An estimated 50 million Apple iPhones are replaced each year with a new one and half of the old ones get tossed in the back of a drawer and forgotten. But a Silicon Valley company is offering an application that gives that gadget a second life protecting you and your family.
People Power Co., of Palo Alto, this week is introducing Presence, an application available for a free download at the Apple App Store that takes advantage of the video camera on iPhones, as well as iPods and iPads, for you to monitor goings-on in your home or anywhere else when you’re away.
Many consumers believe that when they replace their old iPhone with a new one, the old one is useless because it’s no longer connected to a carrier network, but that’s not true, says David Moss, co-founder and chief technology officer of People Power. Users can still activate the video camera, microphone and speakers on their old gadget as long as it’s connected to a wi-fi network, which is ubiquitous in homes and other places now.
“What makes this app, Presence, exciting, is that it recycles something that most people don’t think has value anymore into something that is incredibly valuable,” Moss said.
During an online demo, Moss showed me the many ways Presence makes an old Apple iOS-powered gadget useful. Once you install the app on both your old device and your new one, you can activate the camera on the old device and see an image of the room in which it’s placed. The app provides the option of hearing audio on the old device and enabling two-way voice communication.
Presence gives the user a way to monitor their home, communicate with people there or see how a pet is doing when home alone, he said. Parents can see when children come home from school or communicate with an elderly relative in an assisted living facility to make sure he or she is okay.
Security features of the app also include motion detection, Moss explained. Once motion detection is activated, the user can step out of the frame and leave the house and the device keeps an eye on things.
“You can leave the house and the camera itself will record a 5-second video clip if any kind of motion is detected while you’re away from home. It will send you a notification on your phone when motion is detected and you can see what happened,” he said Viewing the 5-second clip, you can determine if it’s just your dog traipsing by the camera or if there’s an intruder in your home.
You can also add multiple gadgets to the app and activate and de-activate them as needed and can activate either the front-facing or rear-facing camera on devices that have both. The device can also be managed with what Moss calls “if-then rules,” meaning that it would determine that if, for instance, the time is between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., the motion detector is automatically turned on because that’s when you’re away at work.
While presence currently only runs on devices running the Apple iOS operating system, the company plans to introduce a version of the app for Google Android OS devices later this year.
The introduction of Presence marks a new phase for People Power, which began by selling monitoring devices for the home that would communicate over People Power’s cloud-based network with your smartphone, providing you the ability to turn lights on and off, regulate heat and air conditioning or control other systems to control energy use. The company found, however, that a barrier to entry for many consumers was that they had to get a special device to do the monitoring.
“In trying to get a control device into your home you first had to buy a thing ... you had go to a store or go online to discover this and buy it. That just slows down the adoption rate,” Moss said.
People Power’s strategy with Presence is to invite software developers and gadget makers to develop products to integrate with the Presence platform. That could be apps to support energy conservation, tripods for holding cameras, custom lenses or even night vision cameras for guarding a home at night.
“Where we hope to take this app is to make the app free and valuable right out of the box and then use that to get developers and manufacturers to innovate on top of this Presence platform,” said Moss.
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