Tag: iot

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Connected Objects Lighting Music

Riflo connected LED lights up your abode with glorified notifications

We’re not quite at the point of questioning’s someone’s grasp of reality if their lights aren’t connected to the Internet. But while most would immediately point to the Philips Hue as the de facto connected light bulb for the technologically savvy dweller, the Riflo’s Indiegogo campaign presents an alternative.

While the Hue’s array of color options and scenes are all the rage, the Riflo programmable smart color LED expands on these features by adding a Wi-Fi connected speaker to the mix. This speaker can do things like audibly communicate information pertinent to the user (e.g. “You have a meeting in an hour,” “You have a new email.”) or stream music with or without a companion streaming app. Or, it’s Wink feature uses the colorful LED to silently communicate what needs to be known without a possibly annoying robo-voice droning on about it.

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Chargers/Batteries Smart Home

The YOUMO modular power strip makes supplying power electrifying

While smartphones and laptops continue to slim down and offer more powerful specs, the humble strip keeps on chugging along in all its practical, drab glory, doling out power and taking names. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t offer much in the way of functionality.

The YOUMO is a smart modular power strip offering users a wide range of plug-and-go modules for a custom power solution for any situation.  Good Gadgets, the three-man team behind the Kickstarter campaign, has designed YOUMO modules to be lightweight for travel and aesthetically pleasing, a far cry from most dollar store varieties. It all starts with a base cord in three different lengths and seven different colors. From there, six modules can connect in any combination to each other.

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Maker/Development Sensors/IoT

MATRIX’s sensor platform seeks to be The One for the Internet of Things

editors-choiceSmartphones are so ubiquitous because just one replaces a wide variety of real-world objects. This has yet to happen to in the world of Internet of Things. Instead, more and more companies create more hardware that do different things, and therefore, introduce more fragmentation. This makes things difficult for the developers and end-users who would have been clamoring for a standard that could simplify the entire IoT experience.

By applying the lessons learned from what the smartphone did for the real world, the folks at AdMobilize have designed MATRIX. Just as a smartphone combined a number of capabilities into one, slim package, MATRIX’s 15 different, embedded sensors do the same — just for the home or business.

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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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Smart Home

JUCEBOX juices up the disconnected IoT experience

When couples have issues communicating, they go to a relationship counselor. When all the Internet of Things products in a home require 17 different apps to operate because they don’t communicate with each other, who do they go to?

If creator Urlich Frerk has his way, they will go to JUCEBOX, a universal device communicator capable of translating between the four main communication langagues used to code the IoT products. This allows those invested in the increasingly fragmented IoT ecosystem to take comfort knowing anything they have bought or will buy are all usable together with JUCEBOX, future-proofing homes for the foreseeable future.

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Imaging Smart Home

Remocam looks over a human family, controls its own device family

Once upon a time, the idea of a camera ready to capture anything in a home would have sounded like something out of 1984, But the past few years have seen no shortage of connected indoor security cameras that allow for surveillance of those unwelcome in a home or ways to check up on those who are welcome.

Remocam looks a bit like a levitating black golf ball. It includes night vision capabilities, takes a unique approach to the security cam market, going beyond watching to doing. Some of this is handled by the camera itself, which includes a speaker for, say, singing your baby to sleep remotely  But to take full advantage of the system, users will need to buy in to the company’s eclectic collection of smart home gadgets that include mainstream outlet adapters and bulbs, but also an automatic pet feeder called RemoPet. The latter is at least aggressively priced. The company seeks $50,000 in its Indiegogo Flexible Funding campaign. The basic Remocam is $199, a $50 discount off the expected retail price.

Remocam represents a middle ground between simple cameras and cameras loaded with home security sensors such as the Oomi Hub. That system also works with its own family of devices, but can also tap in to any Z-Wave device. Both systems have a great opportunity to take advantage of a larger family of devices in the connected home.

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Connected Objects Smart Home

GATE connected mailbox makes postal mail notifications just as annoying as e-mail notifications

Even though mailboxes have been around for at least a century, they haven’t changed all that much. They’re still physical boxes, they hold mail, and they don’t do much else. In a world where everything is digital and integrated with the Internet of Things, that simply isn’t enough when such important information is routinely mailed everyday.

