App-controlled LIFX bulbs reinvent the humble household light
For years and years, the dimmer switch was about as fancy as it got for lightbulbs — but a team of designers is intending to change all that. — The LIFX lightbulb (pronounced “life ex") is a Kickstarter project that seeks to “reinvent” the humble household light.
Context & Ripple Effects
The LIFX launch lands at the moment when Kickstarter has become a legitimate proving ground for consumer hardware: a team of designers is going straight to backers with an app-controlled bulb rather than through lighting-industry channels, and the pickup across GigaOM, The Next Web, Ubergizmo, 9to5Google, iMore and others within a day shows how much appetite there is for the pitch.
The framing matters as much as the product — 'reinventing' the household light positions the dimmer switch, unchanged for decades, as the thing being displaced, and makes the smartphone rather than the wall the new control point for home lighting.
First-order effects
- Backers, not retailers or lighting incumbents, decide whether LIFX exists: the Kickstarter campaign substitutes crowdfunded demand signals for the shelf-space and distribution deals that traditionally gate a new bulb.
- Every early backer's home becomes a test bed where lighting control moves from the switch on the wall to an app, setting user expectations before any incumbent ships a rival.
Second-order effects
- Established bulb makers face pressure to add connectivity to what had been a pure commodity purchase, because a crowdfunded entrant is defining the feature set — color, remote control, scheduling — that buyers will now compare against.
- A successful campaign invites a layer of intermediaries around the bulb itself: hubs, home-automation apps and platform makers who want to be the software surface that controls every light in the house.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, lighting becomes the beachhead category of the connected home — the cheapest, most distributed device class through which apps and platforms enter the household — and bulb brands compete on software ecosystems rather than lumens.
- Crowdfunding hardens into a standard route for consumer-hardware startups to validate demand and force incumbents to respond, shifting product-definition power from manufacturers' roadmaps to what campaigns prove buyers will fund.
The trend: Household lighting is beginning its shift from dumb fixtures controlled at the wall to networked devices orchestrated by phones and home-automation platforms, with crowdfunded startups setting the pace.