Friday night, I was invited to attend an open house to see a  demo of a prototype product that a friend of mine has been working on for the past several months. This friend, owner and creator Derek Bartron, calls it Doggo – a fully loaded home theater system that also combines home automation and security into it’s interface.

The name comes from the British slang “lie doggo”, which means to keep out of site; a definition that is at the core of Doggo’s design. Derek and his team have bent the rules on some of the known limitations of technology to make Doggo appear as though a TV and a remote are all it takes to make this product run. In fact, a well designed server is tucked out of the way making the magic happen over 150 feet away.

Doing it Doggo Style

This is really what most consumers want. They don’t care how it works or how much RAM the rig has. They just want it to work and without a lot of hoop jumping or expense. This has been the goal of the Doggo team from day one: create the best in home automation, security, multimedia and file storage while being both cost effective and easy to use. I’ve really got to say, it looks like they’ve done a damn good job.

So what exactly is Doggo? It’s probably easier to define what it isn’t:

• Doggo isn’t proprietary software designed to work exclusively with proprietary hardware. It’s a flexible system designed to handle all types of known (and yet to be developed) home automation and entertainment technology.
• Doggo isn’t an expensive piece of hard to use technology. It’s been designed (as Derek put it) so that even his Dad could figure it out and enjoy using it. It’s also got a proposed price tag way below the inferior HTPC/automation products currently on the market.
• Doggo isn’t something that works fine at first but then starts getting sluggish and crashes frequently the more you use it. In fact, Doggo can’t be broken. Let’s say your kid gets a hold of the remote and wreaks havoc on the Doggo interface. Click the home button 3 times and it resets itself back to the factory settings without ditching important customizations or files. It also self heals. When a program doesn’t launch correctly, Doggo recognizes the error and creates a fix for it so it won’t happen the next time.

How is all this possible? Magic. I’m not going to divulge any of the secrets Derek shared with me about how Doggo works. It’s pure genius though and the best part is that he’s not showcasing any of this technology to the consumer. He’s hiding it and removing the unnecessary crap that makes existing HTPC/automation products hard to use. He’s simplifying the interface and making it intuitive. You don’t get to see how it works. It just does and it’s so freaking easy.

This weekend, I realized the home of the near future won’t have a PC sitting in a corner of the house, surrounded by bills and connected to a  mess of cables behind a designated computer desk. It will be seamlessly integrated into our homes with the rest of our entertainment and security systems. One interface controlling everything.

We’ll soon be able to  turn off the lights with same remote we use to change the channel on the TV. We’ll be able to simultaneously update Facebook while also watching the evening news on the same screen. Our house will “know” when we come home and unlock the door for us using presence sensing technology. We can tell our house to go to sleep and various programmed actions will lock doors, close windows, turn of lights… you name it.

Towards the end of the open house, it was as if a light bulb had gone off for everyone and ideas about what we could do with Doggo in our house just started popping out all over the room. Derek just kept nodding his head and saying yes, because it was all possible. I’m excited about these possibilities and I’ve barely scratched the surface on Doggo’s capabilities. Doggo is still in development but will ready within a few short months for the consumer market.

I’ll be keeping you up to date on new developments, but be sure to swing by DoggoHouse.com and read more about it.

Let’s Talk About It

• Would you want Doggo in your house?
• If you had Doggo in your house, what would you do with it?
• What “possibilities” can you dream up?

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