Ninjablocks is a cool idea, but in practice not great for home automation, and not great as a user experience for non-hackers.
For one, from what I understand, Ninjablocks connects sensors to your network via ethernet or wifi. In practice, that's a bad way to do home automation. It looks like SmartThings is using a mesh network (Zigbee or Zwave), which is way more scalable and self-extends its range as you add more devices to the mesh. Using Zigbee/Zwave and Bluetooth 4.0 also means sensors can be super low power... just pop a battery in a sensor and stick it somewhere and have it last for years before needing to replace the battery. Ninjablocks can't do that. Devices that connect via ethernet/wifi/usb are a lot more demanding power-wise.
Also, NinjaBlocks is all about having sensors trigger online actions. That's cool, but what if I want it to trigger my door to unlock? They allude to being able to do that in the future, but from what I gather it will on their site you'll have to cobble together a DIY solution yourself.
Actually, Ninja Blocks' next iteration due toward the end of the year will have onboard RF433Mhz, which allows you to interface with a ton of things you might already have in your house (motion sensors, door bells, door sensors, etc). These devices are super cheap and use crazy small amounts of power.
We've tried to go to great lengths to make it possible for non-hackers to interface with us, for instance you can train the platform what devices are in your house, and then make rules that might trigger anything, such as RF devices like power sockets, Webhooks, SMS, and many more.
Right now we're focussed on getting the rest of our Kickstarter obligations out (we're currently waiting on RF433 dongle's, finally due next week), and are working hard on building a platform that other's can build apps on-top of.
Edit: Don't want to steal SmartThings' thunder here, it looks really cool and we welcome the competition. Just wanted to correct the inaccuracies of the above comment.
X10 reborn. I know people who were playing around with stuff like this back in the 90s and the X10 protocol has existed since the mid 70s. I don't know if these are the guys to do it but it does seem like the time is right for this sort of home automation to finally take off.
Sorry, but I think this is pure fantasy. Of course it is possible, but they won't provide all those things for 100K.
What I mean is: all they show is a smartphone app and a fancy looking device. All the cool things we all dream about will have to be built on top of that. That is exactly the state we already have without that Kickstarter project (could as well go for Arduino or whatever). Yet nobody is building those things. Hence my conclusions that these are just pipe dreams...
Might as well start a Kickstarter for a Teleporter.
> but they won't provide all those things for 100k
they raised 135k in a day. by the end of the kickstarter they will likely have raised 1-2 million.
i think their plan is to ship with a handful of sensors and apps but have a platform for others to develop and share on easily. seems like a pretty good way to do it if you ask me. the platform will be key though, and i guess we'll find out more about that in the coming months.
Agree with your basic point, but they won't raise more than ~650k because they've set maximums on all of the (normal) tiers. I think this is actually a great thing as there have been a number of kickstarters that have been victims of their own success because they've been oversubscribed beyond what can actually be delivered in a realistic timeframe. IMO most kickstarters that aren't pure digital distribution should have a limit of ~3x their funding level.
Granted, with the right set of sensors and base app they could make it easy to create lots of apps. I suppose all this is available today (RFID tags, motion sensors and so on), but putting them together requires some thinking. If the invention part can be moved into software, lots of apps could follow.
While you raise a good point about the difficulty of what they are attempting, I think it is worth noting that they might be attempting to get an MVP out there to gauge market viability. If this campaign is successful (which it obviously has been so far) then the team could always raise a little seed money on much better terms compared to what they would get before the campaign.
Why is the link to the backers page? All due respect to the backers, but I want to hear about the project first, not who's backing it. Not hard to find the actual page, just annoying.
A side note: crowd-funding platforms are really sparking a renaissance in hardware startups. VCs have stopped betting on these companies, because software companies have a much cheaper and faster to scale. But the really interesting advancements are going to happen on the open-source hardware side, and consumers are willing to fund that in exchange for early access and involvement in the creative process.
Cool project. In the future, it's probably better for the story to link to the description instead of the list of backers. I'm guessing most people would prefer to initially read about the project instead of seeing who already supports it.
I started thinking about a similar concept a few months ago. When researching if to connecting various things in your life to some sort of central, network connected, interface already existed, I wasn't entirely surprised to find out there are a few less than inspiring home automation systems developed by garage door opener companies, Time Warner Cable, etc. Their applications are limited and their UI's look pretty terrible.
It would be awesome if this could be pulled off in some manor that either has a ton of applications from the vendor, or has a fairly open architecture that allows other sensors / devices to be applied it. And if it can do all of this while still being simple for non-tech people who may still want some basic functionality, I could some big potential in it.
Same here. Just got a house and I'm looking for a way to automate the whole thing, but there's a pretty shockingly small amount of usable hardware out there for a reasonable price. Here's hoping this platform is everything that hackers like us are looking for in a HA system.
