We're all connected

With all of the technology available today, the world we live is becoming much smaller.

And it is also becoming a much more connected world, where systems and technologies are talking with each other, and more and more products are working with each other, all in an effort to provide the most cutting-edge and user-friendly experience for customers.

One look no further than what is going on in the residential space, with the emergence of the smart home, and smart everything, for that matter—thermostats, lights, doorbells, refrigerators—you name it.

Just this week alone, there have been a number of big announcements from major players in the smart home world, from Amazon, Google, Apple, Coldwell Banker, and even Facebook.

This week Amazon Echo announced that it now works with Sonos, the popular speaker manufacturer, so homeowners can tell Alexa to play something from their Spotify account, for example, using their voice alone. And Amazon continues to partner with companies to bring voice control to the smart home world.

And as Google prepares to launch Google Home to compete with Amazon Echo, it was announced this week that engineers responsible for the Nest Labs platform will move to Google to work on smart home projects for the company.

Also this week, Coldwell Banker announced that it is now promoting smart home staging kits that include August, Nest and Lutron products, all in an effort to be at the forefront of this smart home movement. This announcement from Coldwell Banker comes on the heels of Apple announcing that it is working with homebuilders—Brookfield Residential, KP, and Lennar—to support Apple's HomeKit in new properties.

As if that is not enough smart home news for one week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at a Facebook internal Q&A session in Rome, that he has been working on a project using AI software solutions from the engineers at Facebook to build a Smart House solution in his own home that he hopes to be able to show publicly in the next month.

While more and more companies enter the smart home space and become connected, so to speak, we are entering into an era of interoperability, where making everything work seamlessly together will become a necessity rather than a luxury, and an industry where partnering with others to maximize the customer experience will become the norm rather than the exception.