Gmail Buddy, aka "The Internet of Things we do NOT need"
an Internet of Things that we definitely don’t need
there is a project, over at Seeed, that is a good example of a really (too) large category of projects that I really do not get. At least, I don’t get why they should have anything like “smart” or “smarter” in their name. I’m talking of
“Gmail Buddy - Smarter Email Notifications”:"Gmail Buddy is companion device which checks your Gmail inbox every 15 secs and notify you using sweet elegant light [and] can also be used as a sweet night light!
I honestly find the Gmail buddy a waste of material that doesn’t make any sense. A (night!) light that blinks when email comes? Sounds much more a nightmare than anything smart to me. “Internet of Things” does have some substance as a vision. But the really smart home is the one where you can really, totally, easily unplug whenever you want, and that runs on as little electronics as possible, especially the connected ones.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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