Dubai to be home to smart technologies

Dubai: When Fayssal Daoud shows you the home of the future, he starts by showing you a small touch screen installed discreetly into a wall.

It's almost anti-climactic, but through this screen home owners can now control almost any aspect of their house or apartment. By tapping a few buttons on the screen, Daoud opens the living room curtains, turns on the lights and starts some music. Have a romantic evening planned? There's a pre-programmed button for that. Tap the pad, and the lights dim and softer music fills the room.

What if the music you want isn't there? No worries, you can just access it off of the network's storage system, where all your download movies are also stored.

Speaking of worries, the panel can also be used to access any of the home's security cameras. In this mini-apartment, there are four, and they can be viewed simultaneously.
And did I mention the robotic arm in the bedroom with the TV mounted on the end?

Forget any previous “homes of the future'' you've seen. This isn't a Disney-esq attempt at predicting what life will be like in 20 years. Everything in this home is available for installation — today.

Daoud is the chief operating office of Eon, a retail store specialising in home automation, also referred to as smart homes, e-homes, or connected real estate, depending on who you speak to.

Eon is the brain child of Leon Beuyukian, a founder and former CEO of CompuMe, a retailer of home electronics and accessories. Beuyukian opened the first Eon store, located in the Mall of the Emirates, in October of 2006. There are now stores in Festival City, Abu Dhabi and, tentatively scheduled to opene in August. a store in Dubai Mall.

But despite being open now for almost 15 months, Beuyukian has only seen an estimated 430 requests from walking customers looking for home automation. Of those, he estimates that about 25 per cent have actually had anything installed. The lack of customers isn't from lack of interest or too much competition, but from lack of knowledge about smart homes, he says.

“If we have more knowledgeable customers, our sales would shoot through the roof.''

The time it will take to develop those customers is hard to determine. Dubai is still in the early stages of smart home development says Yasir Khokhar, who leads Microsoft's digital city initiative in Dubai.

“We want to change that and make this a technology that is available to everyone,'' he says.

There are a number of reasons for the low rate of adoption. Older homes have higher installation costs — Daoud says retro-fitting older homes can add as much as 20 to 30 per cent of the cost — and property developers haven't fully embraced smart technology. Developers and technology providers, Khokhar says, need to “give a little more trust to one another''.

Having smart home technology installed isn't cheap either. Basic installation on systems that deliver audio and video start at around Dh30,000-Dh40,000. The cost for a fully-equipped two-bedroom smart home, such as the one Daoud showed this reporter, run as high as Dh110,000-Dh140,000.
So for now, the biggest installer of smart home technology is still property developers, who are offering the technology as a way to differentiate their properties, Khokhar says.

Amr Salem, the director of Connected Real Estate for Cisco, a company that specialises in installing communications infrastructure, says some developers consider smart home technology as must.

“In all the upmarket, luxury developments, it's de facto to have a smart home infrastructure,'' he says. “It will continue to grow very strongly. Developers have realised that it's not just about the gadget at the end. It's about the connectivity behind it.''
So while Eon is still the only company offering smart home technology in the retail market, the company is working with property developers.

Beuyukian says Eon currently has bids out on construction projects worth Dh400 million and expects to convert at least Dh70 millions of those bid in contracts, including some bids with DP World, by the end on the year. Eon is already working on installing smart home technology in the Al Habtoor Palm.