Hasta La Gadget!

Belkin’s connected home efforts are moving forward at a rapid clip, and its WeMo line has a number of new products on display at CES 2014 this year. There’s a connected lightbulb set similar to Philips Hue, a connected slow cooker for lazy cuisine, and the WeMo Maker, which allows enterprising users to make any existing DC appliance into a smart device.

The LED-based WeMo connected bulbs come in either a starter set with three for $129, or individually in single bulb packs for $39.99. They have 800 lumens, and are 60 watt equivalent with a warm white tone. They can be controlled each on their own, or in pre-assigned groups, and they are connected to a WeMo link, which is included in the starter pack and can manage up to 50 bulbs. You can turn them on and off over the web, run vacation programs, dim them and control from both iOS and Android via the WeMo app.

Unlike the Philips Hue, they don’t offer changeable colors, but they are cheaper per unit once you get set up with a starter kit, and they work with Belkin’s existing WeMo setup, which is a big seller for those already invested in the ecosystem.

The new WeMo crock-pot lets you turn the slow cooker on or off from anywhere, get reminders about the state of your meal, change the temperature remotely and either control things manually or use built-in calculators for time and temp. It retails for $99.99, which actually isn’t that far off from some nicer slow cookers on the market, and can be controlled from the WeMo app for iOS or Android too.

Finally, and most interesting of all, Belkin is making it possible to take legacy hardware and then turn that into a WeMo-enabled accessory. You can add Internet control to anything with a DC switch, the company says, and allows you to schedule those device or turn them on or off manually from anywhere you have a connection. It’s like a more sophisticated and integrated version of their smart outlet WeMo products, with additional features that let you watch and control a huge range of 5V DC-powered sensors. So if a moisture sensor connected to the maker notices that it’s rained, it’ll prevent your connected sprinkler system from going on as previously scheduled. The Maker can also be combined with IFTTT recipes for advanced intelligent programming.

All these new WeMo gadgets are expected to ship this upcoming spring, and new features will be added to the WeMo control app on iOS and Android starting in February via software updates.

Belkin clearly wants to own the fast-growing connected home space, and this new range of gadgets indicates it’s tackling the problem from a number of different angles at once.

Kickstarter success and Australian hardware startup LIFX is finally shipping its Wi-Fi connected smart lightbulbs this Friday. That’s a little later than originally promised in its Kickstarter campaign. LIFX had promised to deliver by March, so they’re officially quite late to the party, but they’ve also managed to secure some major retail partners for a consumer launch late this year and early next.

LIFX bulbs will go on sale at Best Buy online January 19, 2014 in the U.S., and some global retail partners including John Lews in the UK, DickSmith in Australia, Digitech in the EU, MediaMarket in Scandinavia and Virgin Megastores in the Gulf Region, are launching it even earlier in December of this year. That’s all above and beyond the existing $10 million in pre-sales LIFX has done via Kickstarter and its own site, and the $4.6 million it has raised from private investors.

Co-founder and Director Andrew Birt says that they acknowledge that they’re behind schedule, but that the smart bulb race “hasn’t been won yet,” referring to the head start legacy lighting industry giant Philips has with its Hue series. Philips introduced two new types of Hue bulbs and starter kits earlier this week, effectively tripling its product lineup in a single blow. LIFX will offer screw, bayonet and downlight models from the get-go, however, and unlike the Philips Hue, they don’t require a base to connect to Wi-Fi to talk to each other and to your iOS or Android device.

The LIFX team has been working hard to fix production issues and start sending devices out to pre-order customers, Birt says, but they’ve also been working in the background on other efforts while that’s been going on.

A brand new app called Goldee launches today, offering Phlips Hue users a new way to use their connected lighting system. The app provides dynamic “light scenes” which use artist-sourced photos as their palette, changing tones gradually to provide dynamic shifts in color, including gradual on/off sequences for waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night.

There are 10 different scenes included in the app at launch, each which a brief description and credits (citing the scene’s creator, the photographer of the source image and the location where it was taken). Tapping on any starts the dynamic lighting, with each bulb attached to your Philips Hue system taking part. You can specific if you have multiple rooms in a single home with Hue bulbs, too, and run a different scene for each. The first light scene also has an alarm feature, and the last one has a sleep timer for going to bed.

