It's nice to see lots of competition in this area. Small nitpick – on the main page you probably mean "CO Alarms", not "CO2 Alarms".
Thanks. Fixed!
SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#32I love this idea. Two years ago, when I had just moved to Silicon Valley, I came up with a concept called OpenAnno for a hackathon about Twitter's new annotations API feature. Lucky for me (I didn't realize this then, I didn't know a lot about them), two of the judges were Ron Conway and Paul Graham. I naively presented the project and later ended up talking to Paul and Ron. Ron thought it was interesting and asked m…
Pretty awesome concept! Could each of the objects hold there annotations locally, and let other objects query them? Or would there have to be be a central server?
The idea was to have a central database, otherwise it would be impossible to do any kind of computation/search on it. App.net might be a candidate for something like this.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#33Sorry, but I think this is pure fantasy. Of course it is possible, but they won't provide all those things for 100K. What I mean is: all they show is a smartphone app and a fancy looking device. All the cool things we all dream about will have to be built on top of that. That is exactly the state we already have without that Kickstarter project (could as well go for Arduino or whatever). Yet nobody is building those…
> but they won't provide all those things for 100k they raised 135k in a day. by the end of the kickstarter they will likely have raised 1-2 million. i think their plan is to ship with a handful of sensors and apps but have a platform for others to develop and share on easily. seems like a pretty good way to do it if you ask me. the platform will be key though, and i guess we'll find out more about that in the coming…
Granted, with the right set of sensors and base app they could make it easy to create lots of apps. I suppose all this is available today (RFID tags, motion sensors and so on), but putting them together requires some thinking. If the invention part can be moved into software, lots of apps could follow.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#34I love this idea. Two years ago, when I had just moved to Silicon Valley, I came up with a concept called OpenAnno for a hackathon about Twitter's new annotations API feature. Lucky for me (I didn't realize this then, I didn't know a lot about them), two of the judges were Ron Conway and Paul Graham. I naively presented the project and later ended up talking to Paul and Ron. Ron thought it was interesting and asked m…
Yes, but my toaster is not going to have bread sitting in it getting stale waiting for my alarm clock to go off in the morning.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#35Sorry, but I think this is pure fantasy. Of course it is possible, but they won't provide all those things for 100K. What I mean is: all they show is a smartphone app and a fancy looking device. All the cool things we all dream about will have to be built on top of that. That is exactly the state we already have without that Kickstarter project (could as well go for Arduino or whatever). Yet nobody is building those…
> but they won't provide all those things for 100k they raised 135k in a day. by the end of the kickstarter they will likely have raised 1-2 million. i think their plan is to ship with a handful of sensors and apps but have a platform for others to develop and share on easily. seems like a pretty good way to do it if you ask me. the platform will be key though, and i guess we'll find out more about that in the coming…
Agree with your basic point, but they won't raise more than ~650k because they've set maximums on all of the (normal) tiers. I think this is actually a great thing as there have been a number of kickstarters that have been victims of their own success because they've been oversubscribed beyond what can actually be delivered in a realistic timeframe. IMO most kickstarters that aren't pure digital distribution should have a limit of ~3x their funding level.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#36Why is the link to the backers page? All due respect to the backers, but I want to hear about the project first, not who's backing it. Not hard to find the actual page, just annoying.
Probably because the main kickstarter page was submitted yesterday and didn't hit the front page. For whatever reason, it caught on this time.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#37I don't think these guys know how complex and difficult this is going to be. They might have an SDK out this year, but chances are its pretty rubbish. Its not as if others haven't tried. And having written my PhD thesis on these things I know its a complete and utter pain. Chances for success: less than 1%.
Of course doing something hard means there is a high chance of failure. At least these guys are trying to do something that could have massive upside both to the users and the company, and not just taking the lower risk approach and building yet another social widget or game.
Re: SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter
#38How is this much different than Ninja Blocks, which was funded in March (and a few months late on delivering)? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninja/ninja-blocks-conne...
Ninjablocks is a cool idea, but in practice not great for home automation, and not great as a user experience for non-hackers. For one, from what I understand, Ninjablocks connects sensors to your network via ethernet or wifi. In practice, that's a bad way to do home automation. It looks like SmartThings is using a mesh network (Zigbee or Zwave), which is way more scalable and self-extends its range as you add more d…
Actually, Ninja Blocks' next iteration due toward the end of the year will have onboard RF433Mhz, which allows you to interface with a ton of things you might already have in your house (motion sensors, door bells, door sensors, etc). These devices are super cheap and use crazy small amounts of power.
We've tried to go to great lengths to make it possible for non-hackers to interface with us, for instance you can train the platform what devices are in your house, and then make rules that might trigger anything, such as RF devices like power sockets, Webhooks, SMS, and many more.
Right now we're focussed on getting the rest of our Kickstarter obligations out (we're currently waiting on RF433 dongle's, finally due next week), and are working hard on building a platform that other's can build apps on-top of.
Edit: Don't want to steal SmartThings' thunder here, it looks really cool and we welcome the competition. Just wanted to correct the inaccuracies of the above comment.
(Source: I work for Ninja Blocks).