Earlier this month at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES (News - Alert)), Tatung Co. and Arkados Group stated intentions to collaborate on the development of innovative smart home devices in the areas of home energy management and intelligent control over cloud services. Tatung is a designer and manufacturer of industrial, energy and consumer products, while Arkados is a provider of software solutions for the Internet of Things and energy efficiency.

"We are excited to be working with a company with such a strong leadership position and history in the industrial, smart grid, and consumer electronics areas," said Terrence DeFranco, president and CEO of Arkados, in a statement. "Tatung's vision and motivation of creating a fully-integrated solution benefits multiple parties, including utility companies, carriers, consumers and the general public."

In this collaboration, Arkados is to contribute its ArkTIC software solutions and development expertise, which will enable Tatung's smart home devices for home area network (HAN) applications. Arkados will also provide user control interfaces capable of running on a wide array of devices, including mobile devices.

Tatung will employ Arkados' solutions to give these devices quick time-to-market and seamless connectivity.

"Energy conservation is a key global focus and a major initiative of our Smart Grid efforts," said W. Y. Lin, president of Tatung. "With a complex system in mind and critical implementation details to address, Tatung welcomes Arkados' software development expertise in making our devices interoperable with other devices and conforming to industry standards."

Tatung also recently partnered up with STMicroelectronics NV, a provider of semiconductor solutions, to develop an array of smart home appliances that can be interconnected to form a smart home ecosystem.

These products were implemented by Tatung using platforms and reference designs developed by ST and are designed to use the HomePlug (News - Alert) powerline communication (PLC) protocols, which turn electric wires into a high-speed communication network accessible through any power outlet in a home.

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