Alex Hawkinson - Founder & CEO of SmartThings
发布时间 2013-07-23 19:59:59 来源
摘要
The Internet of Things concept has been around a long time. But with a central communication hub, open-source platform for developing apps, and devices that communicate with that network, SmartThings is making it a reality. Founder Alex Hawkinson explains how, we could arrive home, have the garage open, lights come on, and get alerts about everything from plumbing problems to an opened gun case, right on our smart phones. Plus, how he raised over $1 million on Kickstarter.
Never miss an episode! Subscribe in iTunes: Audio (http://bit.ly/TwiStA) // Video (http://bit.ly/TwiStV)
Show Alex some love!
http://twitter.com/ahawkinson
http://twitter.com/SmartThings
Highlights:
1:21 Thanks to Mandrill.com, from the fine folks at MailChimp.
9:16 What would be the top 5 devices that work with SmartThings that people would be interested in?
15:34 Can the developers make money by selling those apps?
16:50 What are some of the most unexpected things released on the platform?
18:02 Why has it taken so long for this to become a reality?
19:50 So how do you guys ultimately make money?
23:30 I want to take a moment to thank Scott Ed Walker of Walker Corporate Law Group.
25:30 You decided to do a Kickstarter project and it hit over a million dollars. What do you think it takes to do something as successful as you did?
28:49 Hawkinson: An instrumental moment was one of our seed investors, David Tisch, formerly of TechStars New York. He and a few others points folks like CNN to us, so we had smart people catch on to the idea, share it with others, and we had a few of those big bursts of press. And that really helped a lot. I think we would have hit a third of our goal with that. But then it was all about community engagement.
29:25 What does community engagement mean when doing a Kickstarter?
30:15 Hawkinson: Basically it was a full time job for 4 people for a month, just managing the communications.
30:29 And when you're spending 40 hours a day of community engagement, those people I'm guessing, become very deeply involved in the project, and then they become amplifiers.
31:09 Hawkinson: On the down side of that, I think a lot of these Kickstarter projects are two guys and an idea. They don't have the working prototype yet for real. And they put it out there. And that level of community engagement just crushes them.
Follow on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/jason
http://twitter.com/twiStartups
LAUNCH:
Launch Ticker: http://launch.co
Launch Events (Festival, Mobile, Hackathon): http://events.launch.co
Special thanks to the members of the TWiST Backchannel Program!
GPT-4正在为你翻译摘要中......