Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-04-26

• Product
  • Work week in Portland last week
  • Choosing Hypothesis to test and priorities
  • Working with User Research to find the best ways to test the Hypothesis
• Engineering
  • Reviewing Feedback from the Berlin event
  • Getting ready to Demo to the exec team tomorrow (come check it out)
  • Working on Pocketsphinx STT Implementation
  • Will be able to use the offline implementation by the end of this sprint
  • Working on Voice recording and synthesis
  • Ongoing Architecture discussions. How we can achieve skills or Services through Vaani
• General
  • You can see the sprint items on Trello
  • You can see the weekly meeting notes here
  • Next Demo will be 4/27 it is on the CD calendar

Product and Research

• Continued brainstorming on product differentiators
• Working on user segment research and user interviews to gather user pain-points
• Continuing the evaluation of voice integration options and other possible collaborations
• Held discussions for next phase targets, will meet again Thursday to finalize direction

Engineering

• Working on video of first phase demo that shows open/close window sensor, hue lights, and door locks integrated into fox box and working end to end, along with notifications enabled via Web push.
• Ensuring consistent performance
• Designing and developing a demo/showcase room for Link devices. Separate VLAN is ready in one of the conference rooms and devices are purchased as well. Ready to be mounted. Hope to use this for the London All Hands video

Participation

• Will discuss and prioritize how volunteer contributors can help at London All Hands after next steps are agreed upon

• 4/25 branch - technical issue, should be ready 4/27
• 7/15 FC
• 9/1 CC

• Web Apps descoped due to Marketplace team resource issue.

We did/learned: Met in Portland with CD PM and UX teams. Our hypothesis was still pretty broad. So we narrowed and refined it.

NEW HYPOTHESIS

We believe that people want to communicate their love for other people without the stress or FOMO of 2-way communication methods like text messages.

Creating an ambient method of communicating with loved ones for 12 to 15 year old girls will

• Increase their personal connections / bring their world closer
• Reduce the need to communicate via 2-way methods that distract them from being in the moment at home and at school
• Reduce parents’ anxieties about the amount of time children stare at their phones

We will know this is true when we see

• Use of and satisfaction with this method/device
• Reduction in phone use for communicating “I care” messages
• Reduction in parents’ anxieties

Next we will: Finalize a new Research Plan to test our hypothesis [1].

• Development continues with the tasks committed for Sprint 1.
  • We have already a very basic client for Android and iOS, and the team is working to have downloadable builds.
• Legal team is working in setting up a development account for Connected Devices to enroll in the Apple Developer program (so we can have versions of the Magnet App for iOS and sign our builds). It's been tracked in Bug 1266923.
• We have contacted with Scott Jenson who is leading the Physical Web project in Google. He’s going to send us some beacons and offered us to help us to get more through a manufacturer in Shenzhen.
• We are trying to prepare a real demo in London All Hands using sched application.
• Sam Foster has started his Research work about Beacons,

• General updates
  • MVP up and running.
    • http://blog.sensorweb.io/2016/04/24/release-pre-alpha-0-0-1/
  • 1st deployment success in a school
    • http://blog.sensorweb.io/2016/04/26/our-first-user-ping-sing-elementary-school/
• What’s done
  • lots of bug fixes, and polishes
  • intro video
  • talked with legal to spot check: will followup on terms of use, user data, login credential
• What’s next
  • portal refinement (adding intro video, etc etc)
  • maker faire taipei on 5/7, 5/8
  • sensor and kit partners: talking to MTK, Particle
  • keep on deploying to schools
  • technical review with Dylan this week
• Upcoming Milestone:
  • Planned second PIB update on 5/4
  • London ww: hackathon (in planning), open session (in planning)

B2G add-on installer

• Continuing to get usage, someone found some “issues”
• Collecting metrics for usage and looking to build a dashboard

• The team continues the investigation of other third party solutions (instead of the Telemetry pipeline) and also visualization tools
• We hope we can make a decission during this week. investigation info
• For the time being the option Amazon Mobile Analytics + Periscope seems the better option

• Technical Research
• Started to look into Beacons for the Magnet team
  • Competitive analysis of the market
  • Basic specs
    • Developer Experience
    • how is it to set up
    • easy to switch out?
• Working on a review of OpenHAB and Link
  • Review the lift and capabilities of OpenHAB
• Moving forward with a deeper dive into sensors and what the possibilities are
• Market Research
• Updated Market Research Resources page
• Smart Home
  • Looking into addressable market size for the 12 - 15 years old target and research about their lifestyle
  • Looking for research about habit formation
• User Research
  • The first train to be focused on for user research will be Vaani

• Smartphone Commercial Transition Wiki
• Plan to continue support thru Q1 2018 but have some logistics to resolve for the period from Jan 1 2017 to March 31 2018. Will continue to keep an eye on that.

• Smartphone Code Transition Wiki
• Web Activities and System Messages APIs removed
• Landed new Places database
• Now working on getting homescreen, search and dialer working and cleaning up more APIs
• Plan to merge the transition branches back into master shortly afterwards TV branches 2.6 this week

• B2G OS Transition Wiki
• Holding meetings for volunteers interested in carrying project forward
• More information can be found at B2G Transition Working Groups