Mother

"Imagine v1 of Big Brother's -- or NSA director Keith Alexander's -- most inflamed fever dream: a sensorbot shaped like a Russian nesting doll wearing a Hindi-cow smile. Then terrifyingly name it "Mother" and build it specifically to monitor as many facets of your personal life as it can. Are you schvitzing yet?"

http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/sense-mother-may-i-the-m...

> Mother. Mother knows everything.

> She's like a mom, only better.

> Sense: the meaning of life®

edit: I see they are based in France, so perhaps the branding didn't translate well.

Also, I was unhappy to learn upon close inspection that the face is a sticker.

The video is a brilliant marketing asset. It showed me some very real problems of mine, and how it could help me solve them (by tracking things that I want to, and gamifying them).

The only issue is cost. As a young, single person, £166 is prohibitively expensive. It's likely not worth it for me. Is it worth it for people with families and kids? If they had £166 to spend, could they find something more pressing to spend it on?

So we buy these products that make us feel more important. It documents what we do, and it tells back our story through a dashboard, in an autobiographical way, as if we're some kind of celebrities.

But are we that important?

More seriously, the idea of using cheap motion trackers to track usage of things in the home is very interesting.

When Google acquires this, it'll make the Nest complaints pale in comparison. :)

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HrrR9QDQU

And now they're naming one Mother? I can't tell if I should feel vindicated or offended.

Apart from the super bad naming and Branding, this is another reason for me to stay away from this mother rabbit.

This looks like a solution desperately looking for a problem; that is, unless your problem is "I want to spy every single step of everyone in my family".

And seriously, "mother"? Do they even ever had one, to be that much off-mark? The very first quality of anything motherly is to be human; this is a wireless log collection system. Call it a "warden", or at best "coach", if you really need an anthropomorphic comparison.

I have tried many applications which should increase by productivity, sleep quality, or you-name-name-it. I don't recall a single one that managed to do so in the long run (most not even in the short run...).

So either one is open to change and that has little to do with technology or... You're toasted anyway. But even when you decide to change for yourself and not because a notification tells you to do so, these technologies become time consuming and troublesome to use. Of course they look nice on TV and ads, but in real life, most of them are frivolous IMHO.

If a company wants to make me use a telescreen, they might as well make it a suppository.

I can't seem to find any technical info on the "cookies". Are they similar to the technology in the Fitbit Flex, ie Bluetooth Smart coupled with some sort of accelerometer. If that's the case, do the cookies need to be charged every week. This remains the single massive downside to widespread adoption of such devices.

  Want to improve ___ about yourself? 
  Just do it(tm). 
  Get it done(tm). 
  Do what it takes. 

Fuck this arrogant and stupid product.

You'll have to update your coffee capsule count every time you buy them. Buying new packs when the opening the last set of capsule is ny far the easiest way to manage I think.

You'll have to put the sensor on every bottle you drink.

If you care that much about toothbrushing, buy an electric toothbrush. A timer will be integrated telling you when you pass the 2 pr 3 min mark.

Central temperature management would need a programmable device anyway, you'll basically need a Nest I guess.

At the end, It doesn't seem so easy to use in practice, it will forward every life information to an external server, and half of what it does is better solved an other way.

  I like to think (and 
  the sooner the better!) 
  of a cybernetic meadow
  where mammals and computers
  live together in mutually
  programming harmony
  like pure water
  touching clear sky.

  I like to think
  (right now, please!)
  of a cybernetic forest
  filled with pines and electronics
  where deer stroll peacefully
  past computers
  as if they were flowers
  with spinning blossoms.

  I like to think
  (it has to be!)
  of a cybernetic ecology
  where we are free of our labors
  and joined back to nature,
  returned to our mammal
  brothers and sisters,
  and all watched over
  by machines of loving grace.

The makers perhaps thought that the name 'Mother' would evoke care and love in the minds of their users. To their agony, it is revealing in the thread that though most people love their mom, they really do not want to be a 'watched over' kid.

I guess it gives all of us that creepy feeling of guilt as kids when we stole from the cookie jar and kept turning our heads with fear of being caught by mom :-)

Note to self: keep relationship names away from product names, too much friction ;-)

> Mother knows everything (in red text at that)

> She's like a mom, only better

The branding of this is either creepy or crazy. Maybe it's a bit of both. But I'm certainly not going to forget it, and the idea itself seems pretty interesting.

Above all, I like the neat interface of the apps (mockups?) and simplicity of the cookie sensors. No charging nonsense, because they measure and buffer stuff but don't transmit. 1yr battery life. 10 day memory.

Sure, I'd love to see additional, more advanced cookies that would require charging, e.g. with built-in LED or vibration (reminding me when I enter or leave, though my phone could serve that purpose), Data, GPS (though my phone could serve this purpose, need an app that intercepts an SMS after presence is detected to auto-upload GPS data), multi-mother stuff (one at work, one at home), integration with home automation systems (someone below mentioned frequencies indicate zigbee), Zapier/IFTT support and above all some sort of data input/output API so I can import my own data points.

By the way, $222 for a mother and 4 sensors seems quite affordable to me.

The only thing that prevents me from pre-ordering a set is that the NaBazTag history doesn't exactly instill much confidence in the makers' ability to support this thing in the long run; I also wonder where the data is stored and if it's remotely future-proof (data import/export/backup).

Still pretty good but as long as there isn't a privacy promise that would satisfy the basic security principles (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) I don't see it as a successful device.

"Sense Mother is at the head of a family of small connected sensors that blend into your daily life to make it serene, healthy and pleasurable."

You never know.

For the things on the list that are somewhat useful (like sleep logs + a pedometer + temperature) I have a 1975 pedometer/calculator combo that's worked fine since the day I got it, a notepad, and an infrared thermometer that is a thousand times cooler.

I think the only people that will buy this are people that want Google Analytics for their life.

Just a few picture examples with blurbs of text & a demo video would suffice rather then an infographic type of website.

"Cookies immediately send everything they capture to the nearest Mother."

For me, that's a bit of a scary statement considering how intimate the product is meant to be in someone's life.

And can I see the product without having to hunt down my country in a gigantic freaking select box first?? Isn't it fundamentally the same in every country?

I scrolled to the bottom of the page expecting some kind of explanation of what it is and why I would want it or what need or want it solves. Nothing that I could find.

I guess it's "Big mother is watching you" then.

From this marketing, I'd answer...Big Brother.