Airstream has always been known for its sleek, vintage-looking camping trailers but the company's new models of Classic trailers are getting a modern upgrade with the inclusion of "Airstream Connected," a new set of app-controlled features and monitors that aim to bring smart home convenience to nomads.

A Virginia Tech team won first prize in this year's Solar Decathlon Middle East in Dubai. Their marvelous, modular, and solar-powered smart home, called the Futurehaus, uses sliding technology to adjust the height and placement of fixtures in rooms to accommodate different categories of residents.

Talk about vertical integration: Airbnb has launched a new initiative called Backyard to create new ways of designing, building and selling homes that are likely to be green, efficient, adaptable, and chock full of smart home technology, as well as being adaptable for many different types of occupants.

It looks like someone has called a truce in the smart speaker wars. In a surprise move, Amazon announced that it will bringing Apple Music to its popular Echo smart speakers starting in December, complete with voice-enabled controls and Apple's popular three-month free trial.

A team of researchers decided to test consumers' acceptance of convenience over privacy during smart speaker use, comparing their behaviors and attitudes to counterparts who refuse to embrace smart speaker technology. The results from talking to smart speaker users and non-users are pretty revealing.

Lauded designer Yves Béhar is turning his attention to California's housing shortage by working in collaboration with prefabricated home manufacturer Plant Prefab to design and build a series of tiny homes meant to live in families' backyards and that cost $300,000 or less.

Hand-washing your dishes seems logical because that's how most of us have been doing it all these years but it turns out that handwashing dishes is a counter-intuitive exercise that actually costs way more time, effort, and money than sticking all the dishes in a dishwasher.

The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation in New York City started out supporting first responders but has recently turned its efforts to building smart homes for disabled veterans that include motorized appliances, voice-activated technology, and smart security systems.

Amazon has just upped its music game for its popular Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show smart speakers by adding a new integration that allows users to play music from Pandora Premium, the ad-free music streaming service that can now be controlled by using voice commands.

You can outfit your smart home and give to a good cause this holiday season by buying Amazon's new limited edition red Echo, which has all the same features of the popular smart speaker, but has a crimson hue and donates to Project (Red), the humanitarian organization founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver.

Electronic rubbish is a drag, as more than 45 million tons of potentially hazard electronics are generated every year. That's why Amazon is introducing Amazon Second Chance, a new set of portals and tools designed to help consumers recycle, reuse, and purchase refurbished electronics and devices.

Wi-Charge is leading a new movement aimed at providing wireless power to smart home devices, starting with a kit to transform wired Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home Mini smart speakers into fully functional, untethered devices. The company has earned a CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree for its breakthrough product.

Wynd is launching a new combo package on Kickstarter that includes a brand new version of its popular air purifier as well as a new air quality monitor that can identify a variety of substances including allergens, odors, chemicals, mold, pollution and more.

Of course it lived at the United Nations for a while — this fascinating, totally off-grid tiny home is a collaboration between Yale University and Gray Organschi Architecture. The project was an attempt to produce a fully functional and sustainable tiny home at a cost of less than $50,000.

Schlage is doubling down on its growing partnership with Amazon by enabling compatibility with the Amazon Key app via the Zigbee smart home protocol in the latest iteration of its popular locks for the smart home.

For those of us who really want to get off the grid yet still have a sustainable place to live, Modern Dwellings is offering this 160-square-foot tiny home, dubbed the True Studio, that features smart home controls, heated floors, and an incinerating toilet.

Disney has always been known to sprinkle a little fairy dust on its magical experiences and it's continuing that tradition with ten new storybooks that Google Home can recognize and augment with sound effects, music and even an A.I.-enabled friction-less interface.

Jet is expanding its mission to deliver tailored shopping experiences with curated things by offering to deliver Blue Apron meal kits to discerning consumers in New York City, allowing home chefs to make four flavorful meal kits within 30 minutes or less.

LG Electronics has been expanding into the smart home market in a big way with new smart appliances designed to work with digital assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Now the company is launching two new smart ovens that are also equipped with Innit and SideChef for meal planning and recipe services.

Angee, a London-based startup with resources in San Mateo, Prague and Shenzhen, China, has pivoted its business model to a subscription-based service that will offer the company's proprietary hardware unit for a flat rate starting at $17 per month.

Facebook's latest gaffe with its users involves its new Portal smart displays, which were designed to enable video calls using Facebook Messenger. It turns out that the company technically could use the camera and mic to gather data to target users with advertisements.

Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant sometimes freak users out in spectacular and sometimes humorous ways. From F-bombs to alarms for cocaine and reefer, here are some examples of colossal smart speaker fails. Has anything weird involving smart speakers ever happened to you?

Google is understandably proud of its new Google Home Hub, which goes on sale later this month, but in a surprise move, it's bringing many of the improvements and features associated with the new device to all of the Google-enabled smart displays in its product ecosystem, including some competing devices.

GE Appliances is getting into the smart kitchen market in a big way and recently announced two big partnerships including a venture to outfit its new smart kitchen hub with the SideChef app that can access more than 5,000 recipes and a plan to integrate Hestan Cue's automation technology into its ovens and cooktops.

Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has unveiled his latest sustainable design for a Starbucks store in Taiwan that uses 29 reclaimed shipping containers to form a two-story, 3,500 square-foot store that even has a drive-through and a brightly colored wall mural that evokes the culture of the city.

A New York-based startup called Domio is bypassing the fierce competition in the traditional hotel industry as well as the hospitality market dominance of Airbnb by targeting group travelers with new "asset-light" accomodations with 2 to 4 bedrooms, dubbed "apart-hotels."

Chefling, the digital assistant geared towards home cooking, is partnering with Home Connect to bring kitchen solutions to premier smart home appliance brands like Thermador and Bosch, all through one easy-to-use app. Chefling will be a primary interface for smart home appliance brands including Thermador and Bosch.

Call it sapphire, cerulean, indigo or baby blue, but there's no denying that Google's new model of its popular Google Home Mini is a shade of blue. The new model of one of the company's bestselling products is expected to go on sale October 29th for a cool $50, unless Google has more news next week.

Ezviz, a division of Chinese-controlled Hikvision, announced a diverse new line of smart home security products that includes both wired and wireless infrared security cameras, a powerful floodlight camera for the backyard, a robust pan-tilt camera, and a pair of smart doorbells.

As if Amazon's week hasn't been busy enough, the company announced this week that it's furthering its partnership with interactive cooking platform SideChef to integrate its cooking guidance into Echo devices, including voice guidance, photography, video demos, and voice commands.

A start up operating out of the Republic of Armenia has launched a successful Indiegogo campaign to design and manufacture a smart aquarium that will automatically feed fish, monitor water quality and water levels, and let customers look at their fish via an HD camera.

A new report by Bloomberg indicates that Amazon's head honcho Jeff Bezos is considering upending the convenience store and quick service restaurant market by opening up 3,000 of his experimental, cashier-less Amazon Go stores by 2021, a move that could reinvent the shopping experience in urban centers.

A new survey about voice technology commissioned by IT analytics company AppDynamics indicates that enterprise companies aren't keeping up with millennials' demand for advancements in voice technology, and need to adapt to consumer behaviors and needs sooner rather than later.

A new Silicon Valley-based startup called Maison Me is deploying a new custom-designed clothing service that combines an A.I.-driven chatbot, hand-drawn sketches, video profiles, and smart manufacturing to produce design-to-order clothing that's cost competitive with standard retail outlets.