Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-08-25

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Program		Status	Notes
Project Vaani	Validation (Lindsay/Sandip)	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Cue	Validation Stage (Julie/Preeti)	Challenged	An always-on voice-enabled smart screen device to keep track of the activities, events, and to-do lists of family members. MVP1 Hypothesis that Remains to be Tested Offering a solution that provides an alternative way to create and manage reminders, lists & schedules using a smart display, families would be able to accomplish their tasks 20% more times than before. (Pending smart display device to test) Preparation for Study 2 for MVP1 Continued work on improvements. Only one engineer available until next week. Want to have device ready for internal testing by end of August and ready for study participants by mid-September. Have identified seven participants for smart screen study. MVP2 Hypothesis Creating a product that leverages voice interaction & chatbot to coordinate small gatherings will result in these families seeing 50% reduction in the time required to coordinate such events using traditional methods of email, sms, phone calls 25% quicker response rates from recipients Study 1 for MVP2 Finishing up Wizard of Oz style study to gain insights into how people coordinate simple events prevent the coordination "bot" from sending group chat messages. Identifying Interest Awaiting approval of company that can create the video for the Cue landing page that will help identify interested participants for studies, testing. Script is drafted.
Project Smart Display	Joe	On Target	Exploring the opportunity areas of Enhanced communication and connection Two concepts are being presented to test users. The two concepts represent divergent hypotheses for how to solve the same general problem of staying in touch with a few close loved ones that reside outside the home. The learnings from the research will help selecting the promising qualities from each and continue refinement, rather than selecting an “either / or.”
Project Haiku	Maria/Liz	On Target	Experiments UR #4 - We've got an HTML prototype set up on Heroku. We're testing the interactions and will make refinements next week (3 team members are in training this week). The prototype includes only the minimum set of features for the bracelet (on/off and "get attention" message). We'll share a link to it after this meeting. UR #5 - We ran a Sponsored Post on Instagram to set a baseline for future tests of our value propositions. We ran the post without a CTA over the weekend. We got 61 Likes and 4 new followers. This will be our baseline going forward. You can find more here. UR #6 - Getting started with John Columbo to make physical prototypes. Our goal is to give them to a small group of girls (maybe 6) the week of Sep 12.
Project Sensor Web	Cindy/Wesley	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Smart Kitchen	Tamara/Nicole	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Magnet	Maria/Francisco	On Target	Cooperation with SourceView conf. Drive some investigations towards beacon formats and OS new features for Project Walnut. Apps ready to publish on the marketplaces! We got 100 magnet beacons + 100 for the DevRel team:
Research Team	Lindsay	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Participation Update	Michael/Brian	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Market Developments Update	Irina		The Amazon Alexa Fund invested in Ecobee, a smart thermostat company. Earlier this year, Ecobee became the first thermostat maker to tie itself to the Amazon Echo, enabling Alexa’s control over the device. Time Magazine wrote a feature on the new Home app coming in the iOS 10 release this fall. It has 3 tabs: Home, Rooms, and Automation. The Home tab provides an overview of the HomeKit setup: the most frequently used accessories and “scenes,” a collection of settings you can pre-program for specific events. Rooms sorts smart appliances by where they’re located in the house. The Automation tab lets the user build automatic triggers for certain events. For example, when driving home, the software “talks” to the iPhone’s GPS, it knows you’re nearing your home, and it opens the garage door automatically. Google's Thread joined Open Connectivty Foundation, an IoT standards body. The groups' technologies do not overlap – Thread is a networking protocol, and the OCF produces application-level software – so the alliance is not going to remove one of the multiple clashes in the IoT market. Intel made a series of announcements: Intel Joule - a platform for developers - Project Alloy - a VR headset aimed at developers - a partnership with Microsoft to work on VR and an acquisition of Nervana, an Artificial Intelligence company specialized in deep learning.
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