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Let me take you back to the first decade of the 21st century which is often regarded as the decade of innovation, the one that witnessed many revolutionary technological inventions. During that time, the consumer home was changing in many exciting ways with an influx of new and improved entertainment devices, home theater systems, home automation products and more. Since launch, Nevo line of products have been changing what an ultimate home control solution should look like, and has been constantly finding new ways to put consumers in charge of their devices and services at home, all through elegantly designed products and experiences. This post is dedicated to each and every member of Nevo Labs who have contributed in building these great products that are still an inspiration for one and all. Nevo Nevo – New Evolution in Home Control, symbolizes our vision and journey of building an extensible smart home platform, beginning at a time when even the idea of a connected home was in its infancy. Nevo, at its core, is focused on the consumer experience of interaction with devices, content, and services within the home. Identifying and solving friction points in upcoming technology and industry trends, starting from digital media streaming even before it was a common use case, or addressing smart home fragmentation before it was identified as a major friction point in market adoption. Nevo was designed in all its embodiments for simplicity where users, ranging from CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design And Installation Association) experts to novices could set up, control and interact with all their devices. Evolution of Nevo Products The Nevo line of products have evolved in many different forms for both retail as well as CEDIA professional installer market, offering a range of features through different products such as Nevo iPAQ, NevoConnect, Nevo S70, Nevo SL, NevoStudio, Nevo Home and recently previewed Nevo.AI In this post, we will discuss a few Nevo products. More detailed Nevo story can be found here. 2001: Nevo on iPAQ In the year 2001, the very first embodiment of Nevo was released. A Personal Digital Assitant (PDA) built by HP (Compaq at that time). This consumer-facing retail product targeting busy professionals came embedded with Nevo application and offered full touchscreen capabilities. UEI’s blaster chip inside made this device a full-blown universal control device, and the intuitive graphical user interface enabled simple gesture control of almost any system in the home. Predicting the expansion of digital media and personal content in the home (although a bit too early!), Nevo allowed the users to browse digital media content across devices. In order to complete the experience, Nevo also included a complete bundle of media server & player that could make users’ content on personal computers accessible across home networks. As the next natural step, Nevo was integrated on Viewsonic Smart Displays (the predecessor to what we call Tablets now, what Steve Jobs is said to have initially questioned as a viable product and yet he created the best version of!). These devices offered a much larger surface for home control, and we could always see how they could benefit the experience as a second screen in the Home.  However, these products were limited to a small segment of the market, and never made it into the mainstream, partly due to price points as well as other technological gaps that still existed in the home. Team Nevo had already started working on the next set of products. 2005: Nevo SL Numbers suggest that in 2005, about over 25 million homes in the US had an installed network of over 200 million music tracks and 80 Billion digital photos in a year and consumers were looking for new means and solutions to control their devices as well as the digital media. Launched in 2005, the first generation product of this family, Nevo SL was the universal controller that intuitively delivered a complete A/V (Audio/Video) and digital media control for a networked home. This phenomenal product was extremely popular among the professional installers that enabled customized solutions in many high-end consumer homes. Nevo SL was the universal controller that intuitively delivered a complete A/V and digital media control for a networked home. The final sketch of Nevo SL proudly signed off by the design team as they continued to work on the next designs can be found below. Nevo SL came with a complete suite of tools and services, including configuration software and cloud services- NevoStudio Pro, designed with a simple drag and drop interface to customize and program the Nevo controllers. Nevo SL, an intuitive Windows CE based computing device capable of running a range of applications, and powered with infrared for A/V control and Wi-Fi for digital media control. It incorporated the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) protocol to discover and interact with any new digital media content and devices. It also had an optional NevoLink, an IP-addressable networked infrared (IR) blaster that enabled multi-room control of devices. Nevo SL could be completely customized in order to match the home theater systems. It offered state of the art technology that came with capabilities that were beyond regular device control as it enabled the users to interact with their devices. Read More “Nevo SL, with its hybrid or multiprotocol (IR and Wi-Fi) support and UEI’s connectivity software, is cool, useful, and certainly a contender to win the hearts and minds of consumers,” said Tricia Parks in 2005 in an interview to Business Insider. Read More “Nevo SL, with its hybrid or multiprotocol (IR and Wi-Fi) support and UEI’s connectivity software, is cool, useful, and certainly a contender to win the hearts and minds of consumers” 2005: NevoStudio Let us start with a simple example where a consumer bought an installation service and made a request that the lights and TV in the house should turn off every Monday at 10 PM. In another request, a consumer wanted to set up some kind of vacation mode that gets activated when the family was away. How would installers achieve something like this back in the day? NevoStudio software suite provided a complete visual programming interface to enable the professional installers to customize and program the Nevo controllers with simple drag and drop operations. No coding required unless they really wanted to! It was flexible and easy to configure software that could meet the requirements of the customers. At the simplest form, imagine a series of “if-this-then-that” rules, to …

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