round out the top five, with each taking home around 6% of industry’s revenue share in Q1 2023. The former spun out from AMD’s manufacturing arm when the company went fabless in 2009.

Industry concentration is apparent in semiconductors. For example, the top 10 semiconductor foundry companies account for 98% of the entire industry’s revenue. Furthermore, 90% of the market is dominated by companies in just three Asian countries: Taiwan, South Korea, and China.

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