At first I thought it was an umbrella...

Than I thought it was an app that tells you when it's going to rain...

Which led me to believe it could be some sort of satire...

Then at the bottom is an actual umbrella, so now I'm thinking it's a weather app AND umbrella? and NOT satire?

No idea, but I already have numerous weather apps, and an umbrella in my car.

And none of those put together cost you $60. These were my thoughts exactly!

Same here. Except when I first read the headline I read it as "Kisha - The umbrella you'll never use."

I'm skeptical of any product page that uses the word 'perfect' too many times:

"We're big fans of perfectly crafted products." "built with a perfect opening and closing mechanism" "built using perfect stitching"

Especially when high quality umbrellas tend to cost more than this without the app or tracking technology.

I think this product could definitely be useful, but it is all about the clean, minimal experience to make it so.

Instead, I envision this product doing really well as an impulse buy at Macys, Sharper Image, and similar stores around Christmas. Parents and grandparents will buy this for their younger family members thinking it is cool. Then the young people will forget it at the bar anyway because the reason they forgot their cheap umbrellas was not the lack of reminder, but because they were drunk.

Can't figure out if this is a real product or satire.

I can't love this. It seems there is a flood of new products that allow you to track or remember them. This can't be sustainable in the long run, as each product uses it's own proprietary technology, that requires you to use a specific app. Fast-forward 5-10 years. Do I want 30 apps on my phone that track the various things I may or may not bring with me? Nope. That would be very annoying, indeed.

Where you see hell I see market forces making everyone freer and more powerful.

Once everything has intelligence, we'll need to manage that intelligence. We need one phone app and not dozens.

There's only one thing I can see that can make that happen. Open protocols. Open device APIs. Then we can make our own management apps. Oh what a wonderful day that will be.

When I can coordinate my bathroom scale with the app that manages my grocery list. When I can automatically start my car at 8:30 am, but only if my shower ran. When I can actually teach my house to understand whether I'm actually there or not.

Yet that same phenomenon means that losing your phone feels like losing all the objects tracked by your phone. I agree that this can be done well if we try but it should also be so resilient that you can be on a new phone with the same applications, data and settings in just a few minutes.

>own proprietary technology

Surely they should all use BLE or similar? If umbrella disconnects (you're outside the 15-25m range), give an alert. If using BLE, the protocol is essentially open and other apps could build around it.

"100% windproof"

Downtown in any big city would probably prove that to be wrong very quickly. Toronto destroys umbrellas.

They make some nice claims WITHOUT any warranty at all.

It's great if the wind won't mangle your umbrella, but if its windy and raining and your umbrella merely inverts you'll get wet.

Is this a problem people are willing to pay to solve? Is the fact that it's raining outside a good enough reminder not to lose your umbrella? Just curious.

It wasn't raining when I left home this morning, so I didn't bring an umbrella to work. It's raining now and I need to walk home with no umbrella.

Still doesn't mean that I'm going to buy one of these.

It's cheaper and easier for me to just lose my umbrella and buy a new one if that happens than to pay $60 upfront

People often carry umbrellas in areas where rain is less predictable. I've left umbrellas in restaurants etc. before, but...

a) I know where I left it, and

b) a decent umbrella costs $3 where I live, so I'd need to lose 20 before this became cost effective.

Wouldn't the pay off be not getting wet when you would've forgotten an umbrella? It's not presenting $60 in umbrella value, it's availability/convenience value.

As a habitual umbrella-loser, this is an awesome product :D

A bit of copy-editing:

'percepitation' in all the screenshots should be 'precipitation'. Or possibly just 'rain' / 'snow' / 'hail' ;)

'It doesn't bother you if leave one of your safe locations' -> 'It doesn't bother you if [you] leave [it in] one of your safe locations'

'It works in the buildings' -> 'It works in buildings'

I'll also second "too many uses of perfect". If it's perfect, why does it come with a warranty? ;)

Thanks, will change...

Isn't this just putting a Tile [1] (or any number of other BLE devices) on an umbrella?

[1] https://www.thetileapp.com/

Indeed - there exists an umbrella that bundles a tile: https://www.bluntumbrellas.com/xsmetro-tile

You get the advantage of the Tile ecosystem, which means anyone with the app installed has the potential to help track your umbrella.

The only value-add here is that they have an app that tells you when rain is forecasted, from what I can tell.

Actually no, because the use case is quite different. We wanted to create an umbrella that really has an app that helps. With Tile, you would just get the location feature, without the weather forecast

But buying a product for a singular use and complicating it by including a singular app I have to install will only result in wasting people's time. Not to mention the fact umbrellas are pretty much a commodity. I'd encourage exploring the the general idea of attaching custom trackers to specific objects. Build out an IFTTT type app that tracks things on a selective basis. Backpacks on work days, umbrellas on rainy days, camera when you are going to the game, etc. The tracker tags should be customized for each use. The umbrella one attaches with a punch through pin and lock plate, for example.

Also, your general use statement is all wrong. The biggest problem with umbrellas isn't losing them, it's them getting destroyed by a gust of wind or simple, unrepairable mechanical failures. A better use statement would be "Never get caught again without your umbrella/backpack/camera/etc."

I have Tile, and I also have Phillips Hue lightbulbs, which I currently have hooked up to email and social media alerts, but, if I felt so inclined, I could easily connect to a weather forecast. Or... I could just have a weather alert app on my phone (I'm sure there are tons of them).

