Switched On: Devices designed to disrupt

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology.

Industry conferences that come with competitions among scores of startups generally don’t look too kindly upon companies producing hardware. Nonetheless, there have been loads of physical products shown off this week at TechCrunch Disrupt in Big apple. These were either the primary offering of businesses or complements to their service offering, and judging by their demo platform of choice, the iPhone seems to be a number one agent of disruption — the businesses introducing hardware used Apple’s handset to do everything from avoiding stress to measuring its biological impact. Switched On will introduce four such products after the break.

CarKit by Getaround. Disrupt Cup winner Getaround is a peer-to-peer car rental competitor to Zipcar et al, and the vehicular counterpart to Airbnb. A method it hopes to get a leg up on its competitor RelayRides is with a user-installable CarKit that mixes GPS, WiFi and a remote keyless entry solution. The concept is that prospective renters can unlock cars with their smartphones. Presumably, car owners may also use the device with their very own cars whether they lead them to available for others to enjoy. It is not an entire rent-and-go solution, though, because the device can’t remotely start the auto, so renters might want to leave keys within the ignition. That, combined with electronic unlocking, may arouse the interest of hackers and car thieves alike.

Dot by Kogeto. There are a couple of add-on lenses for iPhones and other handsets to supply telephoto and wide angle capabilities, but Kogeto have been ready to consumerize its $1,400 Lucy S panoramic capture system right into a $100 iPhone add-on . It still may be a pricey novelty for consumers, but can have good potential for bringing a brand new dimension to webcasts of live events.

SmartHeart by SHL Telemedicine. It’s hard to purchase claims that everybody will purchase and use a $500 ECG monitor (unless cardiac arrest sets in after learning of the fee tag). Still, a couple of companies making blood pressure monitors that hook up with the iPhone costing hundreds less have had similar goals for his or her products. While proactive daily or weekly monitoring of such vital statistics for all is probably not within the offing (at the least until the method becomes more transparent), possible certainly see the product being adopted by those that find out about their heart-related health issues. Fortunately (though unfortunately for the affected) that’s still a fairly large market, especially if those people could make the case to insurance firms for reimbursement.

Lark Up by Lark. We’ve seen numerous sleep sensor and sleep monitoring products beforehand couple of years. The Lark Up is now taking pre-orders at $129, which places it well under the cost of the $200 Zeo Personal Sleep Coach but above the $60 Wakemate . Additionally it is just a little costlier with the sleep-monitoring $100 Fitbit , a superb all-around general-purpose connected activity measuring product, but one who isn’t as optimized for measuring sleep. In spite of everything, Lark seeks to distinguish by selling the waking features of the wrist component to the product, which it claims can rouse anyone silently without disturbing their bed partner (or partners for because the case could be).

As has often been the case for Web and mobile technologies, the focus of disruption for the CarKit, Dot and SmartHeart was distance. The CarKit provides easier access to vehicles or even promises to bring the purpose of auto aquisition closer. The Dot provides a brand new technique to experience events remotely, and the SmartHeart allows a brand new option to measure an important sign while not having to go to a health care provider.

But while these are all useful ideas, they likely aren’t the types of goods that almost all consumers would use fairly often. The Lark Up faces a hard road in meeting a happier ending than the star-crossed lovers woken by a lark in Shakespeare’s classic, nevertheless it not less than targets a universal behavior, and seeks to make that daily disruption rather less disruptive.

Ross Rubin ( @rossrubin ) is executive director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm The NPD Group . Views expressed in Switched On are his own.

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This post is tagged: avoiding stress, biological impact, cardiac arrest, consumer technology industry, industry conferences, prospective renters, remote keyless entry