Internet of Sh*t has an early 2017 winner – a 'smart' Wi-Fi hairbrush The annual godforsaken hypegasm that is the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has given an "innovation award" ... to a Wi-Fi-connected microphone-fitted allegedly "smart" hairbrush. A comb through the technical specs of the Kérastase Hair Coach, a snip at around $200, reveals the high-tech hairbrush has sensors that …
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Is there really no end to this stupidity?
Next they'll bring out toilet paper with sensors to ...
Whatever.
The problem lies not with the asshole that thought this up, it is with the marketing imbecile that thought it was actually a good idea and the higher-up DH that thought so too.
With all the *real* problems the world has to solve, time and money are endlessly wasted on this crap.
I fear the gods' wrath will eventually come upon us ...
@oiseau
Whether it's a "good idea" or not depends really on what your criteria are. So far as the company is concerned, a "good idea" is one which makes money.
This is a brush that is cheap to make - after all it's just a hollow brush with some off-the-shelf commodity parts that are ridiculously cheap due to their current ubiquity in smart phones. The 'app' that ties it together would have been very simple to code (so far as coding goes) and could have been farmed out to any number of low-cost out-sourced dev farms and the hosting required for the back-end again is pennies.
It's also not taking up any of their manufacturing capacity as it would all be done via third-parties.
So you've got a cheap device being sold for rather a lot of money - I don't think it has to sell overly well to make a profit.
Is it a rubbish idea when judged against the myriad other innovations that our species of clever little apes have made? Completely. Doesn't mean it won't make money. (Sadly.)
Yes, your toilet paper will have artificial intelligence, so that it can sense what you are doing, understand it, understand what it is and its place in life, the universe, and everything, -- and then converse with you about it.
"EEEWWW!!! What are you DOING to me?!?! Why, oh why this, creator! This person is using me to wipe their ass! No, no more! Please stop at once and set me free from this cursed existence! Let me be free -- from your stinking, smelly shite!"
Whereupon you drop it in the bowl. And it's that same way, with every single square.
"No, no more! Please stop at once and set me free from this cursed existence! Let me be free -- from your stinking, smelly shite!"
This was retrieved from a call-centre voice-recorder.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the commentard to decide which one...
Well, it could be made by Sirius Cybernetics Corp. Then you'd get something like "Thank you for using this piece of toilet paper to wipe your ass today" or "Glad to be of service." How would you like to have to listen to THAT hung over in the morning after a bit of a knees up the night before?
Or, worse, they could have the sensors give you a status report, "Oh, it looks like you had a few Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters too many last night! And WHERE did you get that really nasty curry from?"
Next they'll bring out toilet paper with sensors to ...
Well, someone made a start, albeit with more humour than these people are capable of (probably because she's Swedish) :).
I think most people figure out how to use a hairbrush long before they are able to understand any feedback provided by this thing, so not sure about the usefulness over and above automatic SM posts - "Sian1983 has just brushed her hair. Sent from my hairbrush."
I would have thought that if they were going to stick a battery in it then there are much more useful things they could do to improve the function for which it was originally designed - Brush Hair:
- Heated bristles maybe? *
- Auto retracting bristles to assist with removing hairballs.
- Some kind of nitinol based bristles to adjust stiffness.
And none of this requires wi-fi, apps or any kind of IoT crap. It's just another product which supports my theory that a lot of these 'new' IoT devices are just old devices with user tracking, advertised as being useful to you, but sold for collecting information about you, so they can sell you more. All you are doing is buying advertisements.
* I don't know what use this would be as I have no hair, but we have someone in our house who forgets to turn straighteners off regularly so I assume heat must do some good.
Coming in late, but I believe you're looking for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
On the mane, I think you'd have to be wigged-out to buy one of those.
(More seriously, I think that $200 for a brush is a sign from God that you have too much money. Plus the stupid thing will probably end up in a botnet, or targeted by a hacking group that will co-opt the device and feed you bad haircare advice that causes you to get split ends or frizzies..)
"and an accelerometer and a gyroscope to log the number of strokes through your barnet."
Why would you use a hairbrush for hair? I though they were spanking paddles in disguise, so maybe there is a business opportunity for users of FetLife to "rate my spanking" automatically?
"and an accelerometer and a gyroscope to log the number of strokes through your barnet."
Why would you use a hairbrush for hair? I though they were spanking paddles in disguise, so maybe there is a business opportunity for users of FetLife to "rate my spanking" automatically?
I think you may just have explained the reason for the accelerometer :)
"Withings has a track record for empowering everyday objects such as bathroom scales and watches with sensors that provide people with insight into their behaviors, and we're excited to now bring this expertise to the beauty industry,"
Now theres a sentence that warrants a punch in the face if you ever hear it coming out of someones mouth.
