I may be biased here, but I think almost everyone here is missing the point. Yes, Essential raised $300M because Andy Rubin is at the helm, but the bet is not on the phone they just launched. Its on the Smart Home. Here's a quote from Rubin himself:
The long-term vision for Essential, Rubin said, is more closely aligned
with the Essential Home, which Rubin hopes you’ll put in your kitchen or
living room and use to control all the connected devices where you live.
Apple has HomeKit, Google has "works with Nest" (a joke, really), Samsung has SmartThings, etc.. If he follows the same path he has with Android and decides to open up the Essential Home platform [1], then its going to revolutionize a market that has the potential of being as valuable as the smartphone. If that's not a company that's worth $1B, especially led by someone with Andy Rubin's track record, I don't know what is.
[1] I mean truly open, the way he's done with Android. The Essential phone will already be more open that most phones on the market (unlocked bootloader), there's good reason to believe the Home will be too.
" If that's not a company that's worth $1B, especially led by someone with Andy Rubin's track record, I don't know what is."
With all due respect, there's zero justification in your statement for the $1B valuation. There is bias, of the favorable kind, towards Andy, nothing objective.
Remember that the open market doesn't trade on pure emotion/bias only. Otherwise, many statements like yours could've saved Lehman Brothers from hitting $0 in value
He needs to show something tangible to investors and the world. He's a phone guy, so he starts here, knowing voice assistants are still a few years away from mainstream. That'll give him a customer base and some revenue, keeping investors off his back which extends his timeline as the voice assistant / smart home market develops over next five to ten years.
I had removed it only from the displayed apps. A minute later I real8zed and properly uninstalled it, then the ad stopped. There is no doubt that it was this app, it fronted itself every time the ad displayed.
IoT finding its footing in augmenting other systems rather than revolutionizing them
This is key. All the companies that are trying to start from scratch and build something big are failing or are hitting huge roadblocks due to high learning curves. On the other hand, those that are starting with simple, one-feature, even buttonless devices (philips hue, chromecast, echo) are the ones that are staying afloat.
I'm in this niche, and have been hit hard by this reality. IoT is definitely coming, but right now it is SO young, immature and fragmented, that it takes a pretty skilled person to use it in any meaningful way.
People need to be educated, and the best (read: only) way to do that is to introduce them to IoT one piece at a time. And these pieces have to be reliable and consistent. Until then, the switch on the wall has nothing to worry about.
I have 8 years of experience in Android - I started working with it the day it officially went out of beta. I'm one of the first 100 people to ever publish an app for Android, and the first to publish an In-App Purchase. I've worked on a wide-range of apps with all kinds of technologies, from simple lists & galleries, google maps integration (gps, location, navigation), to complex Bluetooth 4.0 LE enabled smart home apps.
Previous work:
- Lead Android engineer at a YC startup (Circle)
- Lead Android & founder at a smart home startup (AnyMote)
- Lead Android & founder at a security startup (40+ mil users, acquired in '11)
- LAMP stack, AWS (EC2, S3, ELB & more), scripting & similar when the job requires it
If you need someone to get a prototype started quickly or get your app off the ground very quickly, using the latest tech & guidelines, reach out to me at sergiu@colortiger.com
Nobody is even answering our emails/applications for an IFTTT channel so I'm going to shamelessly hook in here and ask: who do small companies (that's what startups are, right?) have to bribe to get bigger companies to even look down at us and exchange an email or two ?
And PLEASE don't tell me to "just fill out the form at http://ifttt.com/platform", tired of that already. We have hundreds of thousands of active users of an IoT service and you're just ignoring us.
PS: I'm grossed out by the fact that I had to resort to a HN comment to try to get someone's attention. Go ahead and downvote to the abyss.
Could you clarify if you actually have someone that is responsible for reading and responding on the official contact channel (http://ifttt.com/platform) for "Partnership" Inquiries?
I've found that if you ever want to contact a company, find the appropriate person and email them. Collectively owned company emails are terrible because they often don't have a single point of responsibility.
Also for github repos, project maintainers, email if you want a response, don't use an issue or the wiki or form. I just got a minor rails gem updated today that had people complaining about the lack of updates in issues by emailing the account owner.
Zrgiu_ , I'd recommend looking into writing a Node-red node. That way, your work stays yours, and integrates in a wider open source community.
Your work should stay yours, and as current as you choose. You will have to deal with the initial npm politics, but that's better than the IFTTT contract presented...
This is Android - what about apps that run mostly in the background ? A music player, fitness tracker, activity tracker? What about apps that run continuously, like a launcher ?
remember that you paid $4.64, but 30% of that went to Amazon anyway.
Generally, about 2-3% of the people who would download a free app would also pay for it, which could make Underground a good choice. People who haven't paid though, aren't as invested, and are more likely to quit using that app sooner.
Also, there's the niche issue: it's very possible that fighting fantasy fans are more likely to pay for their apps, which means none of these numbers applies to them.
