We had a lot of variations for the "house"; the wood > shared caves by a community > single house > apartment(flats). Hotels, cottages as complementary. So the question is, can the current tech start-ups disrupt the concept of the house? It is a broad topic, but random things which comes to my mind without going too deep:
- make virtual windows where you and your selected facebook friends see a common virtual place or a real scenery where you install cameras (for example in beautiful places on earth), use high quality display and cameras. (google's very fast internet may have a use here)
- kill the walls by replacing them with always-on displays and cameras to your remote counterpart. two distant house should feel become virtually "one". (rasperry pi or cheaper hardware may help here in the next one)
- rethink home automation (irobot does it in some sense) or simply build a branded robot which can simply fetch a sandwich. a central web service can be at the center, or a social web service.
- make location-independent apartments(flats) which are stackable, moveable, expandable.
- managed kitchen or fridge based on your dietary requirements by a web service.
It would be actually be even cooler if you could get a live stream from restaurants for their "virtual table" dining guests