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With Echo, Amazon Creates The First Potential Hit Of IoT Era

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Last week at the Smart Kitchen Summit, people couldn't stop talking about the Amazon Echo.

Part of the reason is the event was a forward looking gathering, where folks talked about how technology will change the way we cook, shop and interact with our food, but also because voice-control just makes sense in the kitchen. The very act of cooking occupies hands and makes them dirty, so an Echo on your counter means cranking up the volume on that dinner hour playlist or moving to the next step of a recipe app no longer means grease or cookie dough on your iPad.

But it's more than that. In fact, I think the reason the Echo captured the imagination of both this group of technologists and kitchen industry people and well as consumers is that with the Echo, Amazon has created something new and different, something we really haven't seen before.

This newness has meant as an industry, we've had trouble describing the Echo. Is it a wireless speaker? A virtual assistant? A smart home interface? The reality is we like categories, buckets where we can put things and, for now at least, we haven't really created a short hand description for this new thing called Echo.

As consumers, we might explain the Echo to friends as a wireless speaker, a Siri-like remote or a home automation hub, but the fact that it almost defies description is a testament to the fact to just how different the Echo is.  It's still magical in a world where so many once-magical things like smartphones and tablets are now pedestrian.

And that in itself is amazing since, in reality, smartphones and tablets are still relatively new. In fact, they are probably the biggest product categories to emerge from the mobile computing era, but as we move into what some are calling the third wave with the Internet of Things, it's felt like we've been searching for proof that IoT is going to be a big deal. On the industrial side we already know this, where IoT tech has meant hundreds of millions of dollars in increased efficiencies and billions of dollars added to top line revenue for companies like GE and IBM . In the consumer world however, IoT has been a harder sell, and as we've been left trying to explain how different the Apple Watch is from older watches or how the Nest will save us money on our energy bill, it's all felt a little forced.

Make no mistake. Apple's sold way more watches that Amazon's sold Echos, but is that any surprise? Apple has a built-in audience of 5-10 million consumers that will buy anything new they create, but it still feels like the Apple Watch isn't on the same stratospheric early growth path that the iPhone or iPad were on . The Nest's early success has been more organic, but after a fast start to a million it's not clear they've continued the same momentum.

But here's the bigger point: Both of those devices are existing product categories that simply became more connected, smarter. In the Echo we have something new, the first consumer IoT product that feels as if it's born of this new era.

For that reason alone it's exciting.

Amazon itself recognizes the potential.  They've been on a hiring tear. They announced a $100 million Alexa fund to seed other hardware product with their voice control technology. The company has moved from a controlled rollout through Prime customers to pushing the Echo everywhere, this past week announced the Echo will be available at Home Depot . All indicators are Amazon's looking to propel the Echo to mass market hit this Christmas season.

Will all this investment result in the Echo going early critical and consumer success to a mass market phenomenon? Maybe. Amazon's been known to shoot it's own foot and make enemies in retail since, after all, they compete with every of them in some way, but so far it looks like the Echo could become a household word by this time next year.

Hopefully by then we'll know exactly how to describe it.

Michael Wolf is a smart home and consumer IoT analyst for NextMarket. He created the Smart Kitchen Summit, which you can now watch on video