Tag: iOS

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Smart Home

With a smart lock, Monkey lets one key replace all others

The biggest issue with the sea of smart locks on the market is their design. As they can only really be used by homeowners, a large population of apartment dwellers miss out on the convenience having a smart lock provides because they still need a physical key for the front door of the building.

Locumi Labs thought it was time for a solution, creating the Monkey keyless entry system. Instead of being a typical smart lock, the monkey takes the form of an extremely compact, Wi-Fi enabled chip that is easily installed in the intercom in an apartment or home. From that point, a companion iOS or Android app is able to open the building’s main entrance using an app command, time-restricted access, or smartphone proximity for hands-free access.

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Smart Home

Nucleus intercom system avoids the horror of walking to another room

The intercom of yesteryear is a patently outdated fixture in most homes. So much so, in fact, that most homeowners probably don’t even use it. Considering the increasingly connected direction homes are going in, intercoms are wildly limited in scope and unpleasant to look at to boot.

Taking a product name page out of Gavin Belson’s playbook, Nucleus hopes to become the modern intercom system for the connected home. The Wi-Fi enabled, slimly-shaped slab can either be mounted on a wall or propped up on a table to facilitate instant communication with any other Nucleus device around the world with a tap or voice command. The company boasts connection speeds of less than 200 milliseconds, or about the time it takes someone to blink, through tight integration of all components and software.

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Categories
Wearables

Eyecatcher E-Ink wearable blends jewelry and tech with fashionable results

editors-choiceThe intersection of technology and fashion has long been a wave bound to crash, and crash it has. Wrist-worn wearables are by far the most popular, with Android smartwatches, the Apple Watch, and a bevy of bands worn for the well-being of various facets of the body all vying for dominance.

Looksee Labs has a different conception of what a wearable should be, and its Eyecatcher is the example. The five-inch e-ink display wraps completely around the wrist, displaying everything from images to patterns to text messages to Twitter feeds. Unfortunately, that display isn’t a touch interface, so a companion iOS app is required to control the bangle. Through it, users can upload photos, specify what types of notifications are desired, and generally tinker with the wearable’s settings.

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Sensors/IoT Smart Home

Koto trio of sensor cubes monitor your home’s environent

One of the keys to a healthier lifestyle is as basic as the air we breathe, but that can easily be forgotten because of hard it can be to know exactly what to do to make it better even in our own homes.

To help, the Koto family of smart sensors has been designed to make sure you have all the information needed to make the proper health decisions. The system actually consists of three products. The Koto Blink is a tiny box filled with sensors measuring temperature, humidity, light, and noise, all in an effort to make your living space more comfortable.

The Koto Air is an upgraded Blink, combining its sensors with an air pollution and dust sensor to create a fuller picture of the home and a more robust set of data with which to make the subtle adjustments to the home necessary to stave off mold in older homes, for example.

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Categories
Networking

Strone Roam keeps your number home, calling fees low

Even with certain carriers getting more aggressive about attacking roaming fees, it’s possible to rack up big cellular bills when traveling if you’re not willing to hop from hotspot to hotspot.

The Strone Roam may be an alternative. To use it, users connect the cylindrical, Amazon Echo-like device to Wi-Fi and leave it at home with their SIM card inserted. Doing this routes all incoming and outgoing calls through their own number at local rates using the Strone iOS, Android, or Web app — no matter where they are in the world.

For this functionality, users will still need to buy Strone credit with which to make these calls or browse the internet, but that’s still far less expensive than alternatives such as Skype or aninternational packages direct from a carrier. Calls between Strone app customers are free.

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Smart Home

Angee’s all-seeing eye protects your home from nefarious ne’er-do-wells

Typical home security systems require a lot of input from users every time they leave and enter the home. And while they might alert authorities to sinister plots on your valuable goods, by the time they arrive it’ll have been too late anyway. A smarter type of security system is needed to serve as the best deterrent possible.

