Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently.
A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.
Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.
Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."
The problem isn't that "some value" can't be extracted. The problem is that the value that can be extracted is bounded by my actual problems. Nest can't fundamentally transform my house heating experience into some sort of delight; at the absolute limit, all it could possibly do is cut my heating bill down to $0. Which would be amazing, but it can't do that, of course.
Other IoT possibilities I see tossed about have even worse possibilities; Nest is probably already the biggest possible winner. If you eliminate 100% of the time I spend turning lights on and off, you've basically had no impact on my life. If you design a glorious IoT refrigerator that somehow requires 0 additional time out of my life to feed it data (which is a negative) it still has to face up to the fact that my "display" showing me what I have which I can get to by simply opening the door is superior to any practical front-mounted display. There's very little room for any sort of IoT water-use optimizer, certainly nothing a startup could wedge into and make money. What can the IoT do for my washer and dryer, play tunes off of Pandora while I'm loading them? My cell can already do that.
I don't need an Internet of Things. I need a Robot of doing Things, and if it's hooked up to the internet I rather expect we'll still see it as "a robot" rather than "an IoT device". (I don't think I want my robot live hooked up to the internet anyhow.)
And just to be clear, I'll say again I totally get it for commercial and civil use, so I'm not just down on IoT in general. (I'm down on IoT security in general, but that's a separate problem. Sort of. Close enough for now anyhow.) It just seems to me that the vast bulk of the IoT story involves being not physically proximal to the IoT device (and, indeed, note how the core Nest use case of "turning off the heat when you are not there" fits that to a T), and therefore, unless you live in a mansion, it's solving a problem a homeowner mostly doesn't have.
Honestly, I agree, and I love having my house low-tech and simple. The best solution is avoiding the problem altogether.
But your argument can be advanced against electric light. I could do just fine with candles in my house. But in 2016 I'm not going to go back to candles, even if electricity isn't really saving me that much time or money.
Imagine in 2050 never having to turn on the lights again because they will turn on automatically and that will work well. Never deal with carrying things and reaching over with your elbow. It won't add more than $200 of value to your life, but will you actively opt out of it?
It's not that "IoT" will make your life vastly more efficient and save you tons of money. It's that when it's easy enough and good enough, it will become the new normal as mains electricity is now. Currently it's a buggy gadget, but so was every technology once.
Another thing that you can do is tracking which products you have in your fridges, freezers and cupboards – and when you want to know where something is, you can just do "Jarvis, do we have another bottle of ketchup?" – "Yes, it’s in Kitchen Cupboard Number 2 Left"
In fact, I’ve actually designed something similar to that, but a lot simpler. A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away.
"A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away."
Your homework, before you start too far down this road, is to start doing that right now if you haven't already. You don't even need a real scanner; just pretend with a stapler or something vaguely the right shape and weight. You should also go through your cupboards and just scan everything once to simulate the initial load. Then, I don't know whether you mean to design this for yourself or for selling to others, but if it's the latter, consider whether your customers will actually do this for any period of time. I'd also recommend faceoffs between two people, one pretending realistically to ask your system where something is (either literally typing it in somewhere or doing real-enough voice recognition that you can see the correct query came out), and one just looking. Even if I don't know your kitchen, if it's at all sensibly laid out and you give me a quick look around first, decent odds I still beat your system finding something on average, even if it's not my kitchen.
If you completely eliminate 100% of the time in a year that I spend looking for kitchen goods that I don't know where they are, you've brought me maybe $20/year in value total; if you make me scan everything going in and out, I'd pay at least $200/year not to do that. (Probably more if I really faced that problem.)
(If this is just a personal project, go nuts. Very educational, lots of valuable skill building involved, and it's always good to scratch an itch with it. But if you have any ideas of making money with it, then I suggest taking it seriously and doing some heavy market research and proofing before the tech.)
I actually have built it in about an hour, weeks ago.
The situation was this: Was at home, had no idea what was in the cupboard. So I scanned everything with the app.
I stopped using it, mainly because scanning via phone is far slower than via a real scanner, and I don’t want to spend money. And because my parents always ignored it anyway.
> A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away.
I tinkered with something like this too in my app; but not for where things are, I already have pre-defined homes for things.
Instead I was more worried about food going bad before I ate it. but I backed away from it, mainly because barcodes don't carry expiration data. Instead, my app knows whats on my shopping list, and send me an email afterwards that lets me +1 my inventory of something, which ties into a general expiration for that product (like milk is ~week) and then sends me emails when something I bought is close to expiring. For milk it's not such a problem, but other things I buy and forget.
Fortunately, for most of the food one can buy, "expriation date" is just a manufacturer's suggestion, a date past which they "don't guarantee the intended taste and quality". Nothing to do with actual food safety - you can eat quite a lot of things safely months past their expiration date.
A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.
Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.
Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."