Is the connected home possible without a walled garden?

We live in a brilliant time when doors open without keys and coffee brews itself. Refrigerators come with sensors and cameras to track what’s inside your fridge. We’ll have an incredible 500 devices per home by 2022, according to Gartner. But with so many devices running on different platforms, we risk ending up with a mess of separate walled gardens.

If these devices are to communicate with each other, share data securely and privately, and offer good user control, we’ll need to move to open standards. But big players in the home-connectivity space have conflicting ideas of how this should play out.