Acceso y visualizacion remota para residencias.

Web2.0, Telematics,Homesteads.

Remote Access. By EMILY BIUSO Published: October 2, 2008

Bryan Christie

Technology has left a long line of casualties: the typewriter, the rotary phone, the cassette tape. Now you can add the housesitter to the list. Why enlist a stranger to stay in your home when, with a little wiring (or wirelessly) and an Internet connection, you can water your lawn, adjust your thermostat or turn your lights on and off from any remote location? You can even watch a live feed of your house provided by any number of hidden cameras. Home-automation systems have been available on the mass market for a few years, but the ability to control appliances in your home remotely is a newer phenomenon, according to Danny Briere and Patrick Hurley, authors of ''Smart Homes for Dummies.'' ''In the past year, you've seen the price of wireless cameras drop precipitously,'' Briere says, making these systems more widely available and affordable. On a flight to Utah for a family vacation with his wife and two kids, David Finkelstein realized that they had forgotten to set the central air-conditioner in their Boca Raton, Fla., home to vacation mode. But instead of fretting that it would be blasting away all week, Finkelstein logged on to his computer when they arrived in Utah and reprogrammed it. ''As long as I can get to the Internet, I can control my house,'' says Finkelstein, who frequently logs on to the live feed of his property while he's away, to see whether storms have blown debris into the yard. If anything's awry, he can call his service and have the problem fixed before he even gets there. Control4, the home-automation system Finkelstein uses, offers any number of customizations, starting at about $500 for a basic home-theater controller and running to many thousands of dollars for systems covering the whole house. ''The sky's the limit on price,'' Hurley says. Will West, the C.E.O. of Control4 and the father of six children, uses his own home-automation system for everything from monitoring the comings and goings of his 18-year-old son (he can program the security system to e-mail or text him with the time his son enters the house at night) to listening to three kinds of music in his bathroom at once (he has 3 zones of audio in his bathroom and 21 zones in other parts of the house). When he puts his 3-year-old daughter to bed, she pushes a button, activating her bedtime music and a timer that will dim her lights after 20 minutes. ''Little things like that make your life better,'' West says. But what about the potential dark side of all of this remote access — the constant monitoring, the obsessive-compulsiveness? Finkelstein insists that the ability to monitor his house at any time, from any location, is liberating rather than burdening. ''I don't feel obsessive or compelled to do it,'' he says. ''I feel a greater sense of security.''

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