Smart Home is more popular than ever: Alexa is moving into more and more households, vacuum cleaning robots do the housework and thermostats regulate the heating automatically. This is also evidenced by the steadily increasing number of users on the Internet portal homeandsmart.de. “Smart Home and Internet of Things are important areas in the future digital energy world. Public utilities and energy suppliers must face up to these new developments”, says Dr. Thorsten Radensleben, CEO of Badenova, explaining the company’s commitment to homeandsmart.de.

Since January 2017, the homeandsmart editorial team has been reporting on current market developments. The establishment of the young company is the result of a trustful cooperation between the European innovation engine InnoEnergy and its two partners Badenova and Thüga. InnoEnergy has not only launched the initiative and actively built up the start-up within the framework of its Market Creator offering, but has also successfully established a sustainable business model on the market with the partners involved from the start. Within just two years, an idea had become a success, and together the project partners managed to create the market leader in the fast-growing smart home sector within a short space of time.

“With homeandsmart, we have established a digital platform for the Thüga Group that offers our approximately 100 partner companies in Germany the opportunity for a quick and successful entry into the promising business with smart home products and services,” explains Michael Riechel, CEO of Thüga.

Today, the platform is the leading portal for the topics Smart Home and Language Assistants in Germany with an average of over 1.2 million page impressions per month. The multimedia information offering consists of product tests and comparisons, including assessments and analyses, which offer the end customer orientation and advice in this market segment. With the new owners, homeandsmart also intends to further expand its role as the first information platform on the Internet for modern, sustainable, connected living and housing. “In the future, homeandsmart will position itself even more strongly as an information platform on the Internet for modern connected living. We want to further expand our leading market position,” says David Wulf, Managing Director of homeandsmart.

The online portal with its content and other online services are also offered as white label products for municipal utilities, which can integrate them into their own online presence. This enables the municipal utilities to position themselves comprehensively on new digital topics at an early stage and offer their own customers comprehensive information. The reverse is also possible – utilities can place their innovative offers directly on the homeandsmart portal and thus present them to a broad customer group. “For municipal utilities and energy suppliers, homeandsmart can thus be the first building block for a digital business model and, as a platform for smart products, drive forward the transformation of the energy sector,” says Dr. Christian Müller, CEO of InnoEnergy Germany in Karlsruhe. “We are proud to have turned an idea into a successful brand with our partners in such a short time – a cooperation that bears real fruit.”