“Our philosophy at that point was, ‘Customers are never going to be easier or cheaper to acquire as they are today’ and we, as a small company and board, said we have to step on the accelerator to build this out,” “We literally bet the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because we thought that the time to own the market was right.”
I'll leave the googling as an exercise for the audience.
It's a better experience to show a pop up asking to save a clipboard URL to Pocket rather the user has to tap on a few buttons to do it. The key is to let them switch the feature off.
The ideal user experience would be for the app to forward all my emails, texts, and other personal data to an employee so that the employee could read them and make relevant suggestions.
If your going to Pocket, it's likely that pasting from your clipboard is what you want to do. Not as true for Facebook- would you say you post a link from your clipboard as often as you launch Facebook to read your timeline or post a picture?
Commentary about the silliness of the avalanche of IOT devices being created right now aside (99% of consumer internet startups are based on dumb ideas and fail, but that doesn't mean there is no market or trend!), it's inevitable that this stuff is going to get traction in the market and it's a vast market. I doubt it's going to happen based on a bunch of edge-case $99 devices though.
The big trend here is the cost of wifi enabled microprocessors dropping down to nearly nothing. Last year we were excited about raspberry pi dropping prices down to $30 for sensor-enabled hardware on the network.
This year you can buy a wifi-enabled microcontroller for _$3_ (search esp8266). And that's not even in volume. At that price, pretty much anything consumer electronics companies build can be addressable on the network.
Add to that voice control, which is crude but usable and built into every phone already and improving quickly. The idea of walking into your house and looking for a light switch is going to feel like walking up to your TV to change the channel did 30 years ago when the remote went into wider use.
I find the economic arguments about not saving money using IOT devices a little amusing, on HN especially. My guess is that almost everyone reading this forum spends a shitload of money buying techno gadgets for reasons beyond "it saves me money."
"My guess is that almost everyone reading this forum spends a shitload of money buying techno gadgets for reasons beyond "it saves me money.""
My guess would be that the HN reader is more discerning and sophisticated than that.
I am guessing that a lot of HN readers are considering questions like:
- how many different sources of data egress do I want in my home ? (as few as possible)
- how many different wireless network topologies should be running, and overlayed, on my home ? (perhaps zero, other than wifi and cellular)
- how fragile should my appliances be to things like DoS, firmware compatibility, licensing, network connectivity, etc. ? (not fragile at all)
Think of your current interactions with your printer. Think of how often that works flawlessly and how often it doesn't and think of the underlying business models and network models that make it so (god-damned) fragile and user-hostile. Now imagine everything works like this. That's the Internet of Things. I suspect many HN readers are quite wary of it ...
The business model part of your comment scares the crap out of me the more I let it sit.
Case in point, printer manufacturers are now nlargely no longer selling individual b/w and color cartridges. They now sell them physically connected as a single block and when one color goes, you gotta toss the whole thing. And God help you if you try to refill with generics and void the warrNty.
Now picture that applied to your home, with companies doing their damnedest to lock you into their overpriced proprietary consumables. Familiar with Simple Human? Case in point and they aren't even a Smart Device. Imagine if they refused to update unless you switched to their SaaS model like some certain software companies have.
"...wifi-enabled microcontroller for _$3_..." have been available (in volume) for, at least, a few years now. I'm not sure why, all of a sudden, this is such a promising solution on the most trivial of problems.
As an engineer in this industry, these companies often seem like carpetbaggers, attempting to enter niche markets they know little of, with a solution who's only merit is it's hype.
The ESP8266 is making waves because a) it's substantially cheaper than anything else on the market, b) it integrates the WiFi MAC, the entire RF system from balun to baseband and a useful microcontroller and c) it is fantastically easy to use.
Espressif will sell you a single ESP8266 for less than $2; the ESP8089 is less than a buck, again in single quantities. TI's 1ku pricing for a CC3100 SoC is $6.70. Nordic's cheapest 2.4GHz SoC is about $3.50/1ku, and that doesn't do WiFi. The cheap Espressif chips really are a big deal IMO, in the same way that cheap ARM A-series processors from Rockchip and Allwinner have radically changed many consumer markets. You can run an HTTP server on a chip that is price-competitive with an ATTINY88.
The important part is what you parenthetically dismiss (in volume).
I know they've been around in volume for years, but most of the stuff I build doesn't come close to triggering that kind of volume. Therefore, the guy who wants me to send data from his forklifts to a central server in the warehouse can get it done at a cost he can more easily stomach when the hardware cost is under $20 as opposed to being around $100.
Well here is an interesting argument for voice control: it's more hygienic. All touch points are potential sources for disease. On the other hand, maybe we are increasing allergies by making the environment too sterile.
What hygienic technology will replace touch screens?
That sounds like a made up solution. For the vast majority of people, simply touching something that someone else in your home has touched isn't going to cause you any sort of problems.
Interestingly this is actually a solved problem that we have forgotten the solution to. Copper naturally kills most pathogens. Brass door handles therefore act to prevent touch based spread of pathogens -- but plastic is cheaper.
I think it's not the price but the looks. Copper tends to oxidize and form an ugly green-ish hue of copper oxide, while proper plastics or other non-biocidic metal will not degrade in looks.
A damp, soapy sponge cleans smartphones pretty well. And a damp cloth to rinse before drying.
Still waiting for waterproofing to become a standard smartphone feature. Then we can start debating handwashing vs dishwashing, and also use the phone to record the washing cycle on video from inside the dishwasher.
There is a whole ecosystem that is funding these lawsuits. It also operates somewhat anonymously, with funding sources working directly with law firms and indirectly with inventors (if they are even involved anymore). I've seen emails between law firms and the inventor that literally title the investors as "the funding source." The original inventor need not put any money at risk, and the law firms and funding sources do their own diligence to decide if it's worth proceeding to file suits. In most cases, the entity filing suit is created for each series of attacks so that if they actually lose a suit and are supposed to pay out, there are no assets from which to pay. Therefore, low risk and potentially very high reward.
The biggest factor for that is not the validity of the patents, but the breadth and ability of the patents to be filed against "juicy" targets with a lot of cash. The cost of filing a suit is literally in the hundreds of dollars (I think ~$750) and most of these cases get settled out fairly early because of the immense cost of the defendants to complete the discovery process.
I'll leave the googling as an exercise for the audience.