All Samsung products to be internet ready by 2020
06 Jan 2015
All Samsung Electronics products would be internet-ready within five years as Asia's biggest consumer-electronics company focused on the growing businesses of smart homes and smart cars, Bloomberg reported.
The biggest TV maker in the world will only sell web-connected sets by 2017, says Samsung co-chief executive officer Yoon Boo Keun who spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He added the company would also invest over $100 million in developers this year to accelerate its plans.
Samsung has been reinventing itself as a purveyor of internet-connected appliances and wearable devices to grab share of a market that might be worth $7.1 trillion by 2020.
The changes come with the controlling Lee family shifting to a new generation of leadership and as earnings fall with Galaxy smartphones getting squeezed by devices from Apple Inc and low-cost Chinese competitors.
''The Internet of Things has the potential to transform our society, economy and how we live our lives,'' Yoon said. ''It is our job to pull together -- as an industry, and across different sectors -- to make true on the promise.''
The Suwon, South Korea-based company was also developing more advanced sensors and chips for a broader range of web-enabled mobile devices, including wearables, he added.
The company unveiled more curved ultra definition TVs and announced a tie-up with 20th Century Fox for content. The company intends to expand its Milk entertainment services to internet-connected TVs, and debuted a virtual-reality video service.
In essence, Samsung's vision was that just about every device even products like chairs, that one did see technology in - would be connected and talking to each other.
At the basic level, Samsung imagined that one would be able to take off one's headphones when one arrived home and had the music one was playing automatically start up through one's speaker system.
However, Samsung envisions this connectivity extending outside of the home. For instance, at a digital kiosk, such as a map at a large mall, Samsung imagined that one's phone might automatically connect to it and change the graphic's language to whatever one primarily spoke.
According to commentators, there were obviously an incredibly huge number of possibilities when any device could talk to any other device and that was Samsung what Samsung was selling a much, much smarter future.