Current technology has already solved the generic version of this problem. What you've done is solve this problem again, but only for a very specific use case, while requiring the user to buy in to a bunch of specific software and overhead that only helps them in that specific use case.

A person named Goran who created a smart umbrella called "Kisha" - rain in srbo-croatian. The world makes sense :)

Thanks. I did not come up with the name :)

"Here at fadgadg.et, we are making the internet of things a reality. Our beautiful SmartFondue comes with a exquisitely-designed iPhone 6 app that subtly notifies you when your cheese is ready. Integrating perfectly with the iOS UI, the app adjusts the lock-screen and main UI colour in perfect synchronicity with the SmartFondue itself, transitioning delightfully from virginal white to the deep golden yellow of perfectly-cooked cheese."

I really am not so sold on the idea of having to charge my umbrella...

I do wish you all the success though!

You don't need to charge the umbrella, just replace the battery on the beacon.

Awesome, now I'll just add "replace umbrella batteries" on the list of things I have to remember to do every 6 months or so.

put it on your google calendar

facepalm

Products like this make it hard to argue we're not in a bubble right now. An umbrella with bluetooth and a smartphone app? Seriously?

The idea of taking a mundane household object and adding bluetooth + app support to it is not a sensible formula for innovation. I can think of a hundred products that follow from this formula, and they're all terrible:

* Coffee machine + App. Tells you when coffee is ready. Tell coffee machine to start making coffee as you wake up.

* Vacuum cleaner + App. Tells you when the bag is almost full, sends automatic push notification when you haven't vacuumed a room for too long (using GPS and artificial intelligence!)

* Phone charger + App. Send a push notification to your tablet when your phone is done charging and vice versa.

* Water dispenser + App. Lets you know when your plants need water.

* Sandwich + App. Will send you a push notification when you've eaten the sandwich and final push notification when the sandwich has left your body.

These innovations are just gimmicks, and have no hope of ever becoming more than that. A shame, because launching any kind of product takes a tremendous amount of effort, and I'd rather see people put that effort into something more productive.

Is losing your umbrella a common problem?

For me, yes. I've lost so many umbrellas.

But that reminds me of a story I heard told by Alejandro Jodorowsky,[1] about being at a dinner at Dali's home and Dali telling him about the times when he and Picasso used to go for walks on the beach, and they would keep finding clocks buried in the sand.

Then, Dali asked Jodorowsky whether he too had ever found any clocks in the sand on the beach.

Jodorowsky thought, "What could I say to the great Dali? If I say that yes, I have found clocks in the sand, then I would seem arrogant. And if I say that I never found any clocks, then I would seem like a little man."

"So I thought for a while and then said, 'No, Dali, I have never found any clocks in the sand. But I have lost a lot.'"[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky

[2] - The quotes are not verbatim. This is from memory of an interview I saw with Jodorowsky, which I can not find right now. If anyone has a link to it and can provide a verbatim quote, that would be appreciated.

I'm curious what issues of false-positives and false-negatives this might have. Did I actually remember my umbrella, but the app hasn't updated the location it knows of the umbrella yet, so it starts bugging me to go back? Did I forget to turn the app on, so I leave my umbrella behind, feeling secure that I'll receive a reminder that is never going to come? Do I just plain forget my phone sometimes?

Without some way to guarantee a low failure rate, I can see something like this getting so annoying that I'd just turn it off completely.

And besides, I thought only people who rarely needed rain gear used umbrellas. The last time I visited Portland, or Ireland, I didn't see anyone with umbrellas. Everyone wore rain jackets. Incidentally, they keep your hands free.

I think a better product would be to create a band you can wrap around your own umbrella that does the same thing. Of course, it could be for anything at that point and that is often more difficult to market whereas losing an umbrella is a fairly normal problem.

Just my (unrequested) two cents.

My thoughts exactly. It is not like this umbrella is going to be enhanced by integrating the tech. You aren't going to "deploy" the umbrella from your phone. Simple add-on tags (which are already trying to take off) would suffice for a lot of things.

Seems it only comes with a 3 year warranty even though it claims to be 100% windproof / corrosion proof. I was hoping it would at least be lifetime like totes.

I have enough apps on my phone I don't need to pay $60 to have it more clogged up so I don't forget an umbrella that I overpaid for to begin with.

Why not a device you can attach to any umbrella? I feel like the umbrella market is pretty saturated. (Terrible pun not intended.)

Does it actually exist? I'm interested, but I'm always dubious when I see a shipdate that is in the future.

Hi Avre, yes, it does. We've manufactured a small quantity that will ship in January. We've also prepared our production lines to support bigger quantities as we scale our operations. Thanks for your comment.

Why you didn't go with one of the crowdfunding sites?

Because we're already in production and don't think that it would make a big difference. We'd rather do it on our own site.

This is pretty neat, but I think it is severely underestimating my ability to lose/leave things behind

This is a very confusing. I had to scroll all the way down the page to see actual photos of the umbrella.

I've only ever left umbrellas on trains and buses, which this wouldn't be very useful with.

Seems like a solution in search of a problem. At least it's not very expensive.

I wonder if their image might be improved by marketing it as Ki$ha instead.

I see a dot com like bubble all over again

Obviously not marketed towards California.