Big Opportunity: Improving the mundane
A few weeks back I read the news about Nest’s upcoming product Nest Protect (a smart, connected smoke and carbon monoxide detector and alarm) and it made me wonder why didn’t I think about it? It felt so obvious: a product category that hasn’t seen significant innovation over years, required in every home (usually many units per home) with a meaningful use case, but so dull, uninspiring, forgotten by advances in design, user interface and connectivity. Essentially, a product that could be reconceived if seen through the lens of the Internet of Things (IoT).
In simple terms, the Internet of Things refers to physical objects that can be uniquely identified, connected to the cloud and to each other. Sometimes these objects use sensors (although this is not a requirement) and their user interface is accessed through smartphones or tablets.
Now, take some time and look around your home — room by room, your yard, the kitchen and the bathroom — and think about those mundane products that are part of your everyday. In fact, step outside your home and continue looking around, on your way to work, at the park or at the gym. Think about your everyday activities and the “things” you use: Door locks, light bulbs, garden irrigation, thermostats, key chains and more. One by one, these otherwise boring products can be (and are being) transformed through power, connectivity, sensors, services and beautiful interfaces that leverage our omnipresent touch screens on phones and tablets, making them better, more exciting, fun to use, and easy to control wherever we are.
The Nest Thermostat is probably one of the highest profile products in this category, kicking off a wave of smart and connected devices that are finding their way to our homes and lives. But there are other examples:
- August smart lock, a secure, simple and social way to manage your home’s lock.
- Tile a small device that can be attached to any item you might lose making it easy to track.
- Greenbox a smart irrigation system that uses weather forecast information and your smartphone to more easily control how you water your yard.
And there are many more . The trend is real. Amongst the enablers are omnipresent connectivity, BLE (bluetooth low energy), cheap wifi chips, sensors, the proliferation of screens, and even crowdfunding.
These are mundane objects that use real time data to learn and get better over time, but also produce data that could in turn make other devices smarter (but that’s a topic for another post).
So next time you are out and about, look around and think about your daily activities. You will find mundane yet frequently used products that could be completely redefined leveraging today’s technologies, and there lays a big opportunity.
If you liked this article i just posted the 2nd in the series Big Opportunity: Personal EVs — Single-rider electric vehicles will revolutionize commuting in crowded urban centers
