On any given day, another product promising to be the center of the connected home experience makes its way to the crowdfunding world. Most of the time, they suffer from lack of connectivity and features, forcing users to combine them with accessories to truly get the most out of them.
With the Mercu, Taiwan-based GalaThings promises an all-in-one product combining surveillance capabilities, sound and motion detection for intruders (and a siren to scare them off), and environmental detection keeping tabs on humidity, temperature, luminance, and smoke. In addition to these features, three other aspects of the Mercu make it particularly useful: Wi-Fi, ZigBee and BLE support, the option to save pertinent video locally with its SD card slot or on cloud storage with Dropbox integration, and an IFTTT interface on its companion smartphone to create custom events.
One of the biggest worries when it comes to using any Internet of Things platform revolves around security. With most technology out in the world vulnerable in a million different ways, the last thing anyone wants to do is introduce even more vulnerabilities to the most sensitive parts of one’s life.
Smartphones 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.