I’m contacting you today with regards to a pre-order you have with us at WIFIPLUG. As is published on our website, we expected to get the plugs out of production by Q1 2020. We tried to be as vague as possible on purpose, our last five hardware releases have told us that guaranteeing a delivery date is near impossible and only results in further customer disappointment when the date is missed, but why is the date always missed? There are an untold number of events that can get in the way when it comes to connected hardware and unfortunately, that is what we need to tell you in this update. 7 years of connected hardware experience and excellent communication with our component factories throughout the development of this new product assured us that we’d be on track to release WIFIPLUG HOME 2.0 within Q1 2020. We were very close too until this happened…
Whilst the product is designed in the UK and even partially assembled here, your WIFIPLUG has over 30 different components inside it with over 90% of them being sourced in China. The coronavirus outbreak and subsequent unpredictable lock downs in China have set us back. Today we heard from one of our component factories stating that, as a result of the lock down, they are now 8 weeks behind schedule, with output halved due to lack of labour. This delay is therefore passed onto us and means we cannot send the product to Apple for their 4-6 week testing until all the pieces are assembled. I am hopeful things stabilise and we can ship your new order well within Q2 2020, we will be updating our website to match this statement and will of course update you, should anything change. Sadly, there is nothing more we can do.
Thanks again for having faith in us to deliver you the Worlds smartest smart plug, it means so much to me and my team. Of course, you are welcome to a full refund at anytime, now or during the first 60 days of ownership, just reply with your your order number and it will be processed within 24hrs (Mon-Fri).
Yours sincerely,
Leon Doyle – CEO & Co Founder
Hi folks happy 2020
Here are the latest WIFIPLUG boards – as mentioned, these are ground up designs that will future proof the plug for the next 5 years.
Why are we building ANOTHER smart plug I hear you cry?
The news plug is visually pretty much the same as WIFIPLUG HOME 1.0 – the only difference is that the ON/OFF button is on the top of the plug not the front – this is from customer feed back over the last 7 years. The actual reason we did it now was down to the energy meter inside. Currently our plug can read a maximum of 1 event per second, which is plenty for general use but our B2B customers wanted more granularity and frequency to dial into the exact pattern of energy, so now we are introducing NRG1 – our fully patented smart meter that is capable of reading 50, yes FIFTY events per second, meaning nothing on the market will even come close and with this level of data points we can now more accurately detect faults and issues inside a machine before they happen.
brand new WIFIPLUG app
Available now!
Dan from Mac Rumours states, ‘Accessories or products that take advantage of Apple’s HomeKit software framework, allows users to set up, configure and control compatible smart home devices via voice dictation with Siri or an application like Apple’s own home app. For example you can say things like “Hey Siri, turn the lamp on” or “set the thermostat to 21 degrees”
If you’re also unfamiliar with the Apple Home app, here you can set up and configure all of your HomeKit enabled accessories, set up various scenes, timers, groups and rooms throughout your house. Once you have everything in place, you can use this app to control all of your smart home products.
If you have something in your house that’s not a smart device or HomeKit enabled yet, there are a few accessories out there that will help you turn your everyday product into a smart one.’
WIFIPLUG HOME is a Wi-Fi smart plug that you can plug anything into and turn it into a HomeKit enabled device. A fan, Lamp, Coffee Machine or even your blinds!
We are the first UK company to partner with Apple, they have a super strict certification process, which is why you don’t see all the me2 products on their channel. You can rest assured our plugs have been through the ringer to get them to this level – don’t believe us, check their accessories page here
I thought I would add a little bit more about what we have been getting up to in Munich with Techstars and Bosch / Siemens
As some of you may or may not know – we don’t just connect wifi smart plugs to our cloud – we can connect ANYTHING to it. We have leveraged our 40,000 man hours it took to truly develop our bespoke (made in UK) IoT cloud and have now produced a turn key solution for anyone wanting to connect their things to the internet. We changed the name for our B2B customers as WIFIPLUG didn’t fit the bill. We called it:
MYMA.io – “the science behind the appliance”.
MYMA stands for MyMa(chine) and is capable of handling millions, actually, billions of events every day. Our fine-tuned servers not only power our WIFIPLUG products day in and day out, but they also help other companies get connected and become smart.
Our IoT platform is capable of pretty much anything – we have connected radiators, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, monitors and even student accommodation, not to mention our own products – talk about putting your money where your mouth is!
And that’s precisely what we have done! We are now working with some pretty big brands and also some exciting new startups – more will be revealed on our B2B corporate website over the coming months.
For now, we just wanted to let you know, your plugs are in safe hands – The team that brought you WIFIPLUG all those years ago – now has a super smart, agile and innovative, Internet of Things platform to handle all of those events (currently sitting at 60M per day) .
