As someone who is building IoT devices (www.flair.zone), I would say that many of these complaints resonate with me.  There have been two motivating factors behind what we are doing:
Building the Internet of Useful Things and not building the Internet of Expensive Things.  So far that has worked well for us and we haven&#x27;t even launched officially.<p>Nest (as a company) is an interesting case to examine with respect to this article.  The thermostat in it of itself was a much needed upgrade for some and dropcam has a ton of potential for more complete automation triggering, but the protect was pretty marginal value add if you ask me.  Fires just aren&#x27;t that big of a problem statistically and while a smoke alarm that can call the fire department is great in theory, in practice people are leery of false alarms when it could be incredibly expensive.  And the &#x27;works with nest&#x27; integrations are fascinating: its largly a bunch of companies that want to be associated with Nest and its percieved superiority from a brand&#x2F;acquisition&#x2F;something(?) perspective and then integrate these super low value add enhancements.  Like the Whirlpool integration: &#x27;[if we know when you are getting home, we can refresh your clothes so they stay wrinkle free]&#x27;.  Such a ridiculous proposition for an integration.<p>Leeo was particularly crazy.  It was a case of &#x27;top tier founders&#x27; that all the VCs in the valley love with 30M in investment before leaving stealth mode.  Everyone assumed they must be onto the next big thing but it was in fact a giant let down.  I am sure the pitch was great: we are going to put a microphone in each room and have voice command in every room but somehow they lost sight and it just became a smoke alarm relay. The other angle maybe was that they could convince insures to subsidize them like (GE&#x2F;Wink)?  I would love to see the total number of dollars invested into residential smoke detectors by consumers annually, the number of house fires in the US&#x2F;World (and aggregate damage&#x2F;loss of life) all compared to the stealth mode investment of this company...The internet of things will happen and some devices will add substantial value by better managing energy adding real convinience but the author correctly found some really questionable value add and called it out.