A new start-up called Electric Imp promises to turn almost any product into a connected device with the addition of a tiny card in a slot.
Former iPhone engineering manager Hugo Fiennes, former Gmail designer Kevin Fox and long-time firmware engineer Peter Hartley co-founded the start-up, which is intended to help users monitor, control and get alerted by their devices.
Some potential applications are a laundry machine that texts a user when the wash is done or a power charger that turns on when the price of electricity goes down.
The premise is that hardware makers are not great at making cloud services, so they can just add an Imp slot and let Imp take care of the Web interface.
Each Imp card will contain Wi-Fi and an embedded processor. You could think of it as a souped-up version of an Eye-Fi card, which uploads pictures wirelessly when used in a camera’s memory slot. Or think of it like “The Matrix,” where the computer downloads the software needed to control itself once it connects to the Internet.
via All Things D – Liz Gannes
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