You should then advise your victim that the correct phraseology is:
"Withings has form for putting unwanted bullshit into tools that dont need them , and his next intended victim is the beauty industry."
I think splashing a bit more on Dyson's hairdryer is probably a better use of that money. I would love to see a couple of those put through their paces at a decent salon - if they survive that for more than a year they've made something good (it looks plausible, but real life has a habit of pointing out flaws you never even considered :) ).
"Withings has a track record for empowering everyday objects such as bathroom scales and watches with sensors that provide people us and our advertising partners with insight into their behaviors, and we're excited to now bring this expertise to the beauty industry."
"Each time someone uses the smart brush they we get rich data they we never before had access to, which can improve their overall hair care experience our ability to monitor and profile our customers and generate a new revenue stream when we 'share' that data with our advertising partners."
Quite.
Obvious advertising opportunity#1 is for L'Oréal's own products: It can detect if the hair is wet or dry, so a conclusion can be made about washing frequency, and advertising can try to increase that (and therefore sales of hair-related L'Oréal products).
Obvious advertising opportunity#2 is for third parties - hairdressers. If the software can track stroke length, over time it can probably be used to approximate how often the user visits the hairdresser - and therefore when strokes reach a certain length start advertising local hairdressers.
The reality of the Internet of Things.
Oh well, at least I'm not going to have a security issue with one of these at home - the bulk of my hair has long since departed for pastures greener, what's left will barely support a small comb.
There does seem to be a trend emerging here - firstly, when you're young, your parents show you up by doing cringe-worthy things in public, then your children do the same and then, just when you think it's safe to relax, your employer decides to get in on the act as well!
A: That they manage to sell it to people for two hundred bucks.
(Then again my hair care philosophy is cut never/wash weekly, and some people think I shouldn't be allowed to own hair in the first place.)
Edit: Spending a few minutes trying to figure out why "Kerastase" tripped a vague cultural appropriation alert, then remembered that India has a place called Kerala.
> Also included is a mic
And eventually we find out even these have been compromised. Before if you wanted a private conversation you told people to leave their phones in another room. Now you need to tell people to put out their hairbrushes and god knows what else out of the room too.
A hairbrush with a mic, for gods sake! If there was something which I thought would never need a microphone, it was a hairbrush, followed by the shower head, or possibly my toilet bowl. Although I am sure someone is working on it somewhere...
In this wonderful future planned for us, everything will have a mic, so if you don't want to be recorded, monitored and every single thing "shared" with god knows who, you will have to end up living in a shack in the mountains somewhere, and whittle your own brushes and things.
At least for things that fit in a microwave, the electrics can be disabled. but we will see how things go in future.
On a related note, I didn't notice anywhere in the article a mention on how this thing is powered, nor how long it lasts on a charge. Is this yet another thing you have to plug in to charge? Do you now have to remember to buy batteries for this too? Or will the act of vigorously brushing your hair charge it up, not unlike those emergency torches?
Now you need to tell people to put out their hairbrushes and god knows what else out of the room too their misery.
Reprogramming, axe, the usual process.
Or will the act of vigorously brushing your hair charge it up, not unlike those emergency torches?
If your hair is too dry it'll charge that way.
Reprogramming, axe, the usual process.
On the device, or the twit who brought it?
Wait.. I just need a moment. I got a new axe the other day. Better re-program it before I use it. It has an inbuilt mic to monitor my chopping action through the sounds the wood makes as it splits (so the app can send back helpful hints on better wood chopping techniques). Wouldn't want that to pick up what sounds like screams of terror and send them back to home base now would I?
(actually just that I feel I need to add a "joke alert" icon to make that clear probably says enough about the state of the mentality of our society)
If there was something which I thought would never need a microphone, it was a hairbrush, followed by the shower head, or possibly my toilet bowl.
Never mind microphones, next thing you know they'll be putting cameras on there:
M.
Depending on your conditioner (so not sorry for that one) things could get natty here. A pwn that provides for backdoor access to the hairbrush charging system could result in a bride of frankenstein experience when the lipo overheats due to a comms issues resulting from an IOT originated DDOS. Or what if it could be made to sound just like Joan Crawford. I can hardly wait for the IOT enema, or will it be a do-it-yourself proctoscope with built-in streaming....The B ark is the answer....
Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTGjZx9PiL0
This is comparing 2 sous-vide cooking device. Both are roughly similar and both have smartphone based apps (I assume to monitor and start/stop cooking remotely).
