The voice-control market is seeing explosive growth in the smart home-arena. From Amazon’s Echo to Google’s Home, more homeowners are taking control over their homes, using their voice to speak commands to their home’s appliances.But some manufacturers are starting to question whether the appeal in the smart-home arena is really voice-controlled or possibly text-controlled.Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg has been working on Jarvis, his own
Homeowners with smart-home devices are ahead of the curve. Connected home solutions are still in the early adopter phase worldwide, according to a survey by Gartner Inc. of nearly 10,000 online respondents in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.Only about 10 percent of households have connected home solutions, the survey found. The survey considered “connected home solutions” to be devices and services that are connected to one another and to t
Two big selling points for your listings’ outdoor spaces are sustainability and tech friendliness. The American Society of Landscape Architects says those features were the two most popular design elements with outdoor living spaces in ASLA’s 2017 Residential Landscape Architecture Trends Survey. ASLA surveyed 817 landscape architects to determine the popularity of certain outdoor features.About 82 percent of landscape architects said that na
For years the commercial real estate market remained relatively unchanged when it came to technology, lagging behind the rest of the real estate industry during the Dot Com Boom and the more recent rise of automation and cloud-based technologies. But commercial real estate recovered following the recession and profits began to grow, attracting younger brokers with different needs than their predecessors.These shifts in the industry have led to a
Pena Station Next is a high-tech neighborhood in Denver that is serving as a smart city lab to test different technologies and show what the future could hold. The neighborhood will feature autonomous shuttles and smart home technologies interweaved into everything from kitchen tables to the light pole outside a home.Panasonic, a partner in Denver’s smart city project, recently offered a sneak peak into what the neighborhood will have. So far,
Watch the extensions of the documents you attach in your emails. Google announced it will start blocking Javascript attachments in Gmail starting Feb. 13. That is an expansion of Gmail’s already restricted file attachments, which also includes .exe, .msc, and .bat.Users who try to attach a .js file to an email after Feb. 13 will receive a notification that says the message will be blocked “because its content presents a potential security iss
The obvious password you use for your devices may be making you vulnerable to a data breach. Keeper Security, a password management software firm, analyzed more than 10 million login details leaked online through data breaches that occurred in 2016.The most popular password that continues to be used: “123456,” which the firm’s analysis showed was used 17 percent of the time by hacked accounts. The next most common password was the similar
There were plenty of new ideas, features, and designs of interest to the real estate community at the 2017 International Builders’ Show and the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show, both held in Orlando, Fla. last week. We were there to gather the top trends and buzzwords you need to know about now.Modernity in Moderation It turns out designers, home builders, and consumers have different ideas of the meaning and salability of the term “modern,"
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A security company has issued a warning to real estate professionals about a growing scheme in which criminals are hacking into their emails and sending messages to their clients to wire down payment funds to fraudulent accounts.Information security firm SANS cites an example of the "business email compromise" scheme from an email an agent recently forwarded to the company. The email was a seemingly typical exchange with a potential buyer who exp
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