Atomity: Hal Does Your House Work?

Everybody knows that the name of the rogue computer ‘HAL’ in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001 stands for ‘IBM’, and many of us have shared the nightmare of technological domination in a world controlled by malevolent, or simply soulless robots.

José Mª Vázquez on the other hand would probably just press Ctrl Alt and then get on with the job of turning our current stupid homes into smart houses, with the help of increasingly clever domestic devices.

‘Chema’, as his friends and mechanical slaves call him, is the CEO of Atomity, a Valencian company that would like the devices in your house to talk to each other, and to give you, in this way, a better, more efficient service. At least that’s what he says.

Atomity is his brainchild, although it’s not an only child. Before Atomity Chema founded Indomo, and before that he worked in similar companies, such as Fermax and Omnilogic.

As a Telecommunications engineer, trained at Valencia’s Polytechnic University, where Atomity now has its headquarters in the entrepreneurial development unit, Chema’s restlessness to broaden his and our technological horizons has taken him to Britain and Germany, where he forged his current skills as a technological innovator and organiser.

The rest of the Atomity team consists of Luis Martínez as the Chief Financial Officer, with ample experience in the Valencian economy; Vicente Hernández the Chief Technical Officer with experience in, among other places, Microsoft in London.

Carlos Lorente, Telecommunications engineer with a Master Degree in Home Automation is the Product Manager.

Atomity’s star product is called ‘Master Server’, which is a hi-tech way of simplifying and gathering together the technology in a house or business, so that the occupants can have a better control over how and when their devices and electrical appliances are working, whether the human ‘Master’ is at home, or just a brief computer click away.

The system also has a series of recipes, so that commands can be pre-programmed to deal with foreseeable situations, and to take appropriate action, such as turning off devices and adjusting lighting and heating when you go to bed or fall asleep on the sofa watching Big Brother,Version 247.

Master Server also informs you (no doubt with a seductive voice or sexy scrawl) when situations arise that may need your attention; like if your 4 year old son is setting the temperature to 40 degrees in July and locking himself in the fridge.

The idea of Atomity obviously makes sense because, after only a few months since the company’s launch, they already have customers in Belgium, France, Germany, China, South Africa and the Middle East, although not on any space shuttles as far as I know.

Their other main product is ‘Stuff Finder’, which doesn’t tell you where you left the damned car keys (or the damned car!) as I had hoped, but enables you to connect to your home or business from afar without having to pay for the services of a benevolent telephone company.

Among their plans for the immediate future is a visit to the Big Five Trade Fair at Dubai, because Atomity is hoping to put Valencian technology on the global map if everything goes well.

In conclusion, if you know what’s good for you and your personal economy, you’d better start getting those devices talking to each other if you want to live in a smart home and not a cold pizza hut, and don’t worry about any of that science fiction nonsense about robots talking over the world; this is still a democracy, which means we have the right to speak our minds and say what we think; but say it quietly, just in case they are listening.