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Almost 2 months and we’ve been super busy showcasing the Good Night Lamp, talking to people who can help us make it and meeting “real people”! By that I mean I spent a week with the lovely Georgina Terrana & Rachel Rayns in Birmingham last month showing the Good Night Lamp as part of the “Future Tech” section of the Gadget Show Live. The experience is really overwhelming actually compared to CES which is why there was 3 of us. The Gadget Show is placed during Easter holidays, so it’s the perfect time for Dad’s to show off to their sons and families to have fun together. This isn’t a trade show in a traditional sense, it’s more like a fun thing to do for families living around the area. This means they’re also brutal about their feedback as they have paid money to come and don’t need to be nice to us.

We had some really great comments, 90% of which were positive and most of which were “Oh can it also do…”. This means the product is compelling initially because it’s cute and totally different from its plastic competitors but also because people wanted more from it. Some of the new uses included switching lights on in kids bedrooms remotely, to people who wanted to connect to their loved ones in the army. The usecase of using the Good Night Lamp to keep tabs on an elderly parent really resonated with people who also highlighted to us the need for moving beyond wifi to GSM which makes experimenting with the latest Telefonica/BlueVia Arduino shield really interesting.

In order to try to dig into all these different scenarios, we’ve brought in Jeremy Masmondet who is a student at the International School of Commerce in Dijon where he’s been studying marketing. His background was initially computer science and his dad works in import/export, all of which is a pretty perfect combination for our team. He’s starting on Monday and will be working with us from our London office for 2 months as a Marketing Researcher.

Adrian has been hard at work too, showcasing the Good Night Lamp at Internet World Expo in Earl’s Court (at the same time I was presenting it on stage at NEXT 13)

Next up, we’ve made the cut for 2 startup competitions: one at Thinking Digital and the other at LeWeb London. I’ll be doing both, so wish us luck!

“Super mignon” means “super cute” by the way :)

I’ve been thinking about broadcasting and signals at the moment so you’ll excuse a more esoteric blogpost. Of course we’ve assumed owners of the Good Night Lamp will give Little Lamps to friends and family, but what if Justin Bieber had a Big Lamp and Little Lamps were sold to all his fans (we can dream right?). Would he use it to say “i’m up!” and would the 14 year olds swoon at the thought? Probably, but it would probably be his assistant anyway right?

The nice thing about turning on a light is that context is everything. Where the lamp is, who lives in that home, what time it is back home, etc. Wherever there’s a connection, it’s only as meaningful as you’d like it to be. You can decide to use GNL just to say to your folks in another country that you’re ready for a chat, or just use it in an ambient way. Either way, you’ll have to share that mixed use of a platform with the people you share a connection with. Just like Twitter takes on the utility you want, GNL becomes as clear or obscure as you’d like it to be, because sometimes, you might not want to talk to your mother-in-law. Reversely the connection may or may not be understood in the right way “oh i thought you were around”, “are you ok, you’ve been in and out of home a lot today” are situations that will happen. Just like when someone on twitter has been a bit quiet, you might reach out. Things are always tenuous in human relationships and hopefully we can design products and services that get people to reach out and connect and say “Goodnight Justin!”

Happy weekend everyone.

1. Little Lamps.

When you buy from us, we invite you to set yourself up with an account. The first page will show you the Little Lamps you have collected from friends, the names you will have chosen for them, how long ago they were switched on or off as well as location. This is the location of the Big Lamp which you edit, and it populates the pages of the Little Lamps of your friends. You can change the colour of a roof, to make it memorable too.

2. Big Lamps + your network

When you click on the Big Lamp tab, you see both the Big Lamp you have at home, and the network of Little Lamps you’ve given away. This lets you see your whole network and do things like remotely turn the Big Lamp on and off. This is handy when you’re travelling.

You can also unlink Little Lamps. This is really because the Good Night Lamp is built on relationships between people which can get complicated sometimes :) So being able to remotely decide not to share your Big Lamp status anymore is pretty important.

3. Growing your network

Finally, what happens when you start to collect many Little Lamps? You can start putting them into groups. What happens when you have a Big Lamp connected to Little Lamps for friends, and a Big Lamp used to keep an eye on whether your colleagues are around or not. Well, each Big Lamp and its network has its own tab which you can rename too.

This is just the beginning for us, but this Dashboard will be available to our customers only starting on September 2nd, so pre-order your Good Night Lamp now!

Everyone has been extremely supportive: our backers first and lovely people like Dan and John who wrote about us for Forbes and ComputerWorld documenting a decision we made a few weeks ago when we saw that we might be unsuccessful in our Kickstarter campaign. The feedback we’re getting online and when we present it is overwhelmingly positive so we really weren’t about to get low on the basis of 30 days of campaigning!

Yes we were asking for a rather large amount, but that was also part of our plan. To talk frankly about the cost of these types of products on Kickstarter is new. Most people just want to have a successful campaign, no matter what the implications are in terms of delivery. We didn’t want to disappoint. We’d rather try to do things a bit differently and engage people by showing our numbers so that in the future other campaigns can be asked the same transparency.

We’ve been getting some awesome feedback from people about our little store, and we’ll adjust things accordingly, so keep it coming!

1. Geographies of care
At CES, we asked people to fill in a postcard answering 2 simple questions: who would you give a Little Lamp to and where do they live. Out of 163 responses, 52% of people said they’d like to offer this to a special woman in their life ( written as a mom, sister, daughter, grandmother or a woman’s name). This is really interesting to use and might inform how we talk about the product in the future or even package it.

View Good Night Lamp: Where Little Lamps go in a larger map

Also, within 163 responses, we managed to cover large parts of the US and a lot of countries around the world proving either that:

- CES is really an international event with a bias towards California
- People have family around the world
which either way is super interesting.

2. Data!
In other news, I thought I’d share a little Kickstarter data as well as we make a slow advance towards the finish line. There’s plenty of time, so the game is still to be played and we’re reaching out to local and international press. But the traffic sources is super interesting to us as we discover more and more coverage in blogs around the world and get requests from Italy, China, Russia, Austria and the US. It’s a global game the internet of things.

After many a conversations with our advisors, investors and others like Ed Borden who had experience with the Air Quality Egg, we decided to take the leap and start a 30 day Kickstarter campaign which we’re launching at CES tomorrow. This was carefully considered and we decided to go ahead because it would allow us to:

- Determine within 30 days if we had something that people genuinely found interesting. “What is the size of your market?” is a question we’ve had to face many times in the last few months and with something a little different like the Good Night Lamp, that gets tricky.

- Give us a next harsh deadline. I booked the booth for CES before we had new designs or even a team. This pushed us to deliver when it seemed impossible but we made it happen as I write this from Las Vegas after spending 2 days setting up our booth with John. This campaign, if we’re successful, will push us forward and give us that next deadline to hit.

And at every point, and whatever happens, we will remember the words of our friend Russell Davies: it’s less crowded up front.

We’re in the last stages of sending over the booth that we’ve designed with Costas and Tom has been making. It’s now wrapped up in one big pallet weighing 230 kgs! With less than 3 weeks to go before the show starts, we’ll be trying to get a bit of rest before we hit what has been described as a “totally crazy” week. John and I are going over there and we’ll have some big announcements to make over in Las Vegas. Join us at Las Vegas Convention Centre (LVCC) we’ll be in the Connected Home section at booth number 22036 and reporting every minute of it! :)