Kisha – The umbrella you'll never lose
getkisha.com
getkisha.com
Than I thought it was an app that tells you when it's going to rain...
Which led me to believe it could be some sort of satire...
Then at the bottom is an actual umbrella, so now I'm thinking it's a weather app AND umbrella? and NOT satire?
No idea, but I already have numerous weather apps, and an umbrella in my car.
"We're big fans of perfectly crafted products." "built with a perfect opening and closing mechanism" "built using perfect stitching"
Especially when high quality umbrellas tend to cost more than this without the app or tracking technology.
I think this product could definitely be useful, but it is all about the clean, minimal experience to make it so.
Instead, I envision this product doing really well as an impulse buy at Macys, Sharper Image, and similar stores around Christmas. Parents and grandparents will buy this for their younger family members thinking it is cool. Then the young people will forget it at the bar anyway because the reason they forgot their cheap umbrellas was not the lack of reminder, but because they were drunk.
Once everything has intelligence, we'll need to manage that intelligence. We need one phone app and not dozens.
There's only one thing I can see that can make that happen. Open protocols. Open device APIs. Then we can make our own management apps. Oh what a wonderful day that will be.
When I can coordinate my bathroom scale with the app that manages my grocery list. When I can automatically start my car at 8:30 am, but only if my shower ran. When I can actually teach my house to understand whether I'm actually there or not.
Surely they should all use BLE or similar? If umbrella disconnects (you're outside the 15-25m range), give an alert. If using BLE, the protocol is essentially open and other apps could build around it.
Downtown in any big city would probably prove that to be wrong very quickly. Toronto destroys umbrellas.
They make some nice claims WITHOUT any warranty at all.
a) I know where I left it, and
b) a decent umbrella costs $3 where I live, so I'd need to lose 20 before this became cost effective.
Still doesn't mean that I'm going to buy one of these.
A bit of copy-editing:
'percepitation' in all the screenshots should be 'precipitation'. Or possibly just 'rain' / 'snow' / 'hail' ;)
'It doesn't bother you if leave one of your safe locations' -> 'It doesn't bother you if [you] leave [it in] one of your safe locations'
'It works in the buildings' -> 'It works in buildings'
I'll also second "too many uses of perfect". If it's perfect, why does it come with a warranty? ;)
Also, your general use statement is all wrong. The biggest problem with umbrellas isn't losing them, it's them getting destroyed by a gust of wind or simple, unrepairable mechanical failures. A better use statement would be "Never get caught again without your umbrella/backpack/camera/etc."
Current technology has already solved the generic version of this problem. What you've done is solve this problem again, but only for a very specific use case, while requiring the user to buy in to a bunch of specific software and overhead that only helps them in that specific use case.
You get the advantage of the Tile ecosystem, which means anyone with the app installed has the potential to help track your umbrella.
The only value-add here is that they have an app that tells you when rain is forecasted, from what I can tell.
I do wish you all the success though!
The idea of taking a mundane household object and adding bluetooth + app support to it is not a sensible formula for innovation. I can think of a hundred products that follow from this formula, and they're all terrible:
* Coffee machine + App. Tells you when coffee is ready. Tell coffee machine to start making coffee as you wake up.
* Vacuum cleaner + App. Tells you when the bag is almost full, sends automatic push notification when you haven't vacuumed a room for too long (using GPS and artificial intelligence!)
* Phone charger + App. Send a push notification to your tablet when your phone is done charging and vice versa.
* Water dispenser + App. Lets you know when your plants need water.
* Sandwich + App. Will send you a push notification when you've eaten the sandwich and final push notification when the sandwich has left your body.
These innovations are just gimmicks, and have no hope of ever becoming more than that. A shame, because launching any kind of product takes a tremendous amount of effort, and I'd rather see people put that effort into something more productive.
But that reminds me of a story I heard told by Alejandro Jodorowsky,[1] about being at a dinner at Dali's home and Dali telling him about the times when he and Picasso used to go for walks on the beach, and they would keep finding clocks buried in the sand.
Then, Dali asked Jodorowsky whether he too had ever found any clocks in the sand on the beach.
Jodorowsky thought, "What could I say to the great Dali? If I say that yes, I have found clocks in the sand, then I would seem arrogant. And if I say that I never found any clocks, then I would seem like a little man."
"So I thought for a while and then said, 'No, Dali, I have never found any clocks in the sand. But I have lost a lot.'"[2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky
[2] - The quotes are not verbatim. This is from memory of an interview I saw with Jodorowsky, which I can not find right now. If anyone has a link to it and can provide a verbatim quote, that would be appreciated.
Without some way to guarantee a low failure rate, I can see something like this getting so annoying that I'd just turn it off completely.
And besides, I thought only people who rarely needed rain gear used umbrellas. The last time I visited Portland, or Ireland, I didn't see anyone with umbrellas. Everyone wore rain jackets. Incidentally, they keep your hands free.
Just my (unrequested) two cents.