Internet of Things startup: electric imp

This is cool. At wattvision, we've essentially built our own version of this for the energy monitoring vertical -- would be interesting to see if they expose an API for devices generally. For example, if we can control imp devices through our UI, things get interesting! Or I guess we could consider the strengths/weaknesses of adopting their platform entirely. Looks like a stellar team with great backers, and they even used energy monitoring as one of their examples.

Honestly I don't see the draw to this type of technology. It's a cool piece of hardware but it basically just allows for remote control and monitoring of electronics. Past the "that's cool" stage I don't see many people finding long-term use for such technology. The hacker in me hopes they prove me wrong, but I see this type of product continue to live serving a niche market.

We live in an exciting time. So many ideas haven't seen the light of day because tech like this hasn't hit the tipping point yet. Once it does, the physical creativity of the hackers will be unleashed. Hell, maybe we'll have hoverboards by 2015 after all.

If you want a real internet of things, may I suggest a lower power protocol like ZigBee? Mesh networks come free with the spec! <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zigbee" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zigbee</a>

This looks interesting. A big downside for me is that it sounds like they route all communications through their website. I would rather run a server on my local network and keep communications between me and my imps private.

IOBridge is a similar product/platform that has been around for a while: <a href="http://iobridge.com/" rel="nofollow">http://iobridge.com/</a>

Given that a simple Ethernet shield for Arduino costs upwards of 40$ (last time I checked), this sounds very interesting to me (wannabe for-fun hardware hacker).

Neat. Like a real-life + hardware version of ifttt.com