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With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

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Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#51

Post by wlesieutre »

bluetidepro wrote: post #27

Congrats to IFTTT. I really love all the integrations they have going for them. They are making some great progress with their product. Slightly off topic, but has anyone figured out a good way to use IFTTT to do "If this AND this then that" type of recipes?

I especially want that for scheduling of recipes. Right now they run all the time, but there are definitely things I only want to run at specific times on specific days. For instance:

"If it's 7:00 AM [AND] it's a weekday [AND] the forecast is rain [THEN] Tell me to bring an umbrella" would be much more useful to me than getting notifications every time it's going to rain.

As it stands now with a single condition, I don't can't come up with much I want to do with IFTTT.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#52

Post by digitalsurgeon »

IFTTT surely has a lot of potential. IOT device management might become a problem for normal users, if IOT does become mainstream in the future.

The normal scenarios which we can think of right now for example coming home and things turn on to appropriate settings, blocking phones during meetings etc are surely easy for us to understand, but my parents if they figure these things out and can setup such tasks them selves, I see a huge market and use for such services. It is still too geeky for normal people, it needs to provide use cases for normal folks not just tweeps or facebook generation.

IFTTT needs the money, their servers used to be slow when I last used it.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#53

Post by digitalsurgeon »

IFTTT surely has a lot of potential. IOT device management might become a problem for normal users, if IOT does become mainstream in the future.

The normal scenarios which we can think of right now for example coming home and things turn on to appropriate settings, blocking phones during meetings etc are surely easy for us to understand, but my parents if they figure these things out and can setup such tasks them selves, I see a huge market and use for such services. It is still too geeky for normal people, it needs to provide use cases for normal folks not just tweeps or facebook generation.

IFTTT needs the money, their servers used to be slow when I last used it.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#55

Post by Discrete »

Having developed a couple of "wearable" computing products, I can appreciate what IFTTT offers for early adopting consumers. Most companies making new products don't have the time to work on too many integrations (not to mention all the contractual stuff to even be able to start). They give the early adopter a way around at least some of that problem, and I know a significant number of users appreciate that.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#57

Post by x0x0 »

ericHosick wrote: post #8
idlewords wrote: post #6

IFTTT strikes me as the canonical example of a useful, small project that people would pay for that instead got stars in its eyes. For the moment, it's a great example of venture capitalists subsidizing a useful adapter cable for Internet services. But I get nervous when infrastructure gets delusions of grandeur. If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives.

> If 'cron' suddenly acquired a staff of 40, I would start looking for alternatives. How accessible is Cron to people? For the consumer, almost all aspects of computing are becoming ubiquitous: except programming. Tools like those provided by IFTTT are enabling people to do more with their devices. Someday, programming will also be ubiquitous (it probably won't even be called programming anymore).

fair enough, but how many people who can't setup cron need ifttt's functionality? I'm somewhat skeptical.

And even if they do need ifttt, investors need to turn that $30m into $300m. It's almost a sure bet -- unless you believe that somehow advertising is going to pay the bills -- that ifttt will start taxing users, publishers, or both. Which will end up sucking for all of us. Too bad craigslist didn't implement this...

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#59

Post by tmarthal »

What is interesting to me is that IFTTT is running as a cloud platform, yet some of these devices won't be accessible outside the wireless LAN. I wonder if they are going to have to create a hardware piece, software service or something that communicates to their servers and translates the scripted commands and relevant statuses.

But also, this is a huge market and someone needs to do this.

Re: With $30M More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things

#60

Post by LokiMH »

My personal feelings on IFTTT after using it are that it has a massive potential as an incredible handy tool. However, at the moment the focus seems to be primarily on social media interaction and optimization. This is all well and good, but I would love to see more integration with the features of my Android device.

At this precise moment an example is not jumping to mind, but I know several times now I have seen a trigger option in the list that I could make use of but could not find listed the universal Android feature I wanted to use as the resultant action.

Conversely when trying to create rules for something like having my phone muted in a specific location I had to create two triggers: First a trigger to mute my phone upon entering a location and Second a trigger to turn volume up upon leaving a certain location. Standing back to look at what I was trying do it is easy to understand that yes there are two Ifs that I want my phone to react to (entering an area and leaving it) but having the option to choose "while in area" or "while outside of area" would be great. I think this comes down to a difference between literal if This action then That action and if This idea then That action.

IFTTT is clearly programmed how it operates rather than how people tend to think. As someone that has done programming, I get that and can work with it, but it doesn't seem the ideal model for use by the average person.

All this having been said I think it is a fun, wonderful gadget and I look forward to seeing how it grows. Now if only I could figure out why my triggers have been failing of late...

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