Much the same could be said of most electronics. Toys gadgets gizmos. This is hacker news so I wonder how this sentiment belongs here.

Nevertheless, there is a conceptual barrier here that is difficult to cross, and it has to do with the expectation here that a gadget or product should hold our attention, or in other words, to be a distraction, in order to be worth our time and money. The light however is not exactly the same sort of thing as a game console- it's aiming for a different kind of niche, the niche of ambient computing. A kind of gadget that you /don't/ notice, that doesn't hold your attention. A gadget you buy expecting to forget that it is there- because it is just quietly doing what it is supposed to: ambiently communicating. A mood, a temperature, a status. It's simple as that. As geeks we can hack on it and overcomplicate things, but the essence of this is simply: connect a light to the cloud.