Geek’s SmartLabs Inc Visit

By: Chief Gizmateer
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

The Geeks from Gizmos for Geeks were invited to visit SmartLabs‘ 60,000 square foot facility in Irvine, California for research for an upcoming article on Gizmos for Geeks. We were able to tour the facility and walk through their enormous factory warehouse of gizmos as well as the INSTEON home automated idea house. In addition to the tours, we were able to spend time with Dan Cregg who is the Chief Technical Officer and regarded as the “Father of INSTEON” as well as Ken Fairbanks who is the VP of Business Development. Both Cregg and Fairbanks were highly knowledgeable and able to evangelize the INSTEON technology and product lines. In fact, everyone we talked with at SmartLabs really seemed to know the products. This is a company made up of gadgetologists (or as we like to call them… gizmatologists).

We spoke at length with the Smartlabs folks about their new home automation technology called INSTEON. INSTEON sprang out of research that Smarthome started back in the early 90’s to produce enhanced and more reliable X10 products. For example, the BoosterLinc solved X10’s signal attenuation problem in powerlines by amplifying the X10 signals. Smartlabs solved this problem in INSTEON by making every INSTEON device into repeaters. Now, as more devices are added to the home automation network, the stronger the signal gets.

Read the rest of the article here.