Startups on The connected Home, TV, and Living Room

Category : Interface Research, Ubiquitous Computing

On May 7, 2013 I attended an event entitled “The connected Home, TV, and Living Room” sponsored by MIT and Verizon at the Yotel Hotel in New York. The talks consisted of 4 startup representatives who Verizon named “Ninja Innovators”… this is I am assuming open to interpretation. Presenters were allowed a total of 3 minutes each, or so. Enough time to give you an idea of what their ideas were and share a URL, but not enough to totally grasp the incentive behind the work and how users find their concepts engaging, useful, and possibly sustainable.

The 4 Ninja Innovators were as follows:

iMediaShare.tv provides video distribution over IP, using singular or a combination of multiple devices. The concept was borne out of the simple question: “Can we just beam it to the TV?”

SIMULmedia is an advertising startup that practices targeted advertising as you watch TV, reaching an audience at scale looking at region frequency curves. They called this “the connected living room of the future”. (hmmm…)

KISI systems (here’s my favorite) allows users to control their multi home units with their phones, packing keys and wallet into the phone with the aid of an app suite. This means users can control their TV, doors (including the garage door), etc. Kisi enables this shift by building on top of existing infrastructures within users homes (i.e. alarm system) rather than forcing new infrastructures to replace old ones which can be costly. It does that by providing a Kisi toolkit. Their tag line seemed to be something like that: Kisi is your doorman who knows it all.

Get Blue is the latest Social TV app initiative allowing users to share reactions about content watched with friends on Facebook and Twitter. This app is about discovering, sharing, and the second screen. It works with partners that populate the screens with exclusive TV content; this way re-imagining discovery on the first and second screens.

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