Right now, both Eun and Hawkinson said that there were a myriad of partnership opportunities among the various Samsung efforts like Tizen with SmartThings.
“We want to build a completely open platform,” said Hawkinson, about the increase in competition in the space. “Everything needs to be connected with tech that just works … I love all these efforts.”
It’s also a nice exit for SmartThings, which is now competing with much larger players like Google and even Apple.
If you want to get a better idea of what SmartThings does, here’s a video of Hawkinson demoing his wares at D11 in 2013:
And here’s his blog post on the sale:
SmartThings, Samsung, and the Open Platform
Friends,
Today is a big day for SmartThings. I’m excited to announce that SmartThings has been acquired by Samsung and will be run as an independent company within Samsung’s Open Innovation Center group.
It has always been our goal to create a totally open smart home Platform that brings together third-party developers, device makers, and consumers. We’re thrilled that Samsung fully supports this vision.
We will continue to run SmartThings the way we always have: By embracing our community of customers, developers, and device makers and championing the creation of the leading open Platform for the smart home. Our growing team will remain fully intact and will relocate to a new headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. In short: SmartThings will remain SmartThings.
We believe that there is an enormous opportunity to leverage Samsung’s global scale to help us realize our long-term vision. While we will remain operationally independent, joining forces with Samsung will enable us to expand so we can support all of the leading smartphone vendors, devices, and applications; expand our base of developers and enhance the tools and programs that they rely on; and help many more people around the world to easily control and monitor their homes using SmartThings.
We’re tremendously excited about the possibilities ahead, and owe a heartfelt thank you to the people who have helped us get here: our amazing customers and supporters. To all of our earliest Kickstarter backers who believed in our vision; to our incredible investors and advisors, to our partners who have helped us to reach the world, to our community of developers whose contributions continue to propel the open Platform, to our all of our customers whose feedback, encouragement, and stories have driven us; and to our wonderful and growing team whose tireless work has helped propel us to where we are today: We cannot thank you enough.
Onwards!
– Alex
(Redcode.net)
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