Firebase creators Michael Lehenbauer, Vikrum Nijjar, Andrew Lee, and James Tamplin. Photo: Wired/Ariel Zambelich
Google announced today that it is acquiring cloud hosted database company Firebase. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google will continue to offer Firebase’s services as part of its Google Cloud Platform line.
“If you’re a developer who has built an app on top of Firebase, nothing will change for you and you can continue to use Firebase as you normally would,” Firebase co-founder and CEO James Tamplin wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.
Firebase could make life much easier for developers working on real-time applications, such as chat apps or business collaboration tools. Typically, applications like this run code in the browser, or on your smart phone, that communicates with a web server that, in turn, reaches back to a database server. Firebase, which launched two years ago, now claims to have 110,000 developers using its service, is part of a growing number of companies that are trying to cut the backend server out of that equation.
Firebase cuts out the middle step by letting applications communicate directly with a database with no need for a bunch of complex code in between the two. All of the code runs in the browser, or on your phone, and the data the application needs is synchronized with the Firebase’s servers. “We’ve kind of changed the paradigm from one were you think about sending data and storing data as two separate things to a paradigm where it’s just about synchronizing data,” Lee told us back in 2012.
Firebase competes with mobile-centric data hosting companies like Parse, as well as database hosting services such as Amazon’s DynamoDB and IBM’s Cloudant.
Traditionally, CFOs love developers because they create product. We tend to invest in developers, and expect efficiency from sysadmins. That’s because CFOs often see IT as a cost center, and sysadmins as the people who keep the lights on. Devs are seen as creating innovation, while sysadmins are there to make sure that innovation runs, and runs efficiently. Often, the CFO’s view of technology comes down to this: Invest in innovation, and cut your infrastructure costs.
I’ve been as guilty of that as anyone. I used to say to my ops managers, “Thanks for doing a great job last year. Now do it this year for 10 percent less.”
This point of view can extend to IT innovations like virtualization or cloud: They’re often regarded as means to reducing infrastructure costs. Cloud services can also be seen as a way for devs to bypass sysadmins and their processes, and get software developed and tested faster.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at cloud and other IT innovations. You can’t actually realize the efficiencies and cost savings of new IT technologies without your sysadmins. It’s the sysadmins who understand how these innovations can enhance your company’s IT capabilities, and who can incorporate them to make your infrastructure more efficient — and get your product to market faster.
Your entire organization will benefit from developers (and QA testers) actively collaborating with the sysadmins to improve your company’s software deployment process. This shift from siloed technical teams to ongoing collaboration is at the heart of the DevOps movement. Like the continuous improvement movement in manufacturing a few decades ago, DevOps advocates talk about the importance of cultivating open communication between teammates, free sharing of ideas from everyone involved in the software creation and delivery process, and continual learning. It’s an approach that helps everyone orient themselves around the business purpose of their work, while helping you get products to market faster. That’s only going to matter more as IT innovation becomes an increasingly critical differentiator in every industry.
Automation is the area of IT innovation that’s key to moving faster. Automation lets sysadmins manage infrastructure efficiently, and it’s most effective when it manages all environments: different operating systems, virtualized data centers, and cloud infrastructure, whether public or private. With automation, your sysadmins spend much less time on repetitive tasks (which are better handled by a computer, anyway), so they can spend more time working with your other technical teams. You can be confident that developers are writing code, and testers are putting code through its paces, in production-like environments. Your team can release smaller code changes more frequently, and identify issues much earlier in the development cycle, leading to higher-quality software and a better customer experience.
Truly, every member of your technical team plays a critical role in getting things right, so there’s every reason to invest in sysadmins just as much as you invest in developers. And don’t forget about celebrating success — that too is an investment in your team’s ability to work together. It’s just as important to applaud the sysadmins along with the devs when you release a great new product or improvement. Celebrating success together helps the technical groups develop the camaraderie that is vital to operating as one team.
