About a year ago, Dory Yacobian’s kitchen got a taste of the future.
Her kids had fun with the wireless touch-screen computer mounted on the refrigerator. She was delighted with the combination TV-DVD player-Internet browser mounted under her cabinets. And she loved the online oven, which would let her turn down the temperature on the lasagna from a dozen miles away.
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“It gave me a wonderful feeling of control,” said Yacobian, a Needham, Mass. resident who works at the Boston Stock Exchange. “I hate to be a slave to the kitchen.”
It was fun while it lasted, but the nice people from Whirlpool wanted their toys back. They were loaners, part of an experiment run by Internet Home Alliance, a consortium of computer companies, along with Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Whirlpool Corp. They got together to find out whether Internet junkies were interested in putting their kitchens online.
It sounds like a goofy idea from the pages of Wired magazine, circa 1999. The great Internet folly was still upon us, and people figured you could solve any problem with a Web browser.
People back then were buying and selling dog food on the Internet. Why not put our home appliances online? Today we’re back to buying our dog chow the old-fashioned way, but the dream of the wired appliance is still with us.
Jay Heuer, director of corporate innovation and technology at Whirlpool, is looking for the next great product, in an industry whose products have scarcely changed in the last few years.
Stoves, refrigerators, microwaves — they’re all commodity products now, and consumers pay more attention to price tags than brand names.
“It’s not fun to be in an industry that’s only driven by price,” said Heuer. “We’re going to turn that on its head.”
Whirlpool is hoping that network-savvy appliances will let it scramble ahead of its rivals. The problem is figuring out whether people really want them, and how Whirlpool can build them.
It’s a lot tougher than plugging in a few more microchips. We’re talking about machines that routinely last 15 or 20 years. The network equipment inside them must be just as reliable. And the network connections have to work seamlessly. You can’t expect consumers to reboot their stoves.
Next, how will you connect them to the network? Few homes have ethernet cables in the kitchen. Your wireless appliances could use WiFi wireless networking, but that’s relatively expensive, can be difficult to set up properly, and suffers from radio interference problems that could ruin a meal.
Heuer favors powerline technology, which would let the appliances talk to one another simply by plugging them into an electrical outlet.
Now, which appliances need networking?
The refrigerator is a tempting target. Imagine a fridge that could track what’s inside and automatically notice when the milk runs out.
Trouble is, the technology for that isn’t ready. There’s no practical way to track every item. Some people have suggested using tiny radio frequency identification tags in food packages, but that would be wildly controversial and absurdly expensive.
You could install small video cameras in the fridge, so you could sit at your office computer and see if you needed to buy butter. But cameras might get blocked by cans of soda or bottles of beer. Besides, a survey conducted by the Internet Home Alliance found that most respondents just weren’t all that interested in owning a networked refrigerator.
That’s why Yacobian’s kitchen was equipped with a typical dumb fridge. The one concession to modernity was a wireless Internet tablet that mounted on the refrigerator door, to let her easily type up her grocery lists. But Yacobian didn’t use it much. She preferred the Icebox — not a fridge, but a $2,200 kitchen computer made by Salton Inc., another member of the alliance.
With a wireless keyboard you can wash in the kitchen sink, the Icebox was a better fit. And unlike Whirlpool, Salton let Yacobian keep the Icebox. She uses it as a spare TV set when her son isn’t checking the latest sports news.
But it was the networked stove that really changed how things were done in the Yacobian kitchen. It’s a Whirlpool Polara, a $1,900 range with a built-in fridge. You put cold food inside in the morning. An hour before dinnertime, the refrigerator becomes an oven, heats up, and cooks the food.
Already an impressive gadget, Whirlpool enhanced it with help from IBM Corp. Yacobian could now check up on dinner from any Web browser on the Internet, or even her cellphone. If she and the kids would be late, she could modify the cooking time, or even switch off the oven and order pizza instead.
“The one thing I wish for in life is more time,” said Yacobian. “To me, it was a tool that provided time.”
Still, is the ability to put dinner on hold worth almost $2,000?
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Even Yacobian said she’d think twice about buying a Polara oven with her own money. But Whirlpool says you will someday be able to do a lot more with a smart oven.
Say you don’t know how long to roast a turkey. Punch the bird’s weight into your Icebox computer. It will download cooking instructions from the Internet and relay them to the stove.