There’s a class of obvious monitoring or automation features for cheap devices that don’t exist probably because the price/performance is off. Many fall into the “auto shutoff” or “level warning” category. I wonder where the unit economics fails. Sensors? Analog electronics? UI?
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A good unit economics motivation for IoT would be if UI and control logic were the cost bottleneck. Then there would be a business case for WiFi-connecting and appifying the control interface for anything. Outsource the brain to the smartphone.
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An bespoke app replacing a hardware, locally hard-wired control loop (with or without human in the loop element) will likely cost 10x in initial development, but if it could be non-bespoke (standard sense/control protocol) you could make it ~free by amortizing across many devices
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OTOH if the bulk of the cost increase is in device specific bill-of-materials costs, like sensor, electronics, an app adds very little except remote control capability (which might be a huge deal).
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