Good Housekeeping Home Reno Awards 2024 – Abode Lock

The Abode Lock, while not a category-defining solution, was the first smart lock from smart home security client Abode, so Caster knew that it was going to make waves in the industry. Caster strategically helped the Abode team launch the Abode Lock at the Pepcom event during CES 2024, where we could show it off to hundreds of press within a few hours. During the event, Caster drew in an editor from Good Housekeeping who recognized the Abode Lock’s allure and recommended that we submit it for the Good Housekeeping Home Reno Awards—and we did just that.

Eager to keep the momentum of the Abode Lock in the media after the tradeshow, Caster submitted the Abode Lock in the Home Technology category of the Good Housekeeping Home Reno Awards in February 2024. The Good Housekeeping team asked for 6 samples with 2 months access to the Abode plan so their judges could test the product in real life. Over the next 4 months, Caster continued to answer any questions and troubleshoot any issues the reviewers ran into via email, providing them with the support they needed in a timely manner.

In September 2024, Caster was notified that the Abode Lock was a winner of the Good Housekeeping Home Reno Awards! The Good Housekeeping Awards judges are very thorough, performing expert lab tests, in-home consumer reviews, analysis of safety and performance data by engineers, and installations by professional builders that were all taken into consideration when choosing winners. Caster and the Abode team were honored by this recognition.

Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2024 – Niobium fully homomorphic encryption technology

Caster client Niobium was also honored as one of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2024. This list elevates the technologies shaping the economy and the world at large – inclusion is reserved for future-focused companies who’ve made true breakthroughs with the potential to change how we live and work. 

 Early in our work with Niobium, Caster saw the potential to position the company as just such a game-changer. Their technology, a hardware accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technology, is on the bleeding edge. FHE is the holy grail for data privacy. It allows computations to be performed on encrypted data, meaning that people and enterprises could benefit from insights from secure data sets—or use AI and other powerful services on their own private data—without any risk of that data ever being exposed.  

Until Niobium, FHE has been technically possible, but practically useless. It’s just too slow—as in, millions of times slower than computing in the clear. Niobium’s breakthrough acceleration hardware is closing the gap. Their first commercial chip, Basalisc, proves that dedicated hardware can bring FHE up to the speed of business. 

Caster crafted the award application for the Fast Company editors, taking pains to ensure that every beat was clear:  

• The potential of FHE to enable true privacy for people and companies.  

• Niobium’s massive leap forward in speed and practicality. 

• The applications and new business opportunities, from cross-border fraud detection to agentic AI, that Niobium’s hardware will unlock. 

Niobium’s vision of a privacy-first future captured the editors’ imaginations, leading to a nod for the startup as one of the year’s Next Big Things in cybersecurity.