GATE smartens up the humble mailbox by adding a Wi-Fi or zWave connected home unit and solar-powered mailbox sensor to the mix. With this done, a sensor-equipped mailbox can send an alert to the home unit whenever it is opened, notifying home owners with a blinking light at a range of 500ft. SMS, email, and Twitter notifications can also be sent out as well so that no matter where someone is, they can stay informed through their iOS or Android device. If mail theft is a big problem in the neighborhood, multiple GATEs can connect to share information about the occurrences. Each GATE goes for $249, with an expected ship date of December 2015. Its campaign is looking for $10,000, and ends June 20th, 2015.

GATE sits opposite the bare-bones Postifier, an Arduino-based mailbox solution that sports a low price but a lack of functionality. As such, there is no contest: GATE pushes the bar up on what a connected mailbox should be, truly bringing it into the 21st century — for a premium.

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Podcasts

The Backerjack Podcast, Episode 7, with Ross Rubin and Steve Sande

It’s time for Episode 7 of The Backerjack Podcast. This week, Ross and Steve take on three projects:

  • It’s an LED light bulb, it’s a pico projector, it’s Beam. Insert it into a standard light socket and then project your content just about anywhere. It’s cool enough to put goosebumps on your gooseneck. Find out why we think it’s a a particularly bright idea.
  • More impressive than The One discussed in Episode 6, the Neo Smart Jar tracks the nutritional value of its contents and even suggests recipes. Find out why it’s at the leading edge of  IoT.
  • Pigeon takes another stab at the connected picture frame. Will this grannytech fly or wind up as roadkill?
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Podcasts

The Backerjack Podcast, Episode 5, with Ross Rubin and Steve Sande

As Steve has been busy launching something for today that launched yesterday, we’ve been remiss in posting about what he and Ross, your two favorite crowdfunding connoisseurs, did a while back — focus on three fresh products in Episode 5 of The Backerjack Podcast. We discussed a lot in 26 minutes before entering the time warp:

  • For those who want to ensure that they never miss a word in a phone call, there’s the useful and multifaceted Bluewire call-recording headset.
  • Those who wish to explore the Internet of sleepy things while keeping their cool in bed will want to check out the sleek Luna smart bed cover.
  • And those who want to plug, play and print photos on the spot will want to see how things develop with the Zink-based Prynt .

Steve and Ross also shared experiences trying out the original Narrative Clip (good times) and chatted up the changes coming with its imminent but not crowdfunded sequel, the unsurprisingly named Clip 2.

All the campaigns and preorder pages are still active so check out our thoughts before signing up to back them. Subscribe via iTunes or RSS, download the podcast by saving this link, or listen to it with the player below:

Categories
Sensors/IoT

Heat Seek turns up the the heat up on lazy landlords

The Premise. Although New York City winters can’t compare to those further up the eastern seaboard, they still pack quite a punch. For those with poorly heated apartments, they can be downright brutal. Although avenues exist with which to report heating violations, they are often too unreliable to truly make a difference — literally leaving people out in the cold.

The Product. The team behind Heat Seek is proposing a tech-centric solution to reduce the inefficiency. The initiative uses a set of connected devices relaying temperature information back to a central hub in an Internet-connected apartment. (Only one hub is needed, reducing the barrier of entry for those without a connection.) All this information is then sent to a server where it can be accessed by tenants, advocates, and lawyers using a Web app.

The company hopes this information will allow timely resolutions to violations. Tenants coming home to a toasty apartment are not the only beneficiaries, though: Heatseek NYC wants to partner with responsible landlords to help them stay compliant by figuring out how best to avoid heat loss, maximize heating efficiency, and potentially save thousands. (How many responsible landlords there are in NYC remains to be seen.)

The Pitch. Their Kickstarter campaign has a lot going for it. Its simple and clear video tells the real story of a current NYC resident living in an improperly heated apartment. By telling her story and showing how the company’s sensors would help, the video presents a compelling issue and a solid call-to-action. Although the team is looking for $10,000 to begin manufacturing, it is ideally seeking $50,000 by campaign’s end to put 1,000 sensors in the hands of New Yorkers who need it most.

The Perks. You can gift a temperature hub for a New Yorker in need for $30, or pay $60 to do the same and receive one yourself. Conversely, you can gift a hub while receiving one yourself with a backing of $120 or more.  No matter what option you choose, every perk has an estimated delivery date of February 2015.

The Potential. Any serious attempt to revamp bureaucracy can be messy (here’s looking at you, health.gov.), but Heat Seek NYC’s solution to a persistent problem is simple, elegant, and easily applicable to a wide range of situations. Heat Seek has attracted a lot of attention via a back of a string of wins in app competitions However, it faces a long journey in the real world if it seeks to become a standard in New York or beyond.