There's no "open standard for wireless control of a light", because there's not one standard way to do it. For a dollar in parts, I can build a wireless light switch that uses 433 MHz, just like your wireless doorbell.
Oh, you wanted a network of addressable lights? Well now it's a dollar fifty. We'll move to 900 MHz and switch to a ZigBee radio.
Oh, you wanted to address them through WiFi? Well, here's the problem. Light bulb's don't have keyboards to enter your AP+Key. You could try and use WPS with a fixed pin code, but there's another issue. Putting an embedded Linux device that handles POST requests in a lightbulb is rather silly. We'll keep the ZigBee radios, and build a crossover "base station" that has a RESTful XML based JSON buzzword complaint interface.
Did I mention my ZigBee radio only talks with my brand of ZigBee radios?
The problem in making a standard comes down to the radios in the lightbulb. That interface will likely always be proprietary. Even if you get a standardized web interface, no one will be able to make a universal base station for all "smart" electronics. Wink is trying to do that, best of luck to them. I don't see it happening.
http://thegadgetflow.com/blog/wink-wants-new-standard-smart-...
I haven't found an all-in-one solution to do all this. Then again, I haven't looked for anything else once I got my curtains going through Tasker. An open standard would've made the process much simpler though.
Overall I've found that z-wave is quite reliable. It never loses commands and latency is good enough. The protocol supports just about any kind of device or signaling you might want, in theory, though it can't really do high-bandwidth things. The problem is that devices are relatively expensive (compared to the cost of the components) because the protocol is quasi-proprietary. Zigbee is "open" and extremely flexible, but as a result, zigbee devices from different vendors often can't talk to each other. I'll take the more limited but working thing, thanks.
(The Trigger app's geofencing is pretty unreliable, though. Has anyone found an android app that can reliably do http requests when crossing a geofence?)
Unfortunately, the setup stopped working and I don't have useful tools to debug it; no way to know why an INSTEON controller can't see another component, only that it can't. Plus, I'd like to move away from systems that want to use the house wiring at all (INSTEON is hybrid x10 / radio) because I don't want an errant power surge blowing my $100+ of equipment.
Another problem is APIs and connectivity. Tuning a light on or off should be doable with a simple POST call to a RESTful service somewhere. Instead, we are sold dubious phone apps for everything.