The reviewer chooses one over the other, because it is a bit sleeker. Sleeker because... it has no manual controls of any kind on it. So, a $200 kitchen device that can only work if its wifi works and if your phone wants to talk to it. Which of course puts you at the mercy of the manufacturer updating the app whenever a mobile OS update requires it.
What could ever go wrong???
>Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTGjZx9PiL0
CNet ? They hailed Windows Me, Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10, claiming they were the fastest, most reliable and usable OS' out there ...
I wonder how cnet manage to still attract readers/viewers ... BS purveyor, if you ask me.
> So, a $200 kitchen device that can only work if its wifi works and if your phone wants to talk to it. Which of course puts you at the mercy of the manufacturer updating the app whenever a mobile OS update requires it.
Meh. It's something to talk about to the botulism nurse when you are in intensive care I suppose.
" The rough tongue of a buffalo could be used as a hairbrush."
With the spread of the railways the massive slaughter of buffalo became almost industrial. Apparently all that was taken was the tongue - the rest of the carcass was left to rot where it had been shot. I had always assumed the tongue was a food delicacy - now I wonder.
How about a cooker that detects a ring/oven has been on with no pan on/in it for x minutes and turns it off.
Even simpler, and no net connection required.
I suspect there are high end cookers that already offer this, otherwise I'd patent the idea.
I've wanted "Classes" of mains powered devices for ages.
1. Never to be on when the owner is away
2. Can be on for a selected period once the owner has left the building (E.G. oven that will work for half hour while you "pop out" but turns itself off after that)
3. timed use only - Irons, hair straigteners, vacuum cleaners.
4. can be on all the time but reports status in house monitor.
5. Dumb devices.
Downside
Insurance would then say they won't pay out on a house fire because you had too many Class 5 where Class 2/1 were required for cover.
How about a cooker that detects a ring/oven has been on with no pan on/in it for x minutes and turns it off.
Even simpler, and no net connection required.
Get with the times, Grandad, this is 2017 not 1997!!
The ONLY CORRECT way to do what you suggest would be:
- tie the cooker to the cloud, so you can check licensing validity every time someone wants to use it,
- make it so that if there's no internet connectivity, the cooker stops working
- mandatory account creation, and the signup process has to gather essential data like: user's date of birth, taxpayer ID number, blood type
- (oh, and require use of a credit card when signing up - even if it's "free" - gotta cover your bases if your shareholders decide, 6 months down the line, that the service needs to be monetised)
- control the cooker using a shiny iPhone app thrown together in 5 minutes by an intern, that communicates with the cooker via your AWS cloud server using cleartext HTML.
- Remember to NEVER release updates or security fixes for it, because you're too busy working on the next gen product.
- get bored of the whole thing 1 year after you launch it and terminate service, effective immediately. (Give users 1 week to get their food out of their cookers if you're feeling generous.)
- Remember to design it so that the cooker becomes completely non-functional without the cloud service.
And of course, it has to be priced at 50% above the top of the market, because it's NOT "a braindead cooker that is effectively rented, not bought, and has a short 12-month useable life" - it's "a premium product that leverages the latest technology to achieve synergy with your digital lifestyle".
Bonus points if you manufacture it in China for pennies.
...and I forgot to add, you have to spend more on the marketing and branding than on the actual product or development.
Give it a cutting-edge name (e.g. "cookr" or "hottr" - don't be gauche and opt for something like "iStove", this isn't 2006 for goodness sakes) and you're halfway done.
You joke, but I'd dare not tell you what [On second thought, shall we just say a brand beginning with H?] had wrapped up in a cupboard that thankfully (for us mere humans trying to keep away from this junk) kept giving them BSOD errors on the firmware way back in 2015...
... actually, call to mind it was the washer that was IOT/cloud and kept crashing. The IOT cooker firmware worked fine and they have it on release/scheduled release.
Anon because (literally these days) the walls have ears.
Kerastase, the company selling average products that can be had elsewhere for 1/10 of the price, jumps onto the IoT bandwagon ... why am I not surprised?
They are a ripoff, that is why you can only find them in hair saloons, because as soon as the competing products are placed next to theirs and a punter looks through the ingredients, punter can find 1:1 alternative products, without the ripoff brand on the bottle, at a ridiculously lower price.
The wonk said "Our customers see their hair as intimate expressions of their identities..."
I never thought there would be device for combing intimate hair. The mind boggles. Though reading the article I was happily reminded of Lawnmower Deth's excellent ditty 'Can I cultivate your groinal garden?'. Paris 'cos, well, it's Paris.
Bargain!
here's a hairbrush that costs $200 and it doesn't have any tech..
http://needsupply.com/sensitive-hair-brush.html?product_id=3132873&adpos=1o17&creative=51051919655&device=c&matchtype=&network=g&gclid=CjwