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Comment by pauljburke | Hacker News Reader

Self timing toothbrushes are already a thing. I'm sure one that posts it to facebook can't be that far behind (pretty sure there's a market for that actually). I think the real money is in tracking how long people's children brush their teeth though.

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You're thinking only about the end user - what I'm talking about is more encompassing than that. Toothbrush companies want metrics around their product. Users are going to soon be faced with a choice to either purchase a smart product that measures these metrics or buy the old cheaper one that doesn't. The way I expect mass adoption to occur is from the possibility of selling this data and passing off a percentage to the users. Your toothbrush will reward you for brushing your teeth not just with a nice sound or trivial leaderboard but by real world products, discounts, etc. If you always brush your teeth, you get notified that you can get your next toothbrush 40% off. The company will be able to do that because you gave them far more money with the data you provided them which they could sell to toothpaste companies, dentists, researchers, candy companies, etc There's a lot of parties who might be interested and this is hardly the best example.

I don't doubt that will be attempted, but it's ridiculous from every angle. If such things are remotely reasonable, then everyone with a product will be trying to do it. You'll be inundated with "real world products, discounts, etc" from everything you touch. You'll end up rejecting the entire system flat out just to escape.

This is the same reason location-based offers won't work either - because everyone will be trying to give you an offer, and they'll try to SEO-game the system so that categories and personalization don't work as filters.

It's cool that my calendar has reminders, right? But I have five devices that all remind me of the same event, all at once and I end up turning off reminders whole-hog because I'm tired of configuring every single scenario and every single device. Sync is great right up until I hate it more than anything and death would be sweet release.

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