Nanoleaf opened up preorders for its newly Matter-enabled Essentials lineup of smart bulbs and light strips Wednesday.
Thanks to the Matter smart-home standard, they work with HomeKit and other smart-home platforms. But there is one catch regarding their use with HomeKit.
The Meross Smart WiFi LED Bulb integrates almost any lamp or light fixture into a HomeKit smart home. It can be controlled with an iPhone, and offers color changing and dimming.
I added a pair to my smart home. Here’s how it went.
Accessory maker Sengled added support for Apple’s HomeKit to its smart home hub. This enables iPhone users to control Sengled’s smart bulbs through Siri commands.
The company also added to its lineup of smart home products with new lights and a smart plug.
This week, the best deals in the Cult of Mac Store run the gamut. For starters, we’ve got an awesome iTunes alternative for iOS management, and an energy saving smart bulb with Home App integration. Additionally there’s a powerful email manager, and a comprehensive training bundle for Adobe Creative Cloud. Some are discounted by over 95%, so read on for more details:
Lightbulbs are the symbol of invention and good ideas, but it’s not until the last few years that they’ve changed in a fundamental way. The LED bulbs are energy efficient, and full of possibility for customization. So if you’re looking to make your house or office smarter, these bulbs from iHaper are a great way to go.
A great thing about being a hub for great deals on gear and gadgets is being surprised by what shows up. This week we’ve got some especially enticing new deals, from a Kevlar-encased Lightning cable and a massive library of design assets to a Bluetooth-enabled LED smart bulb and an award-winning first-person horror game.
If you found the transition from incandescent to fluorescent painful, you will be relieved to know you are in the midst of a lightbulb moment. This is the year when the price of LED-based smart bulbs, with the color and quality of light controlled by mobile apps, falls far enough to go mainstream.
Entering the highly competitive space is Ontario-based Nyrius, which today rolls out a light bulb for $39.99.
It took a little while for investors to see the light, so to speak. Corey Egan and Swapril Bora developed a smartphone controlled LED light bulb, but needed two crowd-funding campaigns, prize money from winning new product contests they had socked away and a deal from Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban before the ilumi smart bulb could enter the market.
Tens of thousands of bulbs have sold in the year they’ve been in production. It won’t take quite so long for the second generation to begin lighting homes and commercial spaces.
With 20 days to go on Kickstarter, ilumi far exceeded its $50,000 goal with a newly designed bulb that includes new experiences – like turning it on and off the shake of your phone – and a new antenna that will pick up commands from 150 feet away.
All that remains of the original Thomas Edison invention is the socket fitting. That and it still only takes one person to screw in the light bulb.
The rest of the ilumi smart bulb, which is slowly lighting the way to smart home and office living around the world, would be unrecognizable to Edison or any of the other early inventors of incandescent bulbs.
It is too soon to know whether the names Corey Egan, Swapnil Bora and their company ilumi Solutions will assume a place on the list of lighting pioneers with their smartphone-controlled LED lights. But with a growing list of patents, financing from a certain well-known “Shark” and a steady stream of orders, the David-like startup is holding its own against bulb big shots like GE and Phillips.