This week’s Smart Living roundup features one tech giant’s acquisition of an innovative smart home startup, a smart solution for regular light bulbs, and a digital picture frame with an artistic twist.

Samsung acquires SmartThings

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has acquired SmartThings, a startup that focuses on creating connected solutions for homes.  The acquisition has been valued at $200 million, though the parties have kept mum on details.

As part of the deal, the SmartThings team will move to the Samsung Open Innovation Center (SOIC) in Palo Alto, CA.  There are fears from SmartThings fans and users, written in the comment section of the announcement, that Samsung will do more harm than good to SmartThings’ technology. But David Eun, the officer in charge at SOIC stated that it will remain an open platform allowing developers and hardware makers to build on it without restrictions –  the main reason Samsung was attracted to SmartThings in the first place.

“Samsung has been committed to smart homes and connected devices and has tried to paint this vision for a while,” Eun said. “But since consumers have lots of different devices, the trend is really toward open, and our approach is to be open and protocol agnostic.”

SmartThings bloomed from a Kickstarter project and with the acquisition, Samsung looks to strategically position itself with other big names in the smart home industry, including Google Inc. and Apple Inc.

Emberlight will spark intelligent control in any home

Image via Emberlight

Hue, LIFX, ilumi – these are just some of the bulbs commercially available today that let people remotely control when to turn lights on or off, and even change the color emitted to match the mood.  The problem with these bulbs is that you have to purchase new bulbs, and in some cases a hub to enable remote control, not to mention how pricey these bulbs can be.

Emberlight, Inc. has come up with a more affordable solution to allow any dimmable light bulb to be remotely controlled.  Called the emberlight, it is a device that you screw at the base of any dimmable bulb such as incandescent, halogen, LED, and CFL.  It uses WiFi and Bluetooth to directly connect to your mobile device and home WiFi network without needing a hub for the connection. This allows the user to turn the light on or off individually or by room, see which lights are turned on in what room, turn lights on or off with your proximity, and even control the bulbs when you’re out of the country or out of town. Not only that, the emberlight app gives users tips on how they can better save on their energy consumption.

Currently, emberlight is a project on Kickstarter Inc. and it has already surpassed its first and second stretch funding goals.  If it is able to raise $200K or more, the team will be creating a bayonet version of the emberlight so people in Australia India, UK and other countries that uses this format can easily use the smart bulb adapter without having to worry if it will fit in their existing bulb socket.

Electric Objects make rooms more interesting

Image via Electronic Objects

Digital picture frames allow you to present a slideshow of your most treasured moments in life but sometimes these frames can clash with a home’s existing aesthetics. Filling the design gaps in today’s market, Electric Objects Inc. has created EO1, an elegant tablet made for consuming digital art.

The EO1 features 1GHz dual ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 1 MB L2 cache, Neon, VFPvd16 Trustzone, 3D graphics accelerator with four shaders, two 2D graphics accelerators, 64-bit DDR3 and 2-channel 32-bit LPDDR2 at 533 MHz, 1GB RAM, 2GB Flash Memory, and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth.

For the display, the EO1 has a 23” 1080p IPS screen with Anti-Glare technology, 1080×1920 Full HD resolution, 50M:1 MEGA Dynamic Contrast Ratio, with 250 cd/m2 Brightness, and 5ms Response Time.

This digital frame rotates artwork from a network of galleries, and supports user uploads as well.  Users can track how many times and how long their uploaded work was viewed or has been on display.

Streamlining the frame’s design, the display on the EO1 must be controlled using your iPhone or Android smartphone, as it doesn’t have any physical buttons or virtual keys.

EO1 has been successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter and will start shipping on May 2015.

Image via SmartThings