Your devs certainly have great ideas — but they don’t have all the great ideas. Innovation in software can really move the needle for your business, but only if you also invest in the IT innovation that lets your company get software out quickly, at high quality levels. It’s your sysadmins who hold those keys.
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home. Leeo
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home.
Leeo
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it. Leeo
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it.
Leeo
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings. Leeo
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings.
Leeo
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people." Leeo
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people."
Leeo
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight is not the stuff of soft-focus smart home dreams. It won’t vacuum your floor, or start your coffee pot when you wake up in the morning. It doesn’t create an intelligent mesh network with the other gizmos around it. It’s just a $99 nightlight that lets you know if your house is burning down when you’re not around. Which is to say, it’s a pretty reasonable take on what a connected gadget should be.
Adam Gettings, Leeo’s co-founder, says the nightlight is just the first in what will be a series of connected devices designed for regular people. At a point where connectivity, processing power, and sensor technology are mature enough to really solve problems in the home, Gettings and company are looking to figure out the next challenge: making it all useful to people who don’t like futzing with technology.
Keeping Things Simple With a Low-Tech Trick
To help design a device for the mass market, Leeo tapped Ammunition, the design firm behind Beats by Dre and the Square credit-card reader. For the designers there, the challenge with the nightlight was keeping things simple.
The device itself has a circular face, about three-quarters the size of a CD, with LEDs that glow onto the wall behind it. Spinning the outside rim of the face dims the light. The real smarts kick in when the device hears your smoke detector going off. Then, it’ll ping an accompanying app on your smartphone, giving you the option to call the fire department.
This central function relies on one especially clever trick. You don’t actually connect it to your smoke detectors in any way. Instead, thanks to the strict regulations on how smoke alarms have to sound, the light is able to simply listen for that familiar beep-beep-beep, and alert the app when it’s detected. It’s a terrifically clever, low-tech solution that removes a lot of potentially messiness from the device’s installation. As Matt Rolandson, the Ammuntion partner who led the project, explains it, the approach ensures that the light will work with existing smoke detectors. Sound waves, he says, are “a network that’s already in every home.”
The nightlight glowing blue. Leeo
Even after installation, the nightlight maintains a low-key presence. Unlike many smart home gadgets, it doesn’t demand a bunch of new interactions. It doesn’t add new interactive overhead to your life. There are no monthly fees. It’s just a $99 insurance policy against an unlikely but potentially devastating domestic catastrophe. You can just plug it in and forget about it.
As Gettings sees it, keeping fussiness to a minimum is crucial for any connected device with mainstream ambitions. “Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable,” he says. “But if technology complicates this, then they’re not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that’s a very small percentage of people.”
How to Get In Peoples’ Homes: Practical Answers
Part of the inspiration for the nightlight came during a focus group conducted in Leeo’s early days. Of the hundred people they talked to, precisely one had heard the term “internet of things.” Here’s a massive trend that’s discussed breathlessly in the tech world, and yet, when it came to normal people, almost no one had heard of it.
For the company, the takeaway was obvious: Connected devices and smart home solutions are still targeted at early adopters and gadget enthusiasts. With Leeo, they’re trying to focus on everyone else.
Rolandson, the Ammunition designer, says that doing so requires a product that makes its value clear in a very straightforward way. “We want to be able to ask and answer very practical questions that everyone will understand,” he explains.
Here, that’s something like the following: Do you have a home? Do you worry about keeping your home safe? Would you want to know if something bad was happening to your home, and if it was, would you want to be able to do something about it, without spending several thousand dollars retrofitting your home with electronics?
If the answer to those questions is obvious, then so is the appeal of Leeo’s light. As Robert Brunner, Ammunition’s founder puts it, “you can’t force your way into peoples’ homes.”
A Regional Approach to the Internet of Things
Leeo could expand the functionality of their light in months to come. Right now, the light just listens for smoke detectors, but Gettings says it could potentially be made to detect other sounds, like windows breaking or a dog barking. The approach shows how software can wring new functionality out of basic components. “I think there’s a very long innovation path for something as simple as a processor and a sound sensor,” Gettings says.
