Amazon has joined the board of the Zigbee Alliance, which is likely a good sign for the low-power mesh protocol that has been plodding along in the smart home space for the past decade. Unfortunately for both Zigbee and its rival Z-Wave, the recent explosion that was powered by Amazon’s Echo range and Google’s Home line-up, largely bypassed the two mesh protocols. So Amazon signing up to the Alliance suggests that it might make Zigbee more prevalent in its smart home portfolio. This would somewhat buck an emerging trend, where lower-power versions of WiFi and the new Bluetooth Mesh capabilities would have pushed the older protocols out of the market. Only one of Amazon’s Echo range had Zigbee functions, the…