Interview with Nilesh Jain, Director, PicoStone
Technology is innovating rapidly and so is the way we function. From connected light bulbs, to plant sensors, to smart locks, home automation technology is evolving rapidly. Today, we can control most of the devices in our home, thanks to the makers of this technology. IoT India Magazine interviewed one such company – PicoStone which helps you make your home smarter. It provides you with your Smart Home Assistant – Butler – to automate your tasks. We interviewed Nilesh Jain, Director, PicoStone to understand how PicoStone products can change our way of living. With over 20+ years of entrepreneurial and operational experience, Nilesh has a proven track record of building and managing companies, revenue centers as well as developing strategies to improve businesses. IoT Mag: Tell us something about PicoStone. Nilesh: “I want to live the future”, I spend a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs about breakthrough technologies. In short, the distant future is no longer distant.  The pace of technological change is rapidly accelerating, and those changes are coming to you very soon, whether you like it or not. We have a choice: to build an amazing future, “Star Trek”.  We are only starting the greatest shift, this shift, though, is both broader and deeper. AI is going to be in our phones, cars and homes; it will be our friend and personal assistant – and will take the role of our Butler. In an energy conscious world, we still waste a lot of electricity due to our inability to have complete control of our electrical devices. We, at Picostone are working towards eliminating this inability with our innovative devices and solutions. We give our users a complete control of their electrical devices at their fingertips and also help them save on their energy usage. Currently, we bring you a small range of devices that are market ready and a huge pipeline filled with some amazing interconnected “PICO” devices that will change the way you live. We strongly go by the concept – “Why do it yourself, if technology can do it for you”. The humongous gap between the technology available in the market and the ‘If only there was simpler way to control this’ thought process, along with our desire to innovate something new, inspired us to venture into this particular sector. Automation at a personal/home level is considered to be one of those “Bucket list”,”Only for Techie”, or ”Only If I had the money to do it” kind of things, and all we want to do is break all these myths, and work towards making it a “You Want, You Own It” sort of a technology. IoT Mag:  Would you like to share with us about the various products at PicoStone? Nilesh: With a lot of products and solutions already in the pipeline, we have the following products that we’ve released for Beta testing – The Butler – Your personal smart home assistant The butler will control your smart home devices for you. It will learn how you interact with your devices at home and with time suggest you the best ways to use them to save energy. The features and services offered by the butler are going to be very synonymous with its name. It is still in a very nascent stage, and the roadmap for its development is really broad and one which we are extremely excited to work upon. Basic – The Basic is like an extended limb to the butler that controls your tube lights, LEDs, dimmers and fans. We have optimized the device design to be able to fit into the existing home architecture without you having to take the pain of rewiring and digging a hole in your pockets. Polar – The polar a small plug like device which lets you control your Air conditioner, TV and set up box. The operations of polar coupled with the Butler’s artificial intelligence will help you use your ACs optimally. Our personal favorite feature of this duo is the location based operations, wherein the butler operates your AC based on your GPS location to give you an amazing automation experience. IoT Mag:  What are the 3 most unique features of PicoStone products? Nilesh: We are striving to make products and an ecosystem which gives our users the best user experience. To summarise the features our products would offer, we consider 3 layers. AUTOMATION – hardware and sensors, EXPERIENCE – Gestures, Voice and touch based system, and INTELLIGENCE- Artificial intelligence with self-learning platform. The ever learning and improving smart home assistant to automate various tasks for you Energy saving by detection of inefficient usage of home appliances The ease of use on both, hardware and software level (Our hardware products are as good as DIY installations) IoT Mag:  What are the requirements/ pre-conditions for the customer before using PicoStone Products? Nilesh: All a customer would need is a smart phone and a Wi-Fi enabled internet connection. IoT Mag:  Would you like to highlight the benefits of using PicoStone products to the customer? Nilesh: Using Picostone products would give the user A personal smart home assistant to allowing him/her to control and monitor his home. Savings on his/her electricity bills. A lot of free time by automating his/her routine tasks. IoT Mag:  How do you see the competition for PicoStone products in the Indian market? Nilesh: Picostone will be smart homes killer user interface! For PC it was the mouse, for phones it was the touch screen and for smart homes it will be ‘Picostone’s Butler’. We believe user experience is of utmost importance in this industry that’s where we would like to focus and be hardware agnostic in the future. With the right approach, the perfect partnerships/networks, and the right team efforts, working around this huge ocean of sharks is really going to be simpler than we expect it to be. IoT Mag:  Would you like to share roadmap/plans of PicoStone in the near future. Nilesh: The beta versions of our products are ready and we are constantly working on making them better based on the feedbacks we receive. We have a lot of innovative products/solutions in the pipeline and we’ve already started working on them as phase 2 of our mapped timeline. We wish to contribute as much as we can to the IoT industry with our innovations and solutions, to make everyone’s personal space simpler and automated
Technology is innovating rapidly and so is the way we function. From connected light bulbs, to plant sensors, to smart locks, home automation technology is evolving rapidly. Today, we can control most of the devices in our home, thanks to the makers of this technology. IoT India Magazine interviewed one such company – PicoStone which […]
Technology is innovating rapidly and so is the way we function. From connected light bulbs, to plant sensors, to smart locks, home automation technology
["Home Automation", "Interviews and Discussions", "IoT"]
["Home Automation", "Go", "API", "artificial intelligence", "programming_languages:R", "AI", "innovation", "programming_languages:Go", "automation", "R", "IoT", "Interviews and Discussions"]
["AI", "artificial intelligence", "R", "Go", "API", "automation", "innovation", "programming_languages:R", "programming_languages:Go"]
Manisha is a Senior Content Analyst with Analytics India Magazine.  Apart from writing &amp; editing articles and taking interviews, she is also responsible for covering analytics news, and handling social media for AIM.  She can be contacted on manisha.salecha@analyticsindiamag.com.