Leading industry forum HGI launches smart home task force and invites participation

6 June 2012 HGI announced today an exciting agenda for its quarterly meeting at ECE Paris (Graduate School of Engineering) from June 12-15, which will be centred on the evolution of Smart Home services and technologies. To launch the meeting, many companies from France’s emerging Smart Home ecosystem will attend HGI’s Paris Open Forum on June 12. In the remainder of the week, HGI’s new Smart Home Task Force will meet to chart the course for the service architecture supporting new usage scenarios in the digital smart home, while HGI’s other task forces will meet to continue their important work in the digital home.

The new Smart Home Task Force will set requirements for the next versions of the Software Execution Environment (SWEX) in the Home Gateway (HG), and will determine Application Programming Interfaces suitable for services deployment within the HG or within the Cloud. It will also discuss requirements for the Smart Home services themselves, M2M, next generation communications, and home energy management (HEM).

“With the launch of the new task force, as well the HGI Paris Open Forum, HGI will bring together participants who can act as catalysts in ensuring that a Smart Home ecosystem will flourish, both in France and indeed, across the globe”, said HGI Chief Technology and Business Officer, Duncan Bees. “We have had a great deal of interest from the leading organisations active on this topic within France such as Agora des Reseaux Domiciliaires. HGI’s Paris Forum will be a superb opportunity to discuss the business roles, service models and technical building blocks that will lead to creative innovation in the digital home.”

France is a dynamic country in terms of telecommunications with a market of 22.8m broadband subscribers at the end of 2011, large deployments of triple play, and massive launch of quadruple play offers in 2012. It was recently ranked 11th out of the 117 countries covered by Point Topic, a leading broadband market analysis company. France has the highest penetration of IPTV subscribers in the world (19.46%).

For additional information about HGI, including registration details for joining the HGI Paris Forum as a guest, please visit www.homegatewayinitiative.org.