The app works well, but there are some caveats – you have to have the app running in the foreground to get the dynamic effect to work, and the screensaver built-in to keep your display from using too much juice is a little finicky when it comes to returning your display to full brightness once you activate the screen again. But on the whole, it’s a unique experience, and one that Hue owners are likely to appreciate.

“The Goldee team started innovating home lighting even before Philips hue was introduced,” Goldee CEO Tomas Baran explained in an interview. “We figured out right away that Philips hue is a very good tool to build upon [with lighting]. However, the Goldee App is only our first step towards changing how we perceive and interact with light.”

Baran says that there are plans in place to do “something much bigger,” which he expects to reveal more about later this year. He calls light “a new form of art,” hence sourcing its scenes from people with experience in that field, and notes that light is never static in nature. I asked whether this might be a bit narrow in terms of focus for a whole company, but Baran says Goldee is betting we’re just seeing the beginning of change in this space.

“Every new thing is risky in the beginning, but if we wait until it becomes popular it will already be too late,” he said. “We believe a revolution has started in the lighting sector with smart LEDs. We have no doubt this will be the future. We used to watch black-and-white TVs, nowadays we cannot imagine a display without colors. Obviously, it will take time, but we see the same thing happening with light. “

The app is free, and so far the only content that’s locked within the app can be made available via either rating the app or sharing via Twitter and Facebook. There is a “library” section that promises to add additional light scenes in future, and some of those may arrive as paid upgrades. For now, Goldee is a well-executed curiosity, but it’ll be interesting to see if smart lights really do herald the kinds of changes Baran envisions.

Philips Hue is a lighting system that changes the definition of what your standard home lighting setup is, and now there’s an official developer program for the innovative Wi-Fi-connected bridge and bulbs, so that third-party apps and hardware can pick up what Philips has started.

To be clear, people have developed apps for the Philips Hue system already; we covered one two Hue hacks just last week, including an iOS app that turn your Hue home lighting into a dance party, and a software add-on for Minecraft that changes your ambient lighting to match the day/night cycle in the world building game. But those, and other Philips apps to date, have been built mostly by developers who are reverse engineering their own solution.

Philips recognized that devs wanted to do different things with the Hue, and decided to help them out, by opening up an official developer program, complete with an SDK for iOS developers, and APIs that allow both software and hardware makers to take advantage of the Hue’s connected features. The official tool means that developers can depend on it as a stable channel through which to build Hue integration into their products.

Hue uses the ZigBee standard for home automation, which means that they can talk to each other, as well as motion detectors, connected thermostats, connected appliances and more. The new developer program will mean that hardware makers using these standards can build in Hue-compatible features, so that the lights can be triggered by various actions. You could have a specific light recipe come on whenever you open the door, for instance, or when a thermostat is set to specific climate setting.

Other potential uses of the developer tools include apps for amateur and professional photographers, which could help them optimize lighting for a shoot with a simple app attached to a device with light level detection capabilities. Philips also plans to release future features around geo-fencing, scheduling and other smartphone sensor capabilities that could expand what developers can do with them.

“We’re now at a point where there are already about 10 applications that have been shared and built from the unofficial developer community for new applications around Hue,” explained George Yianni, HUe System Architect in an interview. “Now what we want to do as Philips is we actually want to help and grow and encourage this community, and give them tools and proper documentation. Also, we want to give them commitment that this is the API and we’re going to support it and it won’t change overnight.”

Yianni says that’s been the big roadblock stopping bigger developers and companies from creating apps and accessories for Hue so far. Specifically, it’s been holding up hardware development, he says, and that means you can probably expect to see some big names start to integrate Hue into their own lines of connected home devices.

The developer tools will be available free to anyone who wants to create applications and devices that connect to the Hue system. Philips will also continue to work on expanding the Hue line, Yianni said, with new lightbulb types to follow soon. With new third-party investment in the Hue ecosystem, as well as more from Philips itself, it’s about to become a lot more than just a different kind of lightbulb.

So, remember when we said bulbs with wireless radios are the future of lighting? We weren’t lying. Philips just upped the ante by making bulbs that can not only cast four gorgeous shades of white, but any color you can imagine. More »