Home, Version 2.0

"What's been missing, and what researchers now are trying to develop, are ways to harness the hardware to run your entire house with little effort or technological savvy -- letting you turn up the heat remotely, anticipating when you want the lights on, or deciding automatically how long your food should cook... Looking for a way to save precious square feet as you downsize from a two-story colonial to a one-story villa? A new sort of water heater, demonstrated in the LifeWise home, heats the water quickly as it passes through, eliminating the need for a big storage tank and saving four square feet of closet space. It comes as a small box that can hang on the wall behind the washer and dryer."