AT&T's Digital Life and Drive platforms are joining forces so you can tap into your home security and automation set up straight from your car.

Inside the AT&T Drive Studio. AT&T

Today at Mobile World Congress, AT&T announced that its Digital Life and Drive platforms now work together.

Digital Life is a dealer-installed, fee-based home security and automation service that provides live monitoring as well as remote access on Android and iOS devices and computers. You have the option to choose from a handful of packages for customization, but you can also opt for a whole-home solution since the available hardware ranges from security cameras and door and window sensors to garage door openers, thermostats and smoke detectors.

AT&T's Drive initiative has locked down partnerships with Audi, BMW, GM, Ford, Tesla, Nissan, Volvo and Subaru. Its goal is to explore opportunities to inject AT&T tech into the connected feature offerings of these brands.

With this new partnership, Digital Life subscribers (with a compatible car) will be able to access the app on their vehicle's control panel or via voice control so they can check in on what's happening at home without having to grab their phone. Theoretically, then, you should be able to tell your car to open the garage door, rather than fishing around for your controller or the AT&T Digital Life app.

This sort of third-party integration is appearing on the smart-home scene with increasing frequency. Consider the Works with Nest initiative and its partnership with Mercedes-Benz. When you and your Benz are closing in on home, you can program it to trigger your Nest Learning Thermostat to switch to Home mode.

Given the sluggish smartphone market, AT&T has been working to secure new integrations and this Digital Life/Drive partnership puts that effort on full display. AT&T said that it added 800,000 wireless cars in the fourth quarter of 2014 and has plans to lasso roughly half of new US cars in 2015 and over 10 million by the close of 2017.

AT&T's Drive Studio is located in Atlanta, but you can check out an interactive demo of this new partnership in action here at Mobile World Congress 2015 in the Innovation City at stand 3A31. Be sure to check out the rest of CNET's MWC 2015 coverage.

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Now you can access AT&T's home security service from your car

It seems that everyone from home security leader ADT to the broadband and cable providers like Time Warner want a piece of the smart home. The logic goes that these companies already have existing relationships with millions of customers and importantly, have hardware in the home. Why not just layer on additional services like home energy management, lighting and thermostat controls and security?

Well apparently theyre not the only enterprise player with similar logic. In December, US Cellular announced its new home automation and security service called OnLook. Whats interesting about US Cellulars move is that it doesnt have existing home infrastructure. Rather,the company has the ability to move data over cellular networks and relationships with mobile phone customers.

Weve seen other cellular providers begin to get interested in IoT and the smarthome. Last fall, Spains Telefonica rolled out a modular IoT platform called Thinking Things. Its not quite a smart home system as much as something an early adopter would savorstackable blocks with sensors for temperature, humidity, and ambient light that can move globally with Telefonicas cellular network.

So whats at play here for the cellular providers? At a basic level, no one wants to be a dumb pipe and the cell providers dream of selling services atop their networks refuses to die (Remember Verizon VCast?). So if US Cellular can figure out a way to build services on its network, theyd love to do that.

But more realistically, companies like US Cellular, and AT&T, which has its own cellular and WiFi powered smart home offering Digital Life, look at their existing customer base and wonder if theres an opportunity to sell to that group, particularly because of US Cellulars strong understanding of mobile. Most of these systems from cellular and telco providers are semi-closed systems that have been engineered to be pretty resilient and stable, even if the closed systems is irritating in that it walls off integration with third party devices.

I wrote recently about how ADT and Life360 are trying to leverage Life360s existing relationship with millions of families through Life360s mobile location sharing app. ADT wants access to those families in order to use Life360s mobile app to provide a better user experience not just for its security services but for additional connected home services.

Similarly, US Cellular is in a position to try and leverage its relationship with mobile customers and its access to mobile broadband to roll out its own smart home service. The service itself includes a home control panel along with door/window sensors, smoke detectors, carbon monoxide sensors, a smart thermostat, a motion sensor and lamp/appliance modules for connected lighting/appliance control. The packages range from $99 to $199 a month and require two year contracts.

To my mind, these are still very pricy packages. AT&Ts Digital Life starts at $40 a month but gets progressively more expensive as you add and install more devices. For someone already paying $50-$100 per month in cell service, doubling that monthly bill seems like a hard sell. I think that gets even more true when you consider that smart home platforms from the likes of SmartThings, Lowes Iris or even Nests burgeoning platform only have hardware costs right now and arguably allow for an open ecosystem of better connected devices.

That said, the likes of Digital Life and OnLook are unlikely to be selling to the individual. Rather theyre targeting the family thats concerned about safety and energy savings. And most importantly, the family that sees the appeal in a one stop solution thats been tested and where all the devices work seamlessly together.

Will consumers trade their favorite devices for one ecosystem that works well even if the monthly cost is a bit high? Its early days in the smart home but we may just see families favor these one stop solutions from cell and telco providers while individuals go for their favorite point applications and build their own ecosystem. Im sure US Cellular would be more than happy just to get a chunk of any smart home family market that comes to fruition.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF) You get a text message on your Google phone from your blood-born Google nanosensors saying you need more vitamin D, so you turn off your Chromecast, turn on your Google connected home security system, pop in your Google anti-UV contact lenses, hop in your Google car to go to a beach that Googles YouTube predicted you would like, then order up a burger and ice cream sundae to be delivered by Google drone, that youll eat with your Google Spoon, all coordinated using WiFi from Google balloons and satellites hovering above the Earth. Powered by Googles Kite turbines. And youll do it all because Googles Calico Lifespan project alerted you this morning that you have exactly 22 years, 5 months left of projected life left, and you want to enjoy every Google-connected minute of it.

Creepy? Maybe.

Brilliant? Yes.

Invasive? Definitely.

Reality? Every one of these is an actual project Google is investing time, money, and in some cases, entire divisions to make a reality. Many already delivered on their initial goals. Some of them Google has bought outright, and began improving on the technologies. Others are home grown.

Whichever way they came to be under the Google umbrella (or Google tentacles, depending on your view of massive corporations that explore diverse products), they show how Google is increasingly entrenched in every part of our lives.

Its all public information, all available byyou guessed it: Googling it.

And, expect this list to grow. Astro Teller (yes, thats his real name) who runs the moon shot programs at Google X tells Forbes they reject 100 projects every year or more, including the Google Jetpack (too inefficient) and the Google Hoverboard (not practical).

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