Skip to main content

Switchmate Lets You Control Your Light Switches From Your Phone, No Rewiring Required


From scrappy startups to mega giants like Philips and GE, it seems like everyone wants to build a smart lightbulb. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to flip off that light they left on downstairs from the comfort of their bed?

Smart lightbulbs have one massive, glaring fault though: as soon as someone hits the light switch — as people tend to do — they’re worthless.

Switchmate, a company competing in the TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield at CES this year, wants to solve the problem from the other end: at the switch.

Read More 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Facebook’s Newest Data Center Is Now Online In Altoona, Iowa

Facebook today announced that its newest data center in Altoona, Iowa, is now open for business. The new facility complements the company’s other centers in Prineville, Ore; Forest City, N.C. and Luleå, Sweden (the company also operates out of a number of smaller shared locations). This is the first of two data centers the company is building at this site in Altoona. What’s actually more interesting than the fact that the new location is now online is that it’s also the first data center to use Facebook’s new high-performance networking architecture. Traditional data centers are, for the most part, built around clusters of machines. That’s because you need really high networking performance between all of the machines within a cluster. Networking resources between clusters, however, are typically more limited. That’s fine, as long as your applications mostly run within a single cluster, but as Facebook grew, its applications also expanded beyond these single clusters. So the bala