
Kisha – The umbrella you'll never lose - gorancandrlic
https://www.getkisha.com/
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josefresco
At first I thought it was an umbrella...

Than I thought it was an app that tells you when it's going to rain...

Which led me to believe it could be some sort of satire...

Then at the bottom is an actual umbrella, so now I'm thinking it's a weather
app AND umbrella? and NOT satire?

No idea, but I already have numerous weather apps, and an umbrella in my car.

~~~
profinger
And none of those put together cost you $60. These were my thoughts exactly!

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ryan_j_naughton
I'm skeptical of any product page that uses the word 'perfect' too many times:

"We're big fans of perfectly crafted products." "built with a perfect opening
and closing mechanism" "built using perfect stitching"

Especially when high quality umbrellas tend to cost more than this without the
app or tracking technology.

I think this product could definitely be useful, but it is all about the
clean, minimal experience to make it so.

Instead, I envision this product doing really well as an impulse buy at Macys,
Sharper Image, and similar stores around Christmas. Parents and grandparents
will buy this for their younger family members thinking it is cool. Then the
young people will forget it at the bar anyway because the reason they forgot
their cheap umbrellas was not the lack of reminder, but because they were
drunk.

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sysk
Can't figure out if this is a real product or satire.

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tomkin
I can't love this. It seems there is a flood of new products that allow you to
track or remember them. This can't be sustainable in the long run, as each
product uses it's own proprietary technology, that requires you to use a
specific app. Fast-forward 5-10 years. Do I want 30 apps on my phone that
track the various things I may or may not bring with me? Nope. That would be
very annoying, indeed.

~~~
vinceguidry
Where you see hell I see market forces making everyone freer and more
powerful.

Once everything has intelligence, we'll need to manage that intelligence. We
need one phone app and not dozens.

There's only one thing I can see that can make that happen. Open protocols.
Open device APIs. Then we can make our own management apps. Oh what a
wonderful day that will be.

When I can coordinate my bathroom scale with the app that manages my grocery
list. When I can automatically start my car at 8:30 am, but only if my shower
ran. When I can actually teach my house to understand whether I'm actually
there or not.

~~~
smoyer
Yet that same phenomenon means that losing your phone _feels_ like losing all
the objects tracked by your phone. I agree that this can be done well if we
try but it should also be so resilient that you can be on a new phone with the
same applications, data and settings in just a few minutes.

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bretthopper
"100% windproof"

Downtown in any big city would probably prove that to be wrong very quickly.
Toronto destroys umbrellas.

They make some nice claims WITHOUT any warranty at all.

~~~
jrs235
It's great if the wind won't mangle your umbrella, but if its windy and
raining and your umbrella merely inverts you'll get wet.

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michaeln
Is this a problem people are willing to pay to solve? Is the fact that it's
raining outside a good enough reminder not to lose your umbrella? Just
curious.

~~~
ddeck
People often carry umbrellas in areas where rain is less predictable. I've
left umbrellas in restaurants etc. before, but...

a) I know where I left it, and

b) a decent umbrella costs $3 where I live, so I'd need to lose 20 before this
became cost effective.

~~~
atwebb
Wouldn't the pay off be not getting wet when you would've forgotten an
umbrella? It's not presenting $60 in umbrella value, it's
availability/convenience value.

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camtarn
As a habitual umbrella-loser, this is an _awesome_ product :D

A bit of copy-editing:

'percepitation' in all the screenshots should be 'precipitation'. Or possibly
just 'rain' / 'snow' / 'hail' ;)

'It doesn't bother you if leave one of your safe locations' -> 'It doesn't
bother you if [you] leave [it in] one of your safe locations'

'It works in the buildings' -> 'It works in buildings'

I'll also second "too many uses of perfect". If it's perfect, why does it come
with a warranty? ;)

~~~
gorancandrlic
Thanks, will change...

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nicpottier
Isn't this just putting a Tile [1] (or any number of other BLE devices) on an
umbrella?

[1] [https://www.thetileapp.com/](https://www.thetileapp.com/)

~~~
gorancandrlic
Actually no, because the use case is quite different. We wanted to create an
umbrella that really has an app that helps. With Tile, you would just get the
location feature, without the weather forecast

~~~
zabraxias
A person named Goran who created a smart umbrella called "Kisha" \- rain in
srbo-croatian. The world makes sense :)

~~~
gorancandrlic
Thanks. I did not come up with the name :)

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RobertKerans
"Here at fadgadg.et, we are making the internet of things a reality. Our
beautiful SmartFondue comes with a exquisitely-designed iPhone 6 app that
subtly notifies you when your cheese is ready. Integrating perfectly with the
iOS UI, the app adjusts the lock-screen and main UI colour in perfect
synchronicity with the SmartFondue itself, transitioning delightfully from
virginal white to the deep golden yellow of perfectly-cooked cheese."

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steeve
I really am not so sold on the idea of having to charge my umbrella...

