Hasta La Gadget!

 Disrupt Battlefield alumnus and wireless power pioneer Ossia has made some new advances with its Cota tech that it showed off to investors recently, including extended range and the ability to transmit without direct line-of-sight, making it much closer to becoming a practical everyday technology suitable for general use. The startup can now charge a smartphone from a distance of 40-feet, through… Read More

 There are lots of reasons to love 3D printing. It democratizes manufacturing, putting consumers in granular control of the things they own — rather than requiring them to choose from a finite pre-made selection. However there’s a flip-side to this freedom. The detritus that will inevitably be created simply because it’s possible to print a physical object at the click of a button. Read More

A few new details about Tesla’s upcoming ‘affordable’ electronic vehicle came out of a talk the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk gave last week, and Electrek has the key takeaways from the event. Musk shared info around what we can expect from the upcoming mass market ‘Model E’ from the electric car-maker, and those details suggest we’ll see a car with… Read More

A new Kickstarter project debuting today offers a lower barrier of entry to those interested in testing the smart lighting waters. At just $25 for an entry-level pre-order of a single unit, the LuMini is the cheapest way to get started with a smart home lighting system, albeit with some trade-offs compared to category leaders like the Philips Hue.

The LuMini comes from TABU Design, a Hong Kong shop that makes the Lumen Bluetooth smart bulb. The full-size Lumen is fairly large, though, and has a 40-watt equivalent output all for $69. The LuMini has the lower retail cost, but it’s also less powerful: TABU Design says it’s ideal for a “night lamp,” but doesn’t specify how many lumens it actually outputs. It uses 3 watts, compared to 7 watts for the standard-sized Lumen, so you can expect it to be probably around half as bright.

With a companion app, you can control the light color, brightness and scheduling, but the difference from most other connected lighting systems with the LuMini is the Bluetooth connectivity: It uses the low-power standard introduced in Bluetooth 4.0 to connect, which greatly simplifies the connection and setup process, but which also has some disadvantages in terms of range (20 ft. maximum) and the ability to remotely connect to your lighting system, which allows you to control bulbs like the Hue from anywhere with connectivity.

The BLE approach still allows for things like proximity activation, however, and it can even be set to trigger light-based notifications for incoming calls. The real innovation here is on price, however, since this is a long-lived LED bulb (rated at 30,000 hours) that will retail for around $30. Also, it’s a very small bulb, whereas others like the LIFX smartbulb have been criticized for their larger-than-normal size.

The TABU Design team hopes to ship the LuMini in April this year, which isn’t that much of a stretch when you consider that they’re already actively shipping the original Lumen, which is sold via its website and through Amazon. The project is seeking $50,000 in 30 days, and hopefully it gets there, because what this market really needs is more price pressure to drive mass market adoption.

Nest is now rolling out a 4.0.1 update to its smart thermostat after last month’s faulty 4.0 firmware caused Wi-Fi and battery issues. However, it tells me the 4.0 bugs are not responsible for turning people’s heat off or down in the dead of winter. Instead, it says incompatible furnaces and people forgetting to change their air filters are to blame.

This paints a much rosier picture than if you check out Nest’s Facebook wall or run a Twitter search on it.

@nest Coldest night in Iowa in years, and I wake up at 4 AM with the temp. dropped to 54 degrees, and the Nest is cycling on/off constantly.—
Richard Harms (@richharms) January 06, 2014

Customers like Clayton and Richard (seen above) have been flocking to social media to report Nest problems ranging from annoyance to disaster. Some say they’ve come home or woken up in the middle of the night to a freezing cold house. When they investigate their Nest, they find it turning on and off repeatedly, or suddenly out of battery. In some cases it’s shut off or down their heat. One unlucky customer had his pipes freeze because his house got so cold.

