Waiting for the Electrician

We've picked up a couple of new players in the smart bulb market. LG and the newcomer Tabu recently released LED bulbs that you control via apps. Are we excited yet?

The Tabu Lumen not only does the now-expected things of turning on and off and changing colors, but it also does so via Bluetooth. This means that you can turn on the light just by walking into the room.

How is this different and better than motion detector-enabled lights that have been around for a couple of decades? Well, it's LED. It's Bluetooth. It's got an app. Yay.

It also allows you to synchronize the color effects to music.

Did I mention that there's a Kickstarter campaign for a mini version of the Lumen? Of course, there is.

LG has picked up a fair bit of press for a product that is available only in South Korea. The Smart Lamp picks up where the others leave off by flashing the light when a phone call comes in. Yay +1.

The Internet of Things is still ascending on the Gartner Hype Cycle, so we can expect a lot more connectivity for our lights and everything else. To date, we've seen a lot of pieces and parts, mostly made up of me-too products trying to solve problems not worth solving.

The Bluetooth folks are promoting Bluetooth 4.0 as a technology that will bring us a step closer to the smart home. (Bluetooth 4.0 is also called Bluetooth Smart Ready, but only by its mother.) There are all kinds of promises, but few companies are stepping forward with a well-articulated vision for the importance of these types of connectivity. Most of the gadgets that have shambled into the market haven't marked much of an improvement over the Clapper.

Timing

Timing is important, and maybe we just have to slosh around with weird, copycat products until the needs align with capabilities.

In the late 1990s, American Express came out with a credit card with an embedded chip that could be programmed to do things. I showed it at a meeting. The senior engineer looked it over and said, "So?"

"It can be programmed to do things," I said.

"So?" he asked again. "What kinds of things?"

I didn't know. American Express knew. It knew that the card was more secure than the swipe-and-sign cards used then and now. American Express knew but wasn't able to convince consumers or businesses that we would want and need something better and more secure. When Target and Neiman-Marcus got hacked, I'm sure several Amex developers swooned in a schadenfreude high.

One of these LED lighting companies -- Philips, LG, GE, or one of the Kickstarter kinder -- has the problem solved. But we don't know it yet. Maybe it isn't the bulb at all. Maybe it's the connectivity, such as Bluetooth LE, iBeacon, some mesh network, or who knows what. Maybe it's an Arduino controller that lands in the hands of a teenage maker and into just the thing we need at the time we need it.

I hope so. The LED lighting industry deserves better products than these.