I do wish you all the success though!

~~~
gorancandrlic
You don't need to charge the umbrella, just replace the battery on the beacon.

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erroneousfunk
Awesome, now I'll just add "replace umbrella batteries" on the list of things
I have to remember to do every 6 months or so.

~~~
ask5
put it on your google calendar

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gizmo
Products like this make it hard to argue we're not in a bubble right now. An
umbrella with bluetooth and a smartphone app? Seriously?

The idea of taking a mundane household object and adding bluetooth + app
support to it is not a sensible formula for innovation. I can think of a
hundred products that follow from this formula, and they're all terrible:

* Coffee machine + App. Tells you when coffee is ready. Tell coffee machine to start making coffee as you wake up.

* Vacuum cleaner + App. Tells you when the bag is almost full, sends automatic push notification when you haven't vacuumed a room for too long (using GPS and artificial intelligence!)

* Phone charger + App. Send a push notification to your tablet when your phone is done charging and vice versa.

* Water dispenser + App. Lets you know when your plants need water.

* Sandwich + App. Will send you a push notification when you've eaten the sandwich and final push notification when the sandwich has left your body.

These innovations are just gimmicks, and have no hope of ever becoming more
than that. A shame, because launching any kind of product takes a tremendous
amount of effort, and I'd rather see people put that effort into something
more productive.

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endlessvoid94
Is losing your umbrella a common problem?

~~~
pmoriarty
For me, yes. I've lost so many umbrellas.

But that reminds me of a story I heard told by Alejandro Jodorowsky,[1] about
being at a dinner at Dali's home and Dali telling him about the times when he
and Picasso used to go for walks on the beach, and they would keep finding
clocks buried in the sand.

Then, Dali asked Jodorowsky whether he too had ever found any clocks in the
sand on the beach.

Jodorowsky thought, _" What could I say to the great Dali? If I say that yes,
I have found clocks in the sand, then I would seem arrogant. And if I say that
I never found any clocks, then I would seem like a little man."_

 _" So I thought for a while and then said, 'No, Dali, I have never found any
clocks in the sand. But I have lost a lot.'"_[2]

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky)

[2] - The quotes are not verbatim. This is from memory of an interview I saw
with Jodorowsky, which I can not find right now. If anyone has a link to it
and can provide a verbatim quote, that would be appreciated.

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moron4hire
I'm curious what issues of false-positives and false-negatives this might
have. Did I actually remember my umbrella, but the app hasn't updated the
location it knows of the umbrella yet, so it starts bugging me to go back? Did
I forget to turn the app on, so I leave my umbrella behind, feeling secure
that I'll receive a reminder that is never going to come? Do I just plain
forget my phone sometimes?

Without some way to guarantee a low failure rate, I can see something like
this getting so annoying that I'd just turn it off completely.

And besides, I thought only people who rarely needed rain gear used umbrellas.
The last time I visited Portland, or Ireland, I didn't see anyone with
umbrellas. Everyone wore rain jackets. Incidentally, they keep your hands
free.

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lost_name
I think a better product would be to create a band you can wrap around your
own umbrella that does the same thing. Of course, it could be for anything at
that point and that is often more difficult to market whereas losing an
umbrella is a fairly normal problem.

Just my (unrequested) two cents.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
My thoughts exactly. It is not like this umbrella is going to be enhanced by
integrating the tech. You aren't going to "deploy" the umbrella from your
phone. Simple add-on tags (which are already trying to take off) would suffice
for a lot of things.

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rickyc091
Seems it only comes with a 3 year warranty even though it claims to be 100%
windproof / corrosion proof. I was hoping it would at least be lifetime like
totes.

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profinger
I have enough apps on my phone I don't need to pay $60 to have it more clogged
up so I don't forget an umbrella that I overpaid for to begin with.

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FlyingAvatar
Why not a device you can attach to any umbrella? I feel like the umbrella
market is pretty saturated. (Terrible pun not intended.)

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avree
Does it actually exist? I'm interested, but I'm always dubious when I see a
shipdate that is in the future.

~~~
gorancandrlic
Hi Avre, yes, it does. We've manufactured a small quantity that will ship in
January. We've also prepared our production lines to support bigger quantities
as we scale our operations. Thanks for your comment.

~~~
dfuego
Why you didn't go with one of the crowdfunding sites?

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gorancandrlic
Because we're already in production and don't think that it would make a big
difference. We'd rather do it on our own site.

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sharkweek
This is pretty neat, but I think it is severely underestimating my ability to
lose/leave things behind

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frncscgmz
This is a very confusing. I had to scroll all the way down the page to see
actual photos of the umbrella.

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okasaki
I've only ever left umbrellas on trains and buses, which this wouldn't be very
useful with.

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heyts
Seems like a solution in search of a problem. At least it's not very
expensive.

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TallGuyShort
I wonder if their image might be improved by marketing it as Ki$ha instead.

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ask5
I see a dot com like bubble all over again

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turboladen
Obviously not marketed towards California.

