Quirky and GE announce Norm $80 smart thermostat, Outlink smart power outlet, Tripper door and window sensor, custom sensor kit micro-factory in SF, more
Quirky just announced seven new products, a micro-factory, custom sensor kits, and the death of the thermostat
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third major swing of 2014 for Quirky's partnership with GE, following their connected air conditioner in the spring. The difference here is scale and ambition: seven products at once, anchored by an $80 thermostat priced far below the premium segment Nest defined.
The announcement builds directly on the Wink app and $79 hub Quirky launched mid-year with Home Depot distribution behind it. With Outlink, Tripper, and a San Francisco micro-factory for custom sensor kits, Quirky is trying to own the low-cost sensor layer of the Wink ecosystem while GE supplies brand credibility and retail muscle.
First-order effects
- Consumers get a sub-$100 smart thermostat option alongside cheap outlets and door/window sensors, all designed to feed the Wink platform — immediately widening the addressable market beyond Nest's price tier.
- GE gains a fast, low-risk way to populate shelves with connected home SKUs by outsourcing ideation to Quirky's crowd, deepening a partnership already proven on appliances.
Second-order effects
- An $80 thermostat puts direct price pressure on Nest, which had treated the category as a premium product; the competitive response eventually showed up as work on a cheaper sub-$200 model with per-room sensing.
- Cheap commodity sensors like Tripper shift the comparison from single hero devices to ecosystem breadth — pushing every player to chase integrations, as Nest later did with August, LIFX, and Belkin WeMo.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smart home splits into a hardware layer that commoditizes toward $50–$100 price points and a software/platform layer where lock-in actually lives — which is why GE later formalized the crowdsourced model itself, spinning out Giddy after acquiring Quirky's assets.
- Micro-factories and custom sensor kits point toward manufacturing flexibility as a differentiator: whoever can iterate small-batch hardware quickly can flood a category before incumbents ship one polished device.
The trend: Smart home hardware is racing toward commodity pricing, with value and defensibility migrating up the stack to software platforms and ecosystems.