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Stringify — Automate your life by connecting every thing
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Great work on the app! As a user of the Philips Hue bridge, I can confirm you are solving a complex but very valuable problem in the home automation space.
While I love the innovation in this space, we're definitely barely making the jump from early adopters to the early majority. The technology is just still too difficult to setup, use, and troubleshoot on a daily basis for the mass markets.
Stringify is doing a decent job at bringing it to a level for general consumers. It is a very hard balance between the freedom that allows deep customization and making it simple enough to figure out. I imagine your app is a lot like what will be needed to make Apple HomeKit usable for general consumers.
As a person that understands tech, I want to build complex workflows like "turn on the lights when I arrive, but only if nobody in my family is home."
@chrisredrich Thanks for the compliments Chris! Regarding your complex flow - we don't support location from multiple iOS devices (yet), but with SmartThings presence tags you could easily do what you describe today in Stringify!
Don t you feel this is a little too complicated for the average Joe? (putting myself in the pack)
@ourielohayon Making something easy is definitely one of the hardest things to do! :) We think that allowing you to connect things visually is much easier and more powerful than other implementations. Time spent automating your digital and physical life in Stringify will save you time, not cost you time. Of course, we're always looking for feedback and ideas on how to improve!
@klinquist @ourielohayon yes i hear you but i have a feeling the set up will always be complicated because you have to think of the rules ahead of time
@ourielohayon Certainly. We've tried to provide people a list of flow ideas for each Thing we support: https://www.stringify.com/flowid...
@klinquist @ourielohayon how do we go about requesting other physical things to support?
@andrewjb44 @ourielohayon Send us an email (support@stringify.com) or post it up on our forum. We're trying to keep track of demand in order to prioritize our engineering efforts (no need to vote for Echo, we're working on that one already).
We've got a live Stringify integration in our office (disclosure: we're an investor) with a few cool initial integrations.
We connected a contact sensor through SmartThings to trigger our Sonos to play a Christmas greeting when the door is opened and LiFx bulbs to blink red & green for visitors. We then connected the same contact sensor to turn on an indicator light so those with desks around the corner can see that the front door is propped open.
We're also working to integrate our shades and some other items with an Amazon Echo to make it easy to setup for a presentation. Next up is a smart-lock we're going to try some experiments with. Just a start; but gives you a few ideas of how we're using it in the wild.
@walne sticking with IFTTT. The vast majority of "things" are triggers and not actions and can be done with the product itself. For example, I don't need Stringify to have my NestCam trigger a notification. It does that out of the box. I don't need another app to tap "home" or "away". What I DO need is a trigger for location and an ACTION for Alexa or NestCam. That would be valuable. So far seems like this is just an IFTTT clone that came out 3 years after IFTTT.
@deeplightco Coming soon Iain. It's more about the diverse standards for IoT devices in the UK. We're getting those squared away and should be up and running there soon.
@ausonio @deeplightco Hi Mark,
Both IFTTT and Zapier live in a similar space, although they only allow 1:1 connections while we allow many to many. With Stringify, you can add "conditions" to your triggers (when I arrive home - but only after sunset - turn on my lights). We also support "cascading flows" (...after you turn on my light, start a 2 minute timer, then turn it off ..but only if no motion is detected). You can design what would traditionally be very complex automations with ease on a digital canvas by simply drawing lines between your devices and services.
Our 'special sauce' technically is how we have been able to abstract APIs in such a way that any trigger in our platform can be connected to any action.
@ausonio our product is for consumers to control and connect their digital and physical Things so they can automate every day tasks. Zapier and IFTTT are great services, we just do things a bit differently. We offer a very simple front-end user interface to build simple to incredibly complex Flows. We also allow for "and" "or" statements in our rules engine which allows for you to build Flows with multiple triggers and multiple actions. We also have a great roster of Things to use. Today we have some of the best IoT products like Nest, SmartThings, Hue, Automatic, LIFX, etc. we also have some of the best digital services like Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, Evernote, etc. all ready for you to build connected Flows personalized to your life.
Are you going to open this up for 3rd party developers?
How do you think you and Reality Editor would compete and/or compliment each other?
@bentossell Yes, we absolutely want to open up Stringify to third party developers. Right now we’re focused on building the platform and features that will support that in the future. The partners we have in our app today, LIFX, Homeboy, Automatic, Netatmo, WiThings, SmartThings, Nest and a handful more have all worked with us directly on their APIs. We have a few more coming soon.
Reality Editor would be an amazing ‘canvas’ in the Stringify app - their interface + the Stringify back-end would complement each other quite well. Reality editor is a solution based on augmented reality and virtually connecting physical things. Enabling those controls is incredibly powerful, we'd love to give it the power to trigger automated Flows to help extend the power of augmented controls. We love it!
@russeisenman Looking at this from a data perspective, Id be interested also in seeing third party integration and interaction with data stores.
@lynnfredricks email us at support@stringify.com and we can talk this through with you.
@alexputici it's been the talk of the day for us! We'll let you know the minute it's live. Thanks for request.
@cooluck international markets are on our list. IoT physical devices unfortunately have different protocols and standards in different international regions, which means we have to evaluate each so that the same rules apply. Email us at support@stringify.com and we can discuss some of the Things you use in Russia. Thanks!
Hey Hunters Stringify just updated their app with some amazing new features. Now you can add a Flow or even add Friends to your Flows. We're striving to making smart home and connected living automation simple and powerful. Try it now, tap this link and get daily updates from Product Hunt: https://goo.gl/N8B7EO
When we started Stringify our team was readily aware that solving the challenges of automation was going to be exciting but incredibly challenging. Rarely do you have a chance to build a platform that could quite possibly shape how we work, play, and live.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly becoming mainstream, finding its way into every industry. It promises to reshape these industries and forever change how we live our connected lives. While IoT holds great promise, it comes with its own set of challenges.
At Stringify we believe that technology should be simple, yet powerful, and that it should work for you (not the other way around) and we believe people should be able to choose best of breed products to create connected experiences that matter to them. Stringify isn't here to replace your connected devices, we're here to give them a connection boost! This is why we created Stringify, to solve these challenges, to make IoT accessible to all, and to finally realize the promise of the Internet of Things.
We can't wait for you to try our mobile app and give us your feedback. Thanks for checking us out!
Happy Connecting!
@andrewjb44 let us know at support@stringify.com everything you mentioned above is on our list! We agree with you...
Cool app, not so cool that you tried putting up a 2nd Stringify on PH just to get new traction...
Where is the Web based interface for this service? an App is NOT that convenient, a full screen UI would be MUCH more logical/nicer/better...
Would love if I could have two or more phone's tracked (location) - For now my lights turn off when I leave, even if my wife is home... 🤔
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