Angee has a good shot at making waves in a segment rife with connected security solutions that pretty much all do the same thing. The portable, lightweight device is outfitted with a 360° camera, allowing Angee to track all motion directly around it, record one hour of HD video, and stream video to an iOS or Android tablet from which it can be shared. Angie’s portability makes it so that users can move it to any room but to truly get the most out of her, security tags mounted at entry points throughout the home can expand Angee’s monitoring range. This offers users more peace of mind through more comprehensive security benefits, at-the-door identification, and pinpointed zone detection in the case of a curious toddler, for example.

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Categories
Cell Phone Accessories

Rogo dock lets your smartphone run a smart home

Having a personal assistant in the home either means shelling out lots of money for someone to follow you around all day or going all in on some of the more experimental attempts to integrate robotics in the home.  Choosing either option overlooks the most powerful computing device in most people’s lives: the smartphone.

Rogo is a dock that uses the connectivity of a smartphone to power a range of applications aimed at giving users a true personal assistant in the home. All of Rogo’s apps are powered by a cloud platform and a conversational AI that users can speak to naturally. RogoTele is a telepresence app to keep users in touch with family or friends back home that takes advantage of the swiveling dock to track movement, while RogoChat is for all other times where message and event notifications will do.

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Smart Home

Drop connected buoy makes a splash by continuosly monitoring your pool

While a pool is a perfect antidote to a hot, sticky day, maintaining it over the long-term can quickly prove to be a hassle. Keeping its water balanced is a tricky game requiring the right amount of the right products at the right to ensure quality. However, balancing kits can be involved and unclear, leaving owners unsure of what to do.

The drop Wi-Fi connected pool monitor is a solar-power buoy that continuously monitors the temperature, pH, and chlorine levels of a pool. With this information, the iOS/Android drop app can create custom maintenance plans complete with recommendations on which products should be purchased, and how often they should be used. drop takes the guesswork of maintaining up to three pools for up to a week without sun with the option of maintaining more for $9 a month. In addition, an accelerometer inside detects suspicious movement too, sending a smartphone alert when it does. Backers can expect their own drop by June 2016 for $199. Drop Designs Inc. is hoping to raise $100,000 by July 9th, 2016.

With ideas like drop and the Quack Vac out in the wild, it’s never been easier to take care of a pool. drop offers users just enough valuable information to make it worthwhile, with a solar panel truly making the product you can set and forget.

Categories
Smartwatches/Bands

Cogito Fit takes on geeky smartwatch competitors with style, simplicity and savings

Think wearables and the smartwatch inevitably springs to mind. With us firmly in the age of the Apple Watch, entrenched stalwarts like the Moto 360 and the Pebble are fighting to stay within the public eye through innovative offerings and novel form factors. All this going on doesn’t mean new ideas can’t spring up, though.

The Cogito Fit attempts to tack on a bit more functionality to a basic smartwatch without resorting to daily charging . Billing itself as the first fashion-forward connected watch on the market, the device not only looks good but also addresses a few limitations of high-end devices. Cogito offers a face with LED icons for basic notifications, straps in a few colors, and a bezel that can be swapped depending on preference.

Feature wise, the Cogito Fit functions like most other smartwatches in its notification capabilities, and when its done alerting someone to what e-mails, SMS, calls, and social media updates they have, a light activity tracker also tracks steps.

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Smart Home

Presence home security system keeps the sensors, skips the fees

Everyone wants to keep their home safe. Not everyone wants to pay the sometimes steep monitoring fees associated with doing so. The result? Houses everywhere essentially are left unprotected.

The Presence home security system gives both renters and homeowners peace of mind without taking a piece of their wallet with it.  It uses the cameras and Wi-Fi connectivity of the spare smartphones and tablets most people already have, and puts them to use alongside a variety of sensors, like motion and temperature, to keep any household safe from intruders, flooding, and a variety of other problems.

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