But the nightlight is just the first product Gettings and team have planned for the company. They envision a line of devices, all designed to solve specific problems in various international markets. As Leeo sees it, the most effective smart home solutions might well vary region to region.
Nightlights, the founders point out, are a uniquely American product. Fire safety is also something Americans fixate on more than people elsewhere. But the smart alert nightlight might not make as much sense overseas. In Europe, Gettings says, homeowners are more concerned with efficiency. China obsessives over air quality. Japan values comfort in the home.
The big vision for Leeo is to find solutions that speak to the diverse, everyday concerns found around the world. “There are different sensibilities,” Gettings says. “Our mission here is to have a global approach.”
Customized genome editing -- the ability to edit desired DNA sequences to add, delete, activate or suppress specific genes -- has major potential for application in medicine, biotechnology, food and agriculture.
Now, in a paper published in Molecular Cell, North Carolina State University researchers and colleagues examine six key molecular elements that help drive this genome editing system, which is known as CRISPR-Cas.
NC State's Dr. Rodolphe Barrangou, an associate professor of food, bioprocessing and nutrition sciences, and Dr. Chase Beisel, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, use CRISPR-Cas to take aim at certain DNA sequences in bacteria and in human cells. CRISPR stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," and Cas is a family of genes and corresponding proteins associated with the CRISPR system that specifically target and cut DNA in a sequence-dependent manner.
Essentially, the authors say, bacteria use the system as a defense mechanism and immune system against unwanted invaders such as viruses. Now that same system is being harnessed by researchers to quickly and more precisely target certain genes for editing.
"This paper sheds light on how CRISPR-Cas works," Barrangou said. "If we liken this system to a puzzle, this paper shows what some of the system's pieces are and how they interlock with one another. More importantly, we find which pieces are important structurally or functionally -- and which ones are not."
The CRISPR-Cas system is spreading like wildfire among researchers across the globe who are searching for new ways to manipulate genes. Barrangou says that the paper's findings will allow researchers to increase the specificity and efficiency in targeting DNA, setting the stage for more precise genetic modifications.
The work by Barrangou and Beisel holds promise in manipulating relevant bacteria for use in food -- think of safer and more effective probiotics for your yogurt, for example -- and in model organisms used in agriculture, including gene editing in crops to make them less susceptible to disease.
The collaborative effort with Caribou Biosciences, a start-up biotechnology company in California, illustrates the focus of these two NC State laboratories on bridging the gap between industry and academia, and the commercial potential of CRISPR technologies, the researchers say.
Our species' waking and sleeping cycles -- shaped in millions of years of evolution -- have been turned upside down within a single century with the advent of electric lighting and airplanes. As a result, millions of people regularly disrupt their biological clocks -- for example, shift workers and frequent flyers -- and these have been known to be at high risk for such common metabolic diseases as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. A new study published in Cell, led by Weizmann Institute scientists, reveals for the first time that our biological clocks work in tandem with the populations of bacteria residing in our intestines, and that these microorganisms vary their activities over the course of the day. The findings show that mice and humans with disrupted daily wake-sleep patterns exhibit changes in the composition and function of their gut bacteria, thereby increasing their risk for obesity and glucose intolerance.
A consensus has been growing in recent years that the populations of microbes living in and on our bodies function as an extra "organ" that has wide-ranging impacts on our health. Christoph Thaiss, a research student in the lab of Dr. Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute's Immunology Department, led this research into the daily cycles of gut bacteria. Working together with David Zeevi in the lab of Prof. Eran Segal of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, and Maayan Levy of Elinav's lab, he found a regular day-night cycle in both the composition and the function of certain populations of gut bacteria in mice. Despite living in the total darkness of the digestive system, the gut microbes were able to time their activity to the mouse's feeding cycles, coordinating daily microbial activities to those of their host.