In our office, we have been testing what’s on offer from the latest voice assistants: the Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and the Google Home. It’s undeniable that the sound quality from the HomePod wipes the floor with the competition. The noise it can generate really is simply tremendous and it doesn’t deteriorate when you want to turn it up; believe us when we say: it goes LOUD! You can also talk to Siri more naturally than you can Alexa or Google Assistant. You don’t have to say: “Hey Siri” and then take a gigantic pause while it registers you want something from it. Despite all the mixed PR the HomePod’s had, we love it! That said, we also think the Echo and Google Home have many redeeming features: Alexa is undeniably the smartest AI engine and has the most ‘skills’ meaning integration with third-party apps is a breeze. She is also more intuitive and seems to be able to use her ‘initiative’ more when you ask her to execute commands. The Google Assistant’s most useful feature is the fact it leverages Google’s search engine and can answer all manner of questions on just about any topic.
Most online articles that discuss the functionality of voice assistant hardware present features as a kind of choice but in a modern household, with different preferences and gadget loyalty, we think it’s about to become more of an ‘and’ issue than an ‘or’ one…
Over the next year, we don’t think it will be uncommon for a typical family to be a multi-assistant household. After all, it’s not unusual to see a mixture of Android and Apple phones all under one roof.
But that’s where the complications begin – there are a number of devices that work with two of the three voice platforms and a few that work with one. Devices that respond to voice commands from all voice assistance are few and far between. This can somewhat tedious for the end user who wants to be able to control everything from everywhere.
Introducing WIFIPLUG: In just a few minutes, you can be using your Android phone or Apple HomePod to control your electrical appliances and that control will be absolutely seamless. Turn your lamp on with Siri and then back off With Google Assistant. It couldn’t be easier!
It was no mean feat teaching WIFIPLUG to speak all languages but we did it and not to sound like a playground show-off, but we’re pretty sure we did it first! We’ve worked tirelessly and relentlessly to make our product top notch and multilingual, all in one smart (in fact, the SMARTest) little plug.
Clearly we love our gadgets here at WIFIPLUG. Our office frequently resembles the inside of a Millennium Falcon with all the research and development work we have going on. That said, we are determined to make technology as practical as possible and bring some great solutions to our end users this year.
With that in mind, we are in the process of diversifying our brand to incorporate either energy-saving or security solutions. This blog will focus on the latter – our aim is to make you more secure in your home using your WIFIPLUG and some revolutionary technology that’s coming your way!
WIFIPLUG is making connections with forward-thinking insurance companies who want to help protect their customers using SMART technology. Imagine if your home insurance could be reduced because your home is capable of letting you know something doesn’t look right; whether it’s that someone has opened a door, there’s a water leak, motion has been detected or your appliances or lights have been switched on, the ability to monitor and act on this quickly makes policy holders a lower risk than those who don’t have the ability to monitor their home.
We want to take advantage of this kind of technology in order to make you safer, whether you’re home or not. We want our app to recognise the heartbeat of your home and recognise if something looks out of place. We’re working on creating some clever AI algorithms that will learn the day-to-day activity in your house and let you know if something unexpected happens.
We are in the process of working with a number of other SMART companies: those concerned with security, those concerned with leak detection and even those concerned with other elements of SMART home. We want to create a consortium of companies who will be able to work together and bring security solutions to you so watch this space.
If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch.
Hello Pluggers! It’s been another busy month for us. We’ve launched a new firmware, a new iOS and Android app, and made significant changes to our cloud services. We are confident you will benefit from these updates and enjoy a great end-user experience. We’re still the only plug to work with all voice platforms without the need for any additional hardware and we’re pretty proud of that!
We’ve written a couple of blogs on IFTTT this month too. We really don’t want to go on about it too much but we are sure that if you check it out, you will absolutely love it! IFTTT is a great way to get your apps and devices talking to each other. For a number of people, the prospect of integrating WIFIPLUG with another app might seem pretty daunting but it’s honestly a piece of cake and you can find out how to do it here. We’ll even help you to get set up if you’re struggling! Once you get up and running, you can do things like set your lamp to come on when the sun goes down. IFTTT automatically updates the timers for you according to daylight changes and simply put, it’s brilliant! There are thousands of possibilities – in our office, we have the lights flashing every time the International Space Station goes by – but we appreciate that’s not for everyone (even though it’s probably the coolest thing we’ve ever heard of). We have put together a ‘Fun Things to Try’ page for our users so they can take advantage of some of the great uses for WIFIPLUG.
On that note, we’ve also started hearing about our customers’ positive experiences of WIFIPLUG. Last week, we heard from a customer who had integrated WIFIPLUG with a motion sensor in order to turn a light on when motion was detected, as well as sending a notification to the their phone. We thought this was a great integration (and again, wouldn’t be possible without IFTTT). Whether you are using your WIFIPLUG to operate a lamp or to set up a complex rule-based system, we hope you love the experience. We would love to hear about any other ingenious or inventive ways you are using your WIFIPLUG – get in touch on Twitter @wifiplug
So what’s the future looking like? Pretty good actually! We are developing some very cool features with Alexa, Siri and Google so watch this space for some combined functionality! We always like to dedicate some text to thanking our early adopter customers and acknowledge that without you, none of this would be possible.
As we’ve previously said, we’re a small company with big dreams and your commitment to us makes those dreams a reality – so once again, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
Happy plugging!
