World’s cheapest smart bulb to get even smarter next year

Qube, the world’s most affordable multi-colored connected light bulb, will soon be controlled by voice command and integrated with a variety of applications such as Facebook, Dropbox, Skype and Weather.

This feature expansion is a collaboration with Amazon Echo and San Francisco-based If This, Then That (IFTTT). Amazon Echo is a voice-activated speaker, while IFTTT is a free web service that links different internet-connected devices and services together through triggers and actions, also known as recipes.

New features

Here’s what a smarter Qube can do: blink blue when users are tagged on Facebook, and blink red when it is about to rain. Consumers can set up different configurations for Qube.



Qube’s new features will be launched by the first quarter of next year.

“The feature expansion is to integrate the smart bulb with as many services as possible,” said Rick Tan, managing director of Innova Technology. Qube, a subsidiary of Innova Technology, is based in Singapore and San Francisco.

“We speak a lot to our customers who are early adopters, and many of them use Amazon Echo,” he said. “Most users don’t want to take out their phones to switch on the lights.” By using Amazon Echo, a voice-activated speaker, users can switch on their Qube bulb by giving a single verbal command.

Affordability and cost

Currently, the smart bulb costs US$19 for pre-orders. The company has not yet decided on the retail price when it beings actual sales in November. Rick said, however, that prices will not differ greatly even after the new features are rolled out.

One focus of Qube is affordability, which helps lower the barrier to adopting smart bulbs in the future. The startup is scaling its product line quickly and keeping costs low for customers through online distribution.

Other wifi LED smart bulbs that work with IFTTT and Amazon Echo, including Philips Hue (US$69.99) and LIFX (US$59.99), have a considerable price difference from Qube.

Qube by the numbers

Qube, which is at the post seed stage, has received around 30,000 units of pre-orders and has raised more than US$600,000 on Indiegogo. For a company that was founded in 2013 and has only eight employees, the figures are not bad at all.

The company’s growth rate in revenue this year is roughly 200 per cent, and it is currently looking at 500 per cent growth for 2017, its key year. “Currently, our main market is the US. We will be scaling into Europe and Australasia quickly next year,” Rick said.



The global market for smart lighting is projected to exceed US$47 billion by 2020, according to a 2015 report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. This growth is driven by the rapid penetration of LED lighting, the enabler of the smart lighting revolution, as well as the increasing focus on energy efficient building technologies.

The future of Qube

While the industry of smart lighting is burgeoning, there are some much needed challenges to iron out. Hardware, after all, is not an easy business, especially for startups. “Our main challenge is to produce much quicker than we sell,” Rick said. “And as inventory cost is high, there is always a limit to how much we can produce.”

The global market for smart lighting is projected to exceed US$47 billion by 2020, according to a 2015 report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. This growth is driven by the rapid penetration of LED lighting, the enabler of the smart lighting revolution, as well as the increasing focus on energy efficient building technologies.

This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.