There are already a few home automation iPhone apps in the store, but here at CEDIA it's clear that all of the home automation heavies have definitely discovered the obvious: the iPhone makes for a great universal touchscreen remote for everything from your AC to your living room blinds to your music collection. And most of them won't make you pay the price of a snazzy dedicated touchscreen controller to get it, either. Most of them.

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In a show full of ultra high-end home theatre installations, Lifeware's LMS-810 Media Centre piece still manages to be a standout. Taking what they came with last year and doubling it, Lifeware has crammed eight CableCARD tuners (two on board and six more in the external Lifetuner box on top) into a dual Intel Quad Core, 12TB RAID 5 box that can stream out to ten Media Extenders (here, Xbox 360s driving Samsung LCDs). The box can record from all eight of its HD streams while streaming to all 10 Extenders at once, so if you've been wondering what to do with your home's 8 spare digital cable feeds, now you know. No price yet for a pre-Christmas release, but last year's model with half as many CableCARDs was US$15k.

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Recently, Disney announced the grand opening of their new Innoventions Dream Home located in Tomorrowland in Anaheim, Calif. The construction was a collaborative effort between Disneyland, Microsoft, HP, Life|ware and home-builder Taylor Morrison--so naturally the home functions more as a big advertising campaign for current products than an actual "home of the future." Still I wouldn't mind booting out the fictional Elias family from their 5000 sq ft home to get my hands on some of this tech.

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Here's two visions of our future home. One has wall-sized TVs, lots of plastic wares and all-electric grooming tools. The other, touchscreens everywhere, smart kitchen counters and auto-thermostats.

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Life|Ware rolled out what it says is the first media centre PC running four CableCARDs at the same time, and it proved to us that the whole thing actually works today at CEDIA 07. Its life|media Media Centre PC is... Read More »