You may have thought of these already but a few ideas for ya:
Aging Parents: As our population ages, many more of us technically inclined have no-so-techically inclined aging parents. An interesting marketing angle and use case would be to monitor their home or care facility (Did mom leave the door open again? Why is dad not putting on the AC now that its 85 degrees?). Medical device integration could be interesting too (when did Dad check his insulin last)?
Hot Spot or Not: Ever head out to a club or bar and find it either dead or just too crowded? What if a SmartThing was monitoring and publishing how many people were there, noise level (dB SmartThing?) so you could know in advance? Bars/clubs could promote make monitoring info avail on their website. IFTTT: Send me an SMS when the bar starts to get crowded so I can head on over…
LMK if either of these wind up being the Next Big Thing…
What if the proximity FOB could work in two ways… First, as it’s currently intended with it’s pair hub. But secondly as an anonymous indicator. Basically, if a ST hub saw a FOB it wasn’t paired with, it could report that it see a FOB. No information beyond mere count would be allowed to be processed by the Hub. The Hub wouldn’t report any info about the FOB other than that is sees one or two or sixty-three.
Then the bar or party spot in question would have a Hub in their place that reports the number of visible FOBs every 5 minutes or so. Obviously this requires that a decent segment of the population buys into the SmartThings platform, but it’s an idea.
+1 For IFTTT (or Zapier) - Belkin already does it with their WeMo stuff, and it would be great to do with SmartThings! Think of the possiblities… Easy logging to Evernote, activating smartthings based on emails or chats, Twitter and FB integration, the list goes on and on…
I really like your second suggestion. I have some friends that enjoy a crowded bar, and some who hate it - if an establishment could publicize their real-time attendance, it could definitely add value to certain customers.
I’m interested to see how long it takes small companies to take advantage of SmartThings technology in cases such as this.
Possibilities are endless when you start weaving technologies together.