Quirky unveils Wink app and $79 hardware hub to connect smart home devices, partners with Home Depot, expects 60 Wink-enabled products by July
Quirky to Create a Smart-Home Products Company — The repurposed red brick warehouse in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood is a bustling hub of modern industrial activity.
Context & Ripple Effects
Quirky, the crowdsourced product shop working out of its Chelsea warehouse, is carving its fast-growing connected-device line into a dedicated smart-home company called Wink, complete with its own app and a $79 hub meant to tie third-party devices together. The move matters because Quirky is not selling direct-to-geek: it has signed on Home Depot as its retail partner, putting the hub in front of mainstream homeowners rather than early adopters.
The breadth of same-week pickup — TechCrunch, Gigaom, VentureBeat, Mashable, Forbes, Digital Trends, SlashGear and others all carried the launch — signals how contested the nascent smart-home platform question had become by mid-2014: whoever owns the $79 box on the shelf could own the protocol layer above it.
First-order effects
- Home Depot gains an anchor SKU for a smart-home aisle strategy, betting that a $79 hub plus roughly 60 Wink-compatible devices by July gives shoppers a one-brand entry point.
- Device makers signing onto Wink get big-box distribution they could not buy individually, while Quirky shifts from making individual gadgets to charging the ecosystem around them.
Second-order effects
- Competing hub makers face pressure to match sub-$80 pricing and national retail placement or cede the mainstream shelf to Wink, turning price and shelf space — not feature lists — into the battleground.
- Retailers like Home Depot become de facto gatekeepers of which connectivity standards reach consumers, giving them leverage over device manufacturers seeking floor space.
Third-order effects
- If hubs keep commoditizing at impulse price points, value migrates to the software and partnership layer above the hardware, pushing small hardware startups toward retail alliances or eventual consolidation.
- A fragmented field of proprietary hubs points toward pressure for common interoperability standards, either via industry agreement or via whichever platform accumulates enough devices first.
The trend: Consumer smart-home adoption in 2014 is being shaped less by gadgetmakers than by whoever controls the cheap central hub and the big-box shelf it sits on.