As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product.
However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can innovate. Maybe it worked well for Koalasafe, which sounds like could have very well be built as just a modified version of OpenWRT with a simple installer. But it certainly wouldn't work for more than half of the other hardware projects out there.
Look at the most succesful projects - Pebble, Coolest Cooler, The Micro, Dash - none of these could have gotten where they are without custom firmware.
Going back to KoalaSafe - the $100k they raised may sound like a lot of money, but it's certainly not enough to develop the kind of hardware they are using. It's enough maybe for the software part and some prototypes. You have to set your expectations straight too, and I do believe they did the best anyone could do with that money. Congrats on delivering!
I remember reading a postmortem about a failed hardware Kickstarter campaign (some photographic accessory: a flash remote?) and they said they contacted a professional manager from the industry who told them he wouldn't even try developing new hardware without a few million in funding, tens of millions being more common. So there, turns out making new hardware is really expensive.
The product could've easily been made on their budget. Their problem was outsourcing much of the development work, so they paid consultants too much money to make something that was overdesigned and way too expensive to make. When you're starting in hardware, you need to immerse yourself in the whole chain to be able to make good decisions. Shame, I liked the guys.
Wow, pretty bad advice they got... The little company I work for does high end microwave equipment (satellite terminals, RF conversion equipment, 5Gbps ultra-low-latency terrestrial links used for high frequency trading, etc.) and only turns over a few million dollars per year...
I would be surprised if a flash remote cost more than two or three hundred thousand to develop and productise, tool up and do a small production run, but that's assuming you have a team with the right skills. If you're paying contract design houses then I guess it would be a lot more expensive.
As I understood the advice, that's what kind of budget it usually takes, at least in the industry of photography, to reliably create a new hardware product with the level of polish that the market is used to.
Yup, it is amazing how quickly a few $10k tools, $3k tooling modifications, and sample shipping costs quickly adds up.
I laugh at most hardware Kickstarters because what they are trying to do is impossible with the funding levels you are going to get, so if it is going to be successful they should already have investors in which case they Kickstarter is just a cheap marketing campaign.
I have used your app on HTC One. Liked it but unlocking the phone to use a remote app was more cumbersome than just grabbing the remote.
I like the approach Peel is taking. Show what's currently on TV and click on what you want to watch and it automatically switches the channel to that show. That's a real good use of the smartphone app, since flicking through channels on TV is really inefficient
That's maybe a discussion for another medium, but we're actually updating the app right now with a customizable notification - so you have access to your commands from anywhere (including lockscreen) without any kind of intrusion.
Also, we already have a floating remote (facebook chathead-style) that shows on top of the lockscreen. Best of all - you can configure it to show only while you're on the home wifi.
Since they make money only with advertising, Peel is only focused on TV-watching. While we're going to have the same feature soon (tv guide with auto-switching), AnyMote is meant to do let you do much more than just control a TV and Set Top Box. It has all kinds of wifi lights support, receivers, media centers, etc.
I'd buy like 4 of these or any other IR bluetooth/Wifi adapters if they had an API so I could hook them up to my Echo. "Alexa, turn on South Park" (turns on TV, switches input, changes channel, etc etc).
Personally, the approach Peel is taking irritates me. Forces me to select a tv antenna/cable profile thing, when that's useless to me. I have no antenna, I have no cable, I just use a roku with netflix. Why does it have to be so complicated when all I need is a power button and volume control?
I believe boundlessdreamz is talking about Smart IR Remote [1]. We named our app "Smart Remote" 2+ years ago, and after a month, Peel (the preloaded app) also renamed itself to Smart Remote (from Peel). We've held on to our name, and they've held on to theirs, which has caused a lot of confusion.
Agree zrgiu - we were able to avoid the hardware design aspect, but the projects you mentioned certainly couldn't - that is their whole point of existing.
Android only recently released APIs for sound that are accurate enough for these kinds of applications. As the % of devices running Android 5.0 starts increasing, we'll see sound mixing (and similar) apps there too.
While Android's sound APIs before Lollipop did have a very high latency, you could hack around it by doing your audio processing in native code and feeding the APIs PCM. It just sucked.
That said, definitely excited for the new sound APIs. It's been far too long.
assuming it's the same anti-piracy mechanism they use for paid apps (and it looks like it is), then you really shouldn't rely on it. Sometimes it takes hours to report an install as "licensed", and crackers have developed tools (apkmania, i'm looking at you) to automatically strip and recompile apks that contain this license check.
The way to do it would be to give developers an API they can use on a server (something we've been asking for a while), but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Well, it's kind of two-phase. If the license check fails, the Play Games server calls will fail. Which means features like multiplayer just won't work.
[1] I mean truly open, the way he's done with Android. The Essential phone will already be more open that most phones on the market (unlocked bootloader), there's good reason to believe the Home will be too.