Monday, February 4, 2008

A very niche home appliance

My typical workday begins with a cup of coffee and morning paper at 6 o'clock when my phone wakes me up. Fortunately this doesn't happen often, but today morning paper was late and I was awake at Monday morning, too sleepy to do anything productive. At that moment I remembered my old idea about a very niche home appliance. This is also very much a mobile gateway type of a solution, an idea I wrote about some weeks ago.

Rough idea has two parts:
  • small sensor device that I could attach to my mailbox. When mailbox door opens, a sensor will notice this event and save the data
  • alarm clock application in my smartphone

Think about following scenario: I have set my phone to wake me up at 6 o'clock, but only if morning paper has been delivered. When alarm would ring, my phone asks (over Bluetooth, WLAN, ZigBee; you name it) from mailbox sensor when mailbox was opened last time. If mailbox hasn't been opened this morning (i.e. morning paper is late) my phone lets me sleep one hour extra. Application for terminal is nothing special, any mobile developer can do it. Any volunteers who are able to create a mailbox sensor appliance?

//Harri

2 comments:

marcelcaraciolo said...

Hi! I have to say that your blog is so cool! you have interesting ideas and i'm always following it. Good luck and keep posting!
Your ideas are a good inspiration for mobile developers!
My Name is marcel and i'm from Brazil.

Harri Salminen said...

Good to hear that you find my postings interesting! I will keep on posting my ideas and notes all across mobile domain - I feel there is much to be done if we just can keep our eyes open and look problems from some fresh angle.

My claim is that current enabling technologies and (mobile) devices are so good that the biggest problem is our ability to see things differently and imagine smarter solutions.

Harri