One user wrote to TechCrunch explaining his Nest issues in detail:

“At about 4PM Friday, our heat shut off without warning. On inspection, the Nest unit appeared to be stuck in an endless loop of power cycling.  Each time it powered on, it would display the spinning blue loading indicator, and then a message would appear, instructing that we detach the Nest from the mount and reattach it. After being reattached, the unit displayed a message indicating that it was restarting, and the process would repeat indefinitely.

We followed the online troubleshooting guide with no success. We then tried to call support, but were met with impressively-long wait-times and a message acknowledging the existence of a breaking software change that seems to have been pushed out just as the bulk of the country was starting to rely on their furnaces.”

While there are plenty of happy customers who’ve had no problems, others are angry Nest didn’t proactively notify users about the 4.0 bugs. Instead, last month Nest posted to its support center about “Intermittent low battery or connectivity issues with thermostat software 4.0″. There it says:

“We have discovered a bug in our latest 4.0 thermostat software that affects a small percentage of our users…affected users will see a low battery warning on the thermostat, see their thermostat as “OFFLINE” intermittently in the app, and won’t be able to control them using the Nest app….As of Sunday, Dec. 8th, we have a short-term solution and have started updating affected thermostats. We’re rolling these thermostats back to version 3.5.3, which should fix the problem.”

Unfortunately, some people rolled back to 3.5.3 are experiencing a new set of issues. Exacerbated by lots of new users installing Nest products they received for Christmas, customers contacting support are enduring extremely long wait times. Those who do get help on the phone or over email are given long sets of instructions to troubleshoot their own devices.

Affected customers are demanding Nest do more thorough testing of its updates before pushing them out, or at least provide a way to turn off automatic updates. In the meantime, some are switching back to their old, cheap analog thermostats.

But today, I spoke with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers who says the 4.0.1 update is ready and is now being rolled out. He also denied that Nest issues shut off people’s heat. In a statement, the company explains:

“As stated in the support center message, the 4.0 update caused a small percentage of customers to lose Wi-Fi connectivity and therefore the ability to control the temperature remotely. Their heating and cooling remains unaffected except for remote control.  We’ve rolled many of those customers back to 3.5.3 to resolve Wi-Fi connectivity while we work on the fix. In the coming days, we expect to release version 4.0.1, which has the same Wi-Fi performance as 3.5.3 with all the great features of version 4.0.

Regarding the small percentage of customers who experience drained batteries, we work with users who contact our Support team on a case-by-case basis because there are many variables that can cause this – including homes with clogged air filters, or with old or unusual HVAC wiring. Sometimes the fix is to run a power wire, other times the customer’s system is incompatible with Nest. To clarify, this is not related to the 4.0 update. “

It seems anyone with problems or considering buying a Nest should be sure to change their air filters and ensure their furnace is compatible.

Still, Nest will need to better educate customers and ramp up support to avoid being blamed for problems it didn’t cause. Otherwise, customer issues like these could shake confidence in Nest right as Re/code reports it’s trying to raise $150 million to $200 million at a $2 billion to $3 billion valuation. Fortune’s Dan Primack says this round “remains very much a work in progress.”

That work could get a lot harder if investors worry Nest is souring opinions of some of its earliest adopters, even if it’s not responsible for problems. Because accurate or not, people’s opinions on social media influence their friends’ buying habits.

Every product has its vocal minority of jilted users and we can’t verify that all the issues customers are reporting are entirely Nest’s fault. But there seems to be a critical mass of discontent right now. For what it’s worth, though, Rogers sounded legitimately saddened about the 4.0 problems distressing customers, and told me “We do take these things really seriously, even if it’s not our fault.  We’ll answer support calls and we’re always there to help people when they have issues.”

As we move toward having more of our lives managed by high-tech devices, their creators will need to double down on stability and security. Unlike work or entertainment gadgets, devices like Nest’s thermostats and smoke detectors are vital pieces of home infrastructure. Software bugs don’t just cause inconveniences, but real quality-of-life and safety issues. “Move fast and break things” just doesn’t work when you’re involved in our survival.