
SmartThings: Make Your World Smarter - guiseppecalzone
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smartthings/smartthings-make-your-world-smarter/backers
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danso
How is this much different than Ninja Blocks, which was funded in March (and a
few months late on delivering)?
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninja/ninja-blocks-
conne...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninja/ninja-blocks-connect-your-
world-with-the-web)

~~~
desertrain
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.

~~~
thatguydan
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.

(Source: I work for Ninja Blocks).

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georgemcbay
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.

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Tichy
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.

~~~
desertrain
> 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.

~~~
tednaleid
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.

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npsimons
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.

~~~
tednaleid
Probably because the main kickstarter page was submitted yesterday and didn't
hit the front page. For whatever reason, it caught on this time.

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bproper
very cool - love me some internet of things.

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.

~~~
joneilloine
Thanks for the love! The renaissance of hardware startups and open-hardware
were big drivers in us taking this approach.

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lpolovets
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.

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ghostblog
Whoa... this is amazing. Classic use case for all the tools is letting me know
when someone has broken into my wine cellar and turned on the taps.

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ssharp
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.

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Eduardo3rd
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.

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ashbrahma
How is this different from Twine?
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-
li...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-
your-world-talk-to-the-internet?ref=live)

~~~
tzm
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.

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xxbondsxx
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...

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frankydp
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?

~~~
whileonebegin
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.

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ricw
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%.

~~~
dkasper
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.

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schiffern
It's nice to see lots of competition in this area.

Small nitpick – on the main page you probably mean "CO Alarms", not "CO2
Alarms".

~~~
alttext
Thanks. Fixed!

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ChuckMcM
Interesting take on the problem. It reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's quest to
automate homes [1]. Perhaps this is the right time for it.

[1] <http://circuitcellar.com/?s=Home+Control>

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swah
The biggest problem to be solved with home automation, IMHO, is making things
cheaper.

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chaostheory
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.

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jeffandersen
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.

~~~
joneilloine
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!).

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jhuckestein
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).

Yesterday's demo is at
[http://www.justin.tv/jonashuckestein/b/264542955#r=Fs6GQLI~&...](http://www.justin.tv/jonashuckestein/b/264542955#r=Fs6GQLI~&s=05)
and a working prototype of the API at <http://openanno.com>. It's built to
scale but a rewrite will be necessary (current code is public on github).
Everything was built in less than 24 hours.

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 :)

 _Edit: Formatting_

~~~
ninetax
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?

~~~
jhuckestein
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.

