By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
LAS VEGAS — Will West wants to neaten up your coffee table.
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Specifically, he’s looking at the handful of remotes resting there. He has a master remote that can turn on the TV and Blu-ray player — and dim the lights, lock the door, close the blinds and adjust the heat. Sound far-fetched, like something out of The Jetsons? Guess what? The year 2062 has arrived.
West says his firm, Control4, had $70 million in revenue in 2009, selling home automation systems and products at some 1,600 dealers around the USA. In December, Las Vegas’ newest hotel, the 4,000-room Aria Resort & Casino Las Vegas, welcomed guests with a Control4 system. It turns on the TV automatically when you enter the room and greets you by name on the television.
“We grew by double digits last year, in the absolute worst of times,” says West, co-founder and CEO. “This suggests that automation of the digital home is happening. It’s real.”
West, 47, is no newcomer to the automation field. He’s been working at it since the early 1990s, when he left Procter & Gamble to open a small retail business in Salt Lake City with a friend, focused on installing fancy lighting and heating controls for well-heeled customers. That store, Audition, morphed into PHAST (Practical Home Automation Systems Technology) to bring automation to homes on a grander scale, but West and partner Eric Smith lost control of the company to their outside investors.
“I learned an important math lesson — that 51 (percent) is a lot different than 49, when it comes to company management,” he says.
He shifted his sights to the hospitality industry, with a pitch to Marriott about what automation could do for hotel rooms. Marriott wasn’t interested, but it did sign up West to bring broadband to hotel rooms. He helped form a company focused on that idea in the mid-’90s. By 2003, eager to return to his first love, he launched Control4 with Smith, his partner from PHAST.
West is no engineering genius. He has rudimentary programming experience. The son of an insurance executive, he grew up planning for a business career.
He graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in finance, got married, then studied at the Wharton School for his MBA.
At age 27, he joined P&G. But after two years, he decided to try the automation venture.
“I really wanted to try my hand at running things. At P&G, my day started at 5:30 … and I never got home before it was dark outside. I figured that if I was going to work this hard, I should do it for something where I at least have a little bit of a stake.”
Wowing hotel guests
At the Aria, once a guest opens a hotel room door, the lights and TV automatically turn on and drapes open. The technology lets visitors fine-tune a wake-up alarm for 6:30 a.m., with the TV to turn on at 6:35 tuned to CNN or another channel, drapes to open at 6:36 and lights on at 6:45.
Everything is set with a touch panel by the bed, resembling a digital photo frame. Guests can order room service, dim the lights, even check an airline schedule — all via a combination of infrared, wireless and Internet technologies managed by a Control4 set-top box.
In designing the Aria, resort President Bill McBeath says, the goal was to wow customers and top what previous Vegas hotels had done — a tall order, considering the nightly water show at the Bellagio and the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris Las Vegas.
“When our guests see their name on the TV and hear the music start to play when they open the door, that’s a pretty important arrival statement,” he says.
Guests were initially wary about using the automation tools, until the Aria placed cards with simple instructions in the rooms. “Even some of our older, less-technology-savvy customers get it. It’s easier than running a computer at home.”
The new technology on display at the Aria is available now for consumers at home, in stores such as Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater centers and Chicago’s Abt. West’s challenge is marketing the possibilities.
“Education is an expensive and timely proposition,” says Bill Ablondi, an analyst at Parks Associates, who covers energy and the building industry. “It’s going to take some time.”
Control4’s system begins with the remote and a set-top box that talks to the remote. From there, you can add features. Magnolia sells and installs Control4 products at 53 stores and will expand the line to all 380 stores by year’s end, says Magnolia Chief Operating Officer Steve Delp.
“So far, it’s been more wealthy consumers than mainstream, but it’s getting more mainstream every day,” he says. Costs for the systems range from $899 to $1 million, Delp says.
New for 2010 are products from Sony, Pioneer, LG and Panasonic that have Control4 technology built into TVs, Blu-ray players and phones.
The automated home
West doesn’t just talk the automation talk. He uses the technology to put his youngest children to sleep…
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