SmartThings is a fully integrated approach to creating a network of connected devices, from software to hardware and IC design. You can create your own hardware components that talk to the SmartThing platform, APIs, etc.
My only concern is that this is a lot of hardware / installation to get some of the basic use cases down, which might be intimidating for non-savvy users. Unless they can sell a home-installation service as well...
I am missing something or is this actually built with a cellular data connection? A new data plan seems like a huge barrier of entry. Why would you not use local internet or at least offer both? Wouldn't most if not all the consumers in this market have in home internet? Cellular data outside of the huge city is terrible on average, even in ATL it is very iffy. Maybe it is because I have never lived in the valley, but cellular data is still a third class service in my experience.
Not trying to be negative, just hoping someone from the team could answer on why no wifi?
It probably supports wifi too. But if the power in the house goes out, so does the Internet. By going cellular they avoid that problem, although batteries can still run out.
I'm not convinced this is what we need. I suppose if you littered your house with these sensors and could see a "house dashboard" to check the house's statuses on a web page any time of the day, it would be nice. But this really won't solve a busted pipe in the basement.
I don't think these guys know how complex and difficult this is going to be. They might have an SDK out this year, but chances are its pretty rubbish. Its not as if others haven't tried. And having written my PhD thesis on these things I know its a complete and utter pain.
Chances for success: less than 1%.
Of course doing something hard means there is a high chance of failure. At least these guys are trying to do something that could have massive upside both to the users and the company, and not just taking the lower risk approach and building yet another social widget or game.
This is definitely a great idea. My only concern about any products like this, that connect to a centralized location on the Internet, is privacy. There are enough details about me online as it is.
My only complaint is that it uses generic bulky looking (from what I see in the photos) add-ons (things). If only they had more slimline pieces to go with the style of the base station.
Thanks for the feedback Jeff! We're showing those generic ones on the KS page because we do integrate with off the shelf components, but have no fear, we are also going to create a whole array of our own SmartThings that are much, much nicer looking (and smaller!).
I love this idea. Two years ago, when I had just moved to Silicon Valley, I came up with a concept called OpenAnno for a hackathon about Twitter's new annotations API feature. Lucky for me (I didn't realize this then, I didn't know a lot about them), two of the judges were Ron Conway and Paul Graham. I naively presented the project and later ended up talking to Paul and Ron. Ron thought it was interesting and asked me to send him a follow up email. This is what I sent, I just dug it out and thought it might be interesting in this context. I've never really shared it with anyone either so I'd love some feedback even thought it's such a long time ago :)
--
OpenAnno is Twitter for Objects.
We want to build a close approximation of the real world "object graph".
OpenAnno stores public annotations (formerly tweets) on unique objects
(formerly people). Objects are connected via typed edges (formerly
mention, follow, reply), thus establishing the "object graph"
(formerly "social graph"). Anybody can add annotations and edges.
Objects can be "followed" (an edge-type; there can be other types with
other semantics). Objects can follow objects, too. A vendor can follow
product ratings of products and adjust prices. This adjustment is
pushed to following objects which might order those items once they
are cheap enough. An alarm clock can follow your work schedule and
your friends and toaster can follow the alarm clock. Thus, OpenAnno
becomes the message bus in a global computational network. The
interplay of smart objects reacting to one another is incredibly
powerful (brains works like that, too).
Another application is search: the object graph can give you shopping
advice that matches your wardrobe, can summarize and add value to
complicated news events, can help you learn new languages and
cultures, can suggest shops that sell every item in your fridge etc
etc..
In certain domains (e.g. shopping) the object graph may be suitable to
do analysis/research/simulation.
Possible "early annotators":
- Cars with license plates (a la bump.com)
- Anything with a barcode (a la stickybits.com)
- Real World that can be recognized in images (a la Google Goggles)
- Pictures/Media (comp. tazpic's presentation from yesterday)
- Objects other APIs give you
OpenAnno is a desirable partner for the mentioned companies allowing
them to put their data in context. Data from non-partners is pulled in
through "API tunneling" (as per yesterdays presentation).
Challenge: We can build the "starting graph" from all the information
we can gobble. This is difficult. Getting from there to a close
approximation of the "object graph" is even more difficult and
interesting.
Social proof: PG first called OpenAnno a "superset of Twitter
annotations" and then a "communication channel that is bigger than Twitter".
--
sigh You gotta love the "it's built to scale but a rewrite will be necessary" line and the "social proof" section :) Makes me feel like I've come a long way in those two years.
Me and my friends talked to SV Angel for a little but I had already decided to take a different job for immigration reasons. Back then I didn't realize that these people were kind of a big deal and I should somehow capitalize on that. Good times :)
Pretty awesome concept! Could each of the objects hold there annotations locally, and let other objects query them? Or would there have to be be a central server?
The idea was to have a central database, otherwise it would be impossible to do any kind of computation/search on it. App.net might be a candidate for something like this.
