Hey everyone, just a few things from the ever expanding world of Electric Imp to update you on before the holidays take hold…
Come Hack With Electric Imp and New Relic
As you are no doubt aware from previous posts, hacking is an integral part of our culture. We stop what we’re doing every few months and set aside a day to brainstorm and build Internet connected things we would like to see out in the world. For our next hackathon on December 7 we are excited to be teaming with our friends at New Relic for day of hacking in San Francisco – and you are invited!
The hackathon will feature workshops, mentors and free DevKits for those who are new to hacking, hardware, or the Electric Imp platform. New Relic is generously supplying food, drinks, and the venue, so all you need to bring is something to hack.
Space is limited, so make sure you register as soon as possible. We hope to see you there!
In addition, Electric Imp will be at UC Berkeley November 23 as a sponsor of the Hackers@Berkeley BEARHACK, a 24 hour hackathon of un-bear-able awesomeness. We’re excited to be part of the event, and for the opportunity to expose our platform to a bunch of excited students!
Smart Holiday Gift Ideas
With the holidays right around the corner, we’re highlighting a few cool new imp-enabled smart consumer products you might want to add to your wish list.
Quirky + GE have just shipped the first wave of imp-enabled Wink: Instantly Connected products, each of which is available at Home Depot and Best Buy locations in the US, including:
Egg Minder is a app-enabled egg tray that tracks the number of eggs stored and the age of the oldest eggs placed on the tray.
Pivot Power is an adjustable, app-enabled power strip that allows you to turn devices that are plugged in ON or OFF from a smartphone.
Nimbus is a customizable dashboard that lets you personalize and track the most important parts of your life from commute traffic, the weather forecast, your email, calendar – and more.
Spotter lets you know what’s going on at home – from anywhere. Monitor motion, sound, light, temperature and humidity all from your smartphone.
Porkfolio is the world’s smartest piggy bank that wirelessly connects to an app on your mobile device so you can track your balance, and be alerted if someone tries to swipe your savings.
Hiku is another clever imp-enabled device. Recently introduced by a company called Hiku, it is a portable in-home grocery shopping device that scans product barcodes and records voice memos to create a digital shopping list accessible on your mobile phone.
Highway to Hackathon
Three Electric Impsters, Tom Byrne, Matt Haines and Aron Steg, recently road tripped 400 miles down Interstate 5 from the Bay Area to Santa Monica, California to participate in the Internet of Things Hackathon. The team created an imp-enabled terrarium intended for elementary school classrooms that would enable students to create experiments to track the growth patterns of plants. The terrarium is equipped with a temperature and humidity sensor and enables users to set lighting brightness and lighting color schedules, and determine parameters for the timing and amount of watering.
We’ll be posting a future blog with many more details about the hackathon and the project, so stay tuned.
iOS and Android BlinkUp App Updates
The Electric Imp apps for iOS and Android have been updated with various improvements, bug fixes and updates to the user interface, and are now available for download. The apps enable you to easily connect your prototype imp-enabled devices to the Internet in seconds using our patent-pending BlinkUp technology.
Welcome Tim!
We’re happy to welcome Tim Sakurai as our new Inside Sales Manager. Prior to joining Electric Imp, Tim held a similar role at Advantech Corporation, an industrial computer manufacturer. He also has expertise in IT, electronic component distribution and semiconductor equipment sales, and received a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from San Diego State University.
Tim was drawn to join Electric Imp because of the company’s passion for creating Internet connectivity solutions within the fast emerging Internet of Things movement, which he feels is going to ultimately influence and shift the way people act as information becomes more transparent.
Tim’s ideal imp-enabled device would be a smart refrigerator that provides a list of its contents, indicates how old each item is and sends a picture of the items to his smartphone. That way Tim will know what foodstuffs are running low or what has gone bad and needs to be replaced.
Glad to have you aboard, Tim! We have several new openings at Electric Imp, so if you’re interested in joining Tim and the rest of our amazing team please visit the Jobs section of our website.
And One More Thing
With the recent rollout of agents and IDE, we will be retiring Blueprint (aka Planner) on December 17, 2013. More information will be coming soon on how to transition from the Blueprint to the IDE if you haven’t already.
Until next time, keep on making!
Tom Sarris
Communications Manager