Does this finding have any medical significance? To further investigate, the researchers looked at "jet-lagged" mice, whose day-night rhythms were altered by exposing them to light and dark at different intervals. The jet-lagged mice stopped eating at regular times, and this interrupted the cyclic rhythms of their internal bacteria, leading to weight gain and high blood sugar levels. To verify these results, the scientists transferred bacteria from the jet-lagged mice into sterile mice; those receiving the "jet-lagged microbes" also gained weight and developed high blood sugar levels.
The research group then turned to human gut bacteria, identifying a similar daily shift in their microbial populations and function. To conduct a jet-lag experiment in humans, the researchers collected bacterial samples from two people flying from the US to Israel -- once before the flight, once a day after landing when jet lag was at its peak, and once two weeks later when the jet lag had worn off. The researchers then implanted these bacteria into sterile mice. Mice receiving the jet-lagged humans' bacteria exhibited significant weight gain and high blood sugar levels, while mice getting bacteria from either before or after the jet lag had worn off did not. These results suggest that the long-term disruption of the biological clock leads to a disturbance in their bacteria's function that may, in turn, increase the risk for such common conditions as obesity and imbalances in blood sugar levels.
Segal: "Our gut bacteria's ability to coordinate their functions with our biological clock demonstrates, once again, the ties that bind us to our bacterial population and the fact that disturbances in these ties can have consequences for our health."
Elinav: "Our inner microbial rhythm represents a new therapeutic target that may be exploited in future studies to normalize the microbiota in people whose life style involves frequent alterations in sleep patterns, hopefully to reduce or even prevent their risk of developing obesity and its complications."
Lactobacillus species, commonly seen in yogurt cultures, correlate, in the guts of mouse models, with mitigation of lupus symptoms, while Lachnospiraceae, a type of Clostridia, correlate with worsening, according to research published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. "Our results suggest that the same investigation shold be performed in human subjects with lupus," says principal investigator Xin Luo of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
In the study, the investigators first showed that mouse models of lupus had higher levels of Lachnospiraceae (a type of Clostridia), and lower Lactobacillus than control mice. They also compared male and female mice, and found that the differences were present only in females. These results suggest that the gut bacteria may contribute to lupus, a disease which is nine times as prevalent in women as in men, says first author Husen Zhang.
They also monitored the gut microbiota over time in both lupus and control mice, and found that in the former, Clostridia increased in both early and late stages of the disease.
In further experiments, the investigators treated the symptoms in the lupus mice with either retinoic acid alone or vitamin A plus retinoic acid. The latter worsened the symptoms -- surprisingly, Luo says, because it had been expected to reduce them -- and in those mice, Clostridia increased, while Lactobacillus declined. Retinoic acid alone improved the symptoms, with opposite population changes in the gut bacteria.
The research suggests, but does not prove that altering the gut microbiota could mitigate lupus. Nonetheless, Luo suggests that people with lupus should eat Lactobacillus-containing probiotics, such as live culture yogurts, to reduce lupus flares. More generally, "The use of probiotics, prebiotics, and antibiotics has the potential to alter microbiota dysbiosis, which in turn could improve lupus symptoms," says co-principal investigator Husen Zhang. Ultimately, says Luo, fecal transplant might prove valuable as a treatment for lupus.
"We were inspired in part to perform this research by a study on type 1 diabetes, which found that that disease is dependent on gut microbiota," says Zhang. "Like type 1 diabetes, lupus is an autoimmune disease that is even more prevalent [than type 1 diabetes] in women."
Firebase creators Michael Lehenbauer, Vikrum Nijjar, Andrew Lee, and James Tamplin. Photo: Wired/Ariel Zambelich
Google announced today that it is acquiring cloud hosted database company Firebase. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google will continue to offer Firebase’s services as part of its Google Cloud Platform line.
“If you’re a developer who has built an app on top of Firebase, nothing will change for you and you can continue to use Firebase as you normally would,” Firebase co-founder and CEO James Tamplin wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.
Firebase could make life much easier for developers working on real-time applications, such as chat apps or business collaboration tools. Typically, applications like this run code in the browser, or on your smart phone, that communicates with a web server that, in turn, reaches back to a database server. Firebase, which launched two years ago, now claims to have 110,000 developers using its service, is part of a growing number of companies that are trying to cut the backend server out of that equation.
