Last week I went to the Geeks’ Night Out at Beerworks in Lexington.
One of the people I met was a junior EE major at UK named Robyn who, along with two of her friends, is looking to start a home automation company (The Unity Box) – but not in the realm of a company like Ambiance (interestingly, a company I was going to start with as a junior developer back in 2001 when the bottom dropped out of the tech bubble – but that’s another story). They want to make a small control device along the lines of a DVR or Roku that would control smart outlets/switches in your home (and be able to learn a la the Nest about your habits (with, of course, manual overrides for non-pattern events)).
Yesterday I found the WeMo from Belkin.
Robyn – looks like you and Belkin should talk: they’ve done the part about the smart outlets 🙂