Smartphone ≠ smart home

I have my previous-generation phone that I don't use anymore, plugged in, connected to wifi, on a shelf. It's an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces, and solves the multi-user issue because it's out in the open on a shelf, and it's not my personal device anymore so I don't have sensitive information on it. The apps are right on the home screen, no passcode, just a direct-to-the-app experience.

You can find a used nexus one, or a moto e, for example, on Swappa for less than $100.

The connected lightbulb example is great. That's IoT as a novelty; it adds few/trivial new capabilities, and it adds a lot of inconvenience.

The flipside of this is IoT as a superpower: finding applications where you can truly use technology to give people a new ability that they didn't have before.

From the personal side, this IoT novelty versus superpower discrepancy is something we thought a lot about as we brought Pantelligent to the world (note: co-founder, https://www.pantelligent.com/ ). Our superpower is to let anyone cook great food, perfectly every time, through science. For us, the smartphone was the perfect user interface, because people are already in the kitchen with smartphone in one hand and spatula in the other! But our integration with the Pebble smartwatch hints at an even better future fit; the Pebble is great for cooking because it's waterproof, and it lets us bring real-time cooking data and instructions right to your wrist, even if your hands are busy.

Also, stuff like light doesn't need explicit interaction most of the time.

If there are people in a room and it's dark, the light should go on.

That's the default case I want almost every time for every room.

I don't want to use my smartphone or do any activities for this.

I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.

This article was a great summarization of the problems we face in our startup.

We actually haven't yet built a smartphone app, even though our customers have asked for it, simply because we don't know a good way to solve these problems.

Do you take the money and build the app anyway, or come back to them with a new and very different solution to what they asked for?

Take this problem, and apply it to an entire building of office tenants, and you can see why this is valuable to them. But it's one thing for us to create a product and make the sale. It's more important to me that they actually use what we sell them.