Point – A smart house sitter

Never thought about this, but the listening part is actually quite nice addition. For example my fridge and freezer both use &quot;beeps&quot; to signal something is wrong. My stove, oven and dish washer are also using beeps (but a little bit different) to tell the food is ready or dishes are done. My Neato uses beeps to signal it is in trouble. My washing machine does not beep, but it makes a specific sound when it is ready and the lock on the door is released. If the bed room windows are left open, the sounds of traffic are more loud than usual. Also all my doors make a specific sound when they are opened.<p>Now when I think about the &quot;beeps&quot; would be actually quite neat and simple way to integrate various home appliances to this kind of monitoring system. Not as cool or comprehensive as bluetooth or zigbee, but simple to add. Intelligent listening could probably reveal all kinds of interesting stuff without the need to adding new sensors here and there.

Hi Form engineers and Form finance department, you have my attention and desire to purchase this. Can you provide answers to the following questions:<p>1. How much will this cost to purchase?<p>2. Will their be a subscription fee?<p>3. How is the Point system installed, from the video it appeared to be a magnet?<p>4. When is the actual release timeline, so I can start figuring out where I can put this in my house or if I should simply Arduino &#x2F; Pi &#x2F; Grove a solution instead.<p>5. Why kickstarter, you appear to have the infrastructure (e.g. engineering, prototype, etc.) in place.

&gt; &quot;Nothing is recorded or sent across the network. Peace of mind, without giving up on privacy.&quot;<p>Devices like this still make me uncomfortable, given the track record of even large companies making extremely insecure devices[1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.ioactive.com/news-events/IOActive_advisory_belkinwemo_2014.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ioactive.com&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;IOActive_advisory_belkin...</a>

Glad to see at least some companies are taking an (at least semi-) offline approach to these things. With the way things have been going these last few years, the internet-of-things irks me.<p>I&#x27;ve also often wondered why the home security industry seems to be so out of phase with the rest of the tech world; e.g. my house has a security system which seems to have been designed in the 70s (yet it was likely bought by the previous owner circa 2000). To (re-)set zones, you need to go through a 90-step setup wizard, which requires you to calculate zone inclusions as an 8-bit number and type it in on the keypad. And in a day and age when self-driving cars are fast becoming a reality, my alarm system can&#x27;t tell the difference between a 3 year old walking around, a large bird coming in for landing, and a man climbing over the fence with a crowbar in their hand. I think there&#x27;s a lot of room for improvement.<p>Another part of me wonders why devices like this have to be wireless. Sure, it sounds awesome at first, but I&#x27;m pretty sure it means weekly battery swapping (even if we discount frequent wifi use). A device that requires frequent maintenance quickly stops being used, and security devices which are off aren&#x27;t much use (or worse than useless, depending on how you look at it).

Huge points for doing this onsite vs. in the cloud.<p>I&#x27;d want to audit the firmware, and would put it behind a firewall blocking outbound connections.<p>I&#x27;d like the ability to monitor a few sites, though -- not just my home, but also a storage&#x2F;warehouse space, potentially an office, vacation home, parking spot, etc. Being able to monitor all of those in a single app would be awesome.<p>I&#x27;m willing to trust you with processed events (probably), just not raw data, and no silent auto-updates, and a network&#x2F;deployment config which is at least relatively secure by default. (I know you could covert channel with a sneaky firmware feature I could never detect, but that would require effort. I trust the company to be honest a lot more than I trust them to be bug-free, so I just don&#x27;t want &quot;fail-open&quot; to be a default.)

&quot;ex-apple team&quot; is a little misleading, only one employee worked at apple (at least according to their about page)

The title is misleading. Looking at the About Us section it appears that only the CEO&#x2F;Founder worked at Apple.<p>It&#x27;s nice to see a new entrant into the industry none the less though. Interesting idea to use audio detection but I&#x27;m a little surprised it didn&#x27;t include a PIR sensor for motion as well. Would be curious if there&#x27;s an eventual platform play here.

I really like the idea of unobtrusive anomaly detection as a product, but I wonder how much benefit I could actually derive from this.<p>Perhaps it is nice to have a log of whenever the front door opens, but that feature certainly won&#x27;t sell me on its own.<p>It is cool that they can tell when a window breaks, but... how much good does that notification do for me? How confident can I be that this is not a false positive and immediately call the police? Or do I rely on the &quot;soft alarm&quot; to hopefully scare away the would-be intruders?<p>I don&#x27;t see what the &quot;light up&quot; option affords. If I&#x27;m there, I&#x27;ll know that loud music is playing. And I don&#x27;t get the sense that this is meant to replace my smoke alarm&#x2F;carbon monoxide alarm, so at best the light is an early warning system that I should open a window to vent out some smoke from my cooking before the real alarm sets off.<p>Overall, this seems like a really cool concept that has a lot of marginal benefits and zero killer features. Hopefully that sell-story will be embellished upon in the real kickstarter!

There are two textboxes on the screen to be notified when it becomes available. I first tried the bottom one, and it gave me an &quot;Too many subscribe attempts for this email address. Please try again in about 5 minutes. (#8715)&quot;. I tried it a few times after waiting a few minutes, then went back to the first textbox, higher on the page, and that one worked without issue.

Home automation and home security need more powerline communication and less app-wankery and IoT pipedreams with shoddy wireless protocols.

Great idea with a terrible name. You won&#x27;t be able to find the web site when you want to show it to a friend a week from now.

&quot;Nothing is recorded or sent across the network. Peace of mind, without giving up on privacy.&quot;<p>Respect this a lot and is a major selling point for me. If the sound analysis&#x2F;processing is not done over the wire (assuming on the device) will there be a way to allow for publicly produce events (i.e. integration into systems like IFTTT, etc)?

First Andy Rubin left to create Android, then Tony Fadell left to create Nest and now these guys.

Is this supposed to replace a home alarm system? can someone from Form clarify?

Here is a 2 1&#x2F;2 min video on Point that I found through their Vimeo account (uploaded 11hrs ago): <a href="http://vimeo.com/110732806" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;110732806</a>

I can&#x27;t sign up, keep getting the follow error message. I&#x27;m only trying once, with various email address:<p>&quot;Too many subscribe attempts for this email address. Please try again in about 5 minutes. (#8212)&quot;<p>:(

I wonder if it can sense the difference between a cat throwing a glass off a counter and a burglar breaking a window.<p>I love home security stuff like this, and hope this rolls in at a decent price point.

See also &#x27;The Canary&#x27; (with a camera) sold out for $250.<p><a href="http://canary.is/specs/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canary.is&#x2F;specs&#x2F;</a>

Not necessarily easy, but a nice addition would be if it could sense water situations - broken washer hose or failed hot water heater tank.

Love it. Will buy one for me and one for my parents.

Blend in? I sure hope they have many finishes or at least interchangeable covers. Perhaps they could even have covers you can paint.

Home security - for middle class, kind of techy, suburban people!

I love this idea.

Will it work as a smoke alarm?

Another device connected to the cloud sending data to the cloud and this time also sound. It was already creepy the learn that Netatmo, a _weather_ station, is recording sound. Because the company released sound profiles from the games during the FIFA world championship mapped to countries, regions. As they said, there is only a loudness sensor integrated.<p>But this time it is a real microphone. That makes it another &quot;smart&quot; device to hack in to, to be used by 3 letter agencies.<p>I know there are webcams. But then people know. I work with many non-tech people and engineers from different companies. I have seens, that the majority is gluing the integrated webcams. Even in my own company, almost everybody has glued the webcam.