Everyone is always looking for ‘the next big thing’. People play the lottery, they bet in the office football pool, and they play poker with their buddies. What I’ve come across seems to me to be a lot surer thing than any lottery or drawing to an inside straight. It’s a company called Control4 and it’s all about home automation.

You might wonder why I seem a little excited by this new (and small) company’s products. Let me tell you. The products that Control4 is putting out operate wirelessly and use IP protocols. That means, my friends, that you can take a 100 year old home and automate it as easily as you would one just being built. No wires, you know, make it a LOT easier. The fact that it operates using Wi-fi means, guess what, operation by computer is a simple software package away.

In fact, this company is rolling out new products every month. Coming soon are wireless media hubs, speakers (can anyone say ‘housewide Internet radio’?), and lots of controllers. Control is good, but what about the interface with good old Homo Sapiens? In today’s world, it has to be described as ‘very simple’. The interface unit looks a lot like a large color-screen PDA, with one large rotating knob. Oh, and a large color touch-screen (PDA, remember?). I don’t have an eyewitness account, but in the photo, it looked like Windows Mobile in a box designed by Apple Corp.

All in all, I think this is ‘the next big thing’, in a big way.