The part about "optimizing the assets" of the company-coupled with the fact that Insteon's cloud servers seem down for good-makes it sound like the company is going out of business. Consequently, the company was assigned to a financial services firm in March to optimize the assets of the company. Unfortunately, that sale did not materialize. The process resulted in several interested parties, and a sale was expected to be realized in the March timeframe. The goal was to find a parent for the company and continue to invest in new products and the technology. However, the subsequent (and enduring) disruption to the supply chain caused by the pandemic proved incredibly difficult and the company engaged in a sales process in November, 2021. In 2019, the onset of the global pandemic brought unforeseen disruption to the market, but the company continued to move forward. The company looked for a buyer but couldn't find one. The statement-which is not attributed to anyone-says that the company is going out of business because of the pandemic and supply chain problems. Insteon has finally updated its website ( archive here) and pinned a goodbye message to the top of every page a full week after its surprise liquidation. (An archive of Insteon's "Leadership" page, starring Rob Lilleness, has been preserved here for posterity.) Finally, he deleted his entire LinkedIn account. First, the absentee CEO removed his role at Insteon from LinkedIn, and then he cut his name and picture. Insteon CEO Rob Lilleness didn't respond to any media questions about why his company suddenly abandoned its customers, choosing instead to scrub his LinkedIn page of information. In what will probably be remembered as one of the most notorious smart home shutdowns ever, Insteon decided to turn off its cloud servers without giving customers any warning at all, surprise-bricking many smart home devices that relied on the Insteon cloud. It ain’t for rock stars, but for $499 plus accoutrements, consumers and pros alike can create a pretty nifty smart home in no time.Smart home company Insteon and its parent company, Smartlabs Inc., suddenly disappeared last week. Insteon is an RF- and powerline-enabled protocol built into a full range of home control devices including lights, thermostats, motorized shade controls, security sensors, keypads, I/O modules and more. “Ultimately we hope to support Z-Wave and UPB, but we have received so many requests for Insteon in recent years, we opted to start with that,” Stein says. Unfortunately, HomeRunner RBI only supports X10 and Insteon for home automation, as well as Global Cache products for IR, relay, IP and other communications. The software supports animated gifs so you can drop an image of a swirling fan to your room, as JDS shows in its online demo of the software (check out the living room). It’s simple to assign “hot spots” to any part of the screen so users can, for example, touch the fan to turn it on. The interface is a true reflection of the status of a room, Stein says, because the interface does not respond unless it receives a message from the system that an action was indeed implemented properly. Voila, you can virtually see the state of any given room. Then assign these images to the appropriate device states. Simply take pictures of a particular room with the lights on and off (and the shades up and down, etc.) in every combination. I had a demo of the original HomeRunner a few years ago and what can I say? It’s fun. The new HomeRunner RBI is a completely new piece of hardware and “advanced software” that enables users to create their own GUI to serve up on virtually any Web-enabled device. The original HomeRunner, introduced a few years ago, was a Windows-based software interface for Stargate. Industry long-timers might remember JDS’s flagship Stargate controller, which put many integrators into business. Through the years, the company has maintained a loyal following among do-it-yourselfers and a surprising number of pros who rely on the company’s rock-solid products (yes, even with X10) and sophisticated programming tools and rules engines. The company keeps going and going and going …. Back then, there were just a handful of systems available, and JDS was one of them. JDS and its owner Jeff Stein have been around the home automation industry for more than two decades. JDS Technologies, one of the granddaddies of home automation, has the poor man’s version of such a system called Home Runner RBI (Remote Browser Interface) and it’s pretty slick for the price. Especially cool are the GUIs that show display the room you’re controlling and let you watch the lights turn on, the fans whirl and motorized shades drop? We love showing off home automation systems with elaborate custom-programmed touchscreens.
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