Firebase cuts out the middle step by letting applications communicate directly with a database with no need for a bunch of complex code in between the two. All of the code runs in the browser, or on your phone, and the data the application needs is synchronized with the Firebase’s servers. “We’ve kind of changed the paradigm from one were you think about sending data and storing data as two separate things to a paradigm where it’s just about synchronizing data,” Lee told us back in 2012.
Firebase competes with mobile-centric data hosting companies like Parse, as well as database hosting services such as Amazon’s DynamoDB and IBM’s Cloudant.
Traditionally, CFOs love developers because they create product. We tend to invest in developers, and expect efficiency from sysadmins. That’s because CFOs often see IT as a cost center, and sysadmins as the people who keep the lights on. Devs are seen as creating innovation, while sysadmins are there to make sure that innovation runs, and runs efficiently. Often, the CFO’s view of technology comes down to this: Invest in innovation, and cut your infrastructure costs.
I’ve been as guilty of that as anyone. I used to say to my ops managers, “Thanks for doing a great job last year. Now do it this year for 10 percent less.”
This point of view can extend to IT innovations like virtualization or cloud: They’re often regarded as means to reducing infrastructure costs. Cloud services can also be seen as a way for devs to bypass sysadmins and their processes, and get software developed and tested faster.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at cloud and other IT innovations. You can’t actually realize the efficiencies and cost savings of new IT technologies without your sysadmins. It’s the sysadmins who understand how these innovations can enhance your company’s IT capabilities, and who can incorporate them to make your infrastructure more efficient — and get your product to market faster.
Your entire organization will benefit from developers (and QA testers) actively collaborating with the sysadmins to improve your company’s software deployment process. This shift from siloed technical teams to ongoing collaboration is at the heart of the DevOps movement. Like the continuous improvement movement in manufacturing a few decades ago, DevOps advocates talk about the importance of cultivating open communication between teammates, free sharing of ideas from everyone involved in the software creation and delivery process, and continual learning. It’s an approach that helps everyone orient themselves around the business purpose of their work, while helping you get products to market faster. That’s only going to matter more as IT innovation becomes an increasingly critical differentiator in every industry.
Automation is the area of IT innovation that’s key to moving faster. Automation lets sysadmins manage infrastructure efficiently, and it’s most effective when it manages all environments: different operating systems, virtualized data centers, and cloud infrastructure, whether public or private. With automation, your sysadmins spend much less time on repetitive tasks (which are better handled by a computer, anyway), so they can spend more time working with your other technical teams. You can be confident that developers are writing code, and testers are putting code through its paces, in production-like environments. Your team can release smaller code changes more frequently, and identify issues much earlier in the development cycle, leading to higher-quality software and a better customer experience.
Truly, every member of your technical team plays a critical role in getting things right, so there’s every reason to invest in sysadmins just as much as you invest in developers. And don’t forget about celebrating success — that too is an investment in your team’s ability to work together. It’s just as important to applaud the sysadmins along with the devs when you release a great new product or improvement. Celebrating success together helps the technical groups develop the camaraderie that is vital to operating as one team.
Your devs certainly have great ideas — but they don’t have all the great ideas. Innovation in software can really move the needle for your business, but only if you also invest in the IT innovation that lets your company get software out quickly, at high quality levels. It’s your sysadmins who hold those keys.
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home. Leeo
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home.
Leeo
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it. Leeo
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it.
Leeo
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings. Leeo
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings.
Leeo
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people." Leeo
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people."
Leeo
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight is not the stuff of soft-focus smart home dreams. It won’t vacuum your floor, or start your coffee pot when you wake up in the morning. It doesn’t create an intelligent mesh network with the other gizmos around it. It’s just a $99 nightlight that lets you know if your house is burning down when you’re not around. Which is to say, it’s a pretty reasonable take on what a connected gadget should be.
