Emberlight

» see emberlight.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The smart bulb pitch of the mid-2010s had an obvious weakness, which was that bulbs are cheap and you own a lot of them. Philips wanted you to replace every bulb in the house with a forty-dollar connected one. Emberlight's answer was to leave the bulbs alone. You unscrewed your existing bulb, screwed in a short threaded adapter, screwed the bulb back into the adapter, and now a dumb lamp was a lamp you could dim from your phone. One device per fixture, and the bulb stayed whatever you already had in the drawer.

It was a good idea, and the market agreed for a while. The Kickstarter in July 2014 asked for a modest sum and came back with roughly $300,000, about six times the goal. Outside investors followed. The product got into 270 Target stores and onto Amazon and Best Buy, which for a hardware startup of that size is the hard part done.

This never reached me in any form. Target and Best Buy are not shelves I have ever stood in front of, and the American smart-home retail aisle of 2015 was a place I read about rather than shopped in. But I have screwed a lot of bulbs into a lot of fixtures, and the thing Emberlight got right is that nobody wants to throw away working bulbs to buy a software feature.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Founder Atif Noori had shipped into national retail, which almost no connected-hardware startup of that generation managed. The problem arrived in the same motion. Within about three years of the campaign, at least four effectively identical socket adapters were on sale from other companies, alongside hundreds of other connected lighting products, and the companies pushing them were Philips and GE rather than four people in San Francisco. A $300,000 Kickstarter does not win that fight on any timeline.

~ what happens to a socket when a company dies ~

Here is the part that made this one a small news story rather than a quiet closure. Every time you told the Emberlight app to turn a light on, that instruction went out to the internet, hit a server the company rented, and came back down to the adapter in your ceiling. The switching logic did not live in the device. It lived in somebody else's data center on somebody else's invoice.

So when the shutdown email went out on 17 November 2017, it had to include a second piece of news: the servers were going to stop in roughly three or four months, and when they did, every adapter already sold would stop responding. Not degrade. Stop. Customers who had bought a light switch at Target were told their light switch had an expiry date set by a company's bank balance. The company's own site went dark over that winter and was returning 404 by April 2018, which lines up with the window they gave.

~ the funny part ~

The adapters did not actually brick in the sense of becoming dangerous or stuck. They reverted to being a piece of threaded metal with a bulb in it, and the lamp still worked perfectly well if you walked over and used the switch on the wall like a person in 1983. Emberlight's customers were returned, at no charge, to the exact lighting situation they had before they spent the money.

That is the lesson the whole connected-device category kept having to learn in public, and Emberlight is a cleaner illustration than most because the stakes were so low. Nobody was hurt. Some lamps got less clever. But the principle is the same one that applies to a connected door lock or a car, and the principle is that a product which phones home to live has handed its lifespan to a company's balance sheet.

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