The connected home hub SmartThings has connected with IFTTT (If This Then That) to let users start giving their connected home a bigger voice on the internet. The SmartThings hub, which I am playing with in my own house, comes with a variety of sensors that let you measure temperature, control lights, speak to connected thermostats and door locks as well as a variety of other physical objects in your home.
IFTTT lets you tie web services together through an easy interface, and it is branching into connected devices with triggers for the WeMo and Hue light bulbs. So adding SmartThings is a good move for IFTTT, but has me wondering how this might affect SmartThings’ app store plans. SmartThings has hopes of building out an app store where developers write sophisticated services using various APIs and the SmartThings supported-connected devices. For example, when a moisture sensor detects a leak, a connected valve might turn off the water.
Right now the only way to get that type of programmability with SmartThings is to use the existing apps, but the IFTTT link lets users go around the app store (and offers a lot more options for the time being). For example, I just make a recipe that calls my phone (using Twilio) if the sensor inside my liquor cabinet detects that the cabinet is opened. If I were the party type, I could have tweeted that info. Super organized? Then I could have logged it to Evernote.
The new SmartThings channel on IFTTT launches today and I can’t wait to see some of the awesome recipes it dreams up. This has the side benefit of now connecting SmartThings to Hue and my WeMo, which means I have more options. Maybe when the liquor cabinet opens I should program the lights to cycle through their colors in party mode. For more on these two check out the podcast I did with Linden Tibbets, the CEO of IFTTT below:
For even more you can check out the podcast with SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson.And if you still can’t get enough, both CEOs will be at Mobilize on October 16 and 17 in San Francisco talking about the connected future.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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