Filling the gap in home automation

Mar 1, 2006 So it's been a wild week here, going none stop presenting to some of the major leaders in the telecom and tech space here, meeting with clients and talking with interesting new companies. That and an occasional stop for some really good Falafel and Hummus.

Today, I had the chance to sit down with Oded Vardi, the CEO of new company called Superna that's just coming into market in the US. Never heard of Oded, he's been a VC and entrepreneur here in Israel for years but you might have heard of older brother Arik, or his farther Yossi. The had a little company called Mirabilis that developed a cool chat application called ICQ. Yep, that Vardi. Today Oded is running Superna, a company that we built out of the need for an affordable platform to do total home control. Essentially, they've built a platform that's easy enough for high end consumers or places like the Geek Squad to totally build a command and control system for a fraction of the costs of the high end systems, Their magic is that they can take any old device from a DVD player or TV set to a light bulb and turn it into a UPNP device that can be managed from a touch panel or the like. There's a slick software interface to build the command and control which can then be operated on a PDA, touchpanel, TV set or even a plug-in to Windows Media Center. It's a simple demo but powerful enough to bring the geeks in the audience salivating. We've seen a huge gap in the market between low end solutions like X10 (Superna can also plug into X10 stuff as well) and the really high end stuff. If they can tap into the technical installers like the Geek Squad, the AVI installers who do home theater or alarm systems as well as the high end consumer channel, this company is going to go places. The cool part is that it's all Linux based and I suspect that community is going to have a field day with this stuff as it comes to market. Definitely a highlight of the trip for me. Cant wait to get one for the digital domain back in NJ.