Lockitron: Keyless entry using your phone

Probably not NFC though. You need a much smaller distance to read NFC (or a much bigger antenna). I doubt it could read a NFC keycard through the thickness of the door. I'm sure all that metal in the lock would act as a great RF shield too. It uses more power than BT4, and all devices that have NFC also have BT4 so it probably wouldn't make sense to power both.

Since no one is forcing you to buy it, I would simply suggest not buying it and going on with your life.

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but there are plenty of products out there that cost a lot of money (much more than $150) which won't bring you any additional value.

The new Lockitron will certainly bring value to a lot of people, including renters.

Wow, I'm amazed that they got wifi to work in the lock itself, vs. using a low-power thing like Zigbee to a base station with AC power.

Also, BT 4.0 LE is perfect for this -- since there's no NFC in the iPhone 5, I suspect BT 4.0 LE will end up taking the place of NFC for a lot of "heavier duty" NFC applications -- not that the Bluetooth protocol is great or elegant, but it's a lot easier to work with than NFC, and now BT 4.0 LE exists on both major smartphone platforms.

All my earlier criticism of not having a local ACL and local RF communication to the lock, vs. going to/from the Internet, is now resolved.

The only thing they're missing is a BT 4.0 LE dongle (which I've seen on Kickstarter called "hone" http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/690528216/hone-for-iphon... -- you could put that on your keyring and use it as an expensive HID proxcard replacement. Same thing works for electronic leash.

Now all they need to do is support 5-10 locksets in some kind of private/small business network (vs. putting in a HID access control system), for 0-99 users, and they'll be really innovative. Managing a single door with 0-5 people is comparatively easy; managing an office with turnover is a lot harder, and businesses would happily pay $1-2k for a system to cover their doors and employees with a nice LDAP/AD/FB/etc. interface.

Since you can upload your own firmware, it would be entirely possible for a customer to build this.

Basically no commercial locks provide a perfect (or even very good) audit trail facility -- guaranteeing the device isn't tampered with. Even the government/military X09 standard lock (from Kaba-Mas; it's a pretty awesome self-powered combination lock) can be forced, then replaced with a new lock with a faked serial number and internally trojaned electronics. You could detect this on internal destructive inspection later, but you might even be able to hack the electronics with self-deleting firmware.

The standard for secure facilities is 24x7 monitoring and roving patrols which are frequent enough to prevent defeating the lock/door initially. If it takes 1h to cut through a vault door, and you do patrols every 15 minutes, it doesn't matter as much that once you compromise the door, you can subvert the lock for future access.

That said, there's more potential to make an electronic locking system (and seal/tamper evidence) really secure than there is to make a mechanical keylock secure -- keylocks are basically deprecated for even moderately high security, and mechanical combination locks for high security -- the future is all electronic systems with online checking of credentials. A system like lockitron has a lot of room to grow.

The advantage for me is that I don't have to get my keys out if I'm carrying groceries or one of my kids. The bluetooth receiver means it will open the door automatically for me.