If modern human life is a drama (consumption), the house is the center location where it mostly occurs. Most people work for a house for all their lives. You feel safe and comfortable in your house, you sleep there, keep all the stuff you bought such as computers there. Most of us are enjoying our sunday at our houses enjoying the Internet.
We had a lot of variations for the "house"; the wood > shared caves by a community > single house > apartment(flats). Hotels, cottages as complementary. So the question is, can the current tech start-ups disrupt the concept of the house? It is a broad topic, but random things which comes to my mind without going too deep:
- make virtual windows where you and your selected facebook friends see a common virtual place or a real scenery where you install cameras (for example in beautiful places on earth), use high quality display and cameras. (google's very fast internet may have a use here)
- kill the walls by replacing them with always-on displays and cameras to your remote counterpart. two distant house should feel become virtually "one". (rasperry pi or cheaper hardware may help here in the next one)
- rethink home automation (irobot does it in some sense) or simply build a branded robot which can simply fetch a sandwich. a central web service can be at the center, or a social web service.
- make location-independent apartments(flats) which are stackable, moveable, expandable.
- managed kitchen or fridge based on your dietary requirements by a web service.