Adam Gettings, Leeo’s co-founder, says the nightlight is just the first in what will be a series of connected devices designed for regular people. At a point where connectivity, processing power, and sensor technology are mature enough to really solve problems in the home, Gettings and company are looking to figure out the next challenge: making it all useful to people who don’t like futzing with technology.
Keeping Things Simple With a Low-Tech Trick
To help design a device for the mass market, Leeo tapped Ammunition, the design firm behind Beats by Dre and the Square credit-card reader. For the designers there, the challenge with the nightlight was keeping things simple.
The device itself has a circular face, about three-quarters the size of a CD, with LEDs that glow onto the wall behind it. Spinning the outside rim of the face dims the light. The real smarts kick in when the device hears your smoke detector going off. Then, it’ll ping an accompanying app on your smartphone, giving you the option to call the fire department.
This central function relies on one especially clever trick. You don’t actually connect it to your smoke detectors in any way. Instead, thanks to the strict regulations on how smoke alarms have to sound, the light is able to simply listen for that familiar beep-beep-beep, and alert the app when it’s detected. It’s a terrifically clever, low-tech solution that removes a lot of potentially messiness from the device’s installation. As Matt Rolandson, the Ammuntion partner who led the project, explains it, the approach ensures that the light will work with existing smoke detectors. Sound waves, he says, are “a network that’s already in every home.”
The nightlight glowing blue. Leeo
Even after installation, the nightlight maintains a low-key presence. Unlike many smart home gadgets, it doesn’t demand a bunch of new interactions. It doesn’t add new interactive overhead to your life. There are no monthly fees. It’s just a $99 insurance policy against an unlikely but potentially devastating domestic catastrophe. You can just plug it in and forget about it.
As Gettings sees it, keeping fussiness to a minimum is crucial for any connected device with mainstream ambitions. “Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable,” he says. “But if technology complicates this, then they’re not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that’s a very small percentage of people.”
How to Get In Peoples’ Homes: Practical Answers
Part of the inspiration for the nightlight came during a focus group conducted in Leeo’s early days. Of the hundred people they talked to, precisely one had heard the term “internet of things.” Here’s a massive trend that’s discussed breathlessly in the tech world, and yet, when it came to normal people, almost no one had heard of it.
For the company, the takeaway was obvious: Connected devices and smart home solutions are still targeted at early adopters and gadget enthusiasts. With Leeo, they’re trying to focus on everyone else.
Rolandson, the Ammunition designer, says that doing so requires a product that makes its value clear in a very straightforward way. “We want to be able to ask and answer very practical questions that everyone will understand,” he explains.
Here, that’s something like the following: Do you have a home? Do you worry about keeping your home safe? Would you want to know if something bad was happening to your home, and if it was, would you want to be able to do something about it, without spending several thousand dollars retrofitting your home with electronics?
If the answer to those questions is obvious, then so is the appeal of Leeo’s light. As Robert Brunner, Ammunition’s founder puts it, “you can’t force your way into peoples’ homes.”
A Regional Approach to the Internet of Things
Leeo could expand the functionality of their light in months to come. Right now, the light just listens for smoke detectors, but Gettings says it could potentially be made to detect other sounds, like windows breaking or a dog barking. The approach shows how software can wring new functionality out of basic components. “I think there’s a very long innovation path for something as simple as a processor and a sound sensor,” Gettings says.
But the nightlight is just the first product Gettings and team have planned for the company. They envision a line of devices, all designed to solve specific problems in various international markets. As Leeo sees it, the most effective smart home solutions might well vary region to region.
Nightlights, the founders point out, are a uniquely American product. Fire safety is also something Americans fixate on more than people elsewhere. But the smart alert nightlight might not make as much sense overseas. In Europe, Gettings says, homeowners are more concerned with efficiency. China obsessives over air quality. Japan values comfort in the home.
The big vision for Leeo is to find solutions that speak to the diverse, everyday concerns found around the world. “There are different sensibilities,” Gettings says. “Our mission here is to have a global approach.”
