Soon after televisions began taking up space in our sitting rooms, the 'remote' was invented, but that should surprise no one. At first it was connected via an awkward wire, but in 1955 Zenith made the first wireless remote, although it was an occasional irritant when the sun shining on the TV would change the channel randomly.
That was the beginning of the idea that we could control things in the home. A little more than 50 years later and we are in a position to do a lot more than change channels on the television.
AMX is a Texas-based company that has been in the business of automating homes for 25 years. The firm has had an office in Hong Kong for more than 10 years and it is run by Chris Yang, who handles the local market, China and other parts of Asia.
Mr Yang said there were three areas that people normally wanted to control in the home and AMX could handle all three. 'Most people want to control devices, the environment or communications,' he said.
If you have audio-video equipment, curtains, lighting, air conditioning, or anything else that could be put under some kind of digital or motorised control, you might want a single point of access and that is exactly what the firm does. 'We have user screens from five inches square to 17 inches square, depending on what the customer wants. They can talk to each other as well; that is the 'communications' part of our systems,' he said. These control panels can connect to the front door bell, to another panel in another room and even to a standard or mobile telephone.
Van Baker, an analyst at research company Gartner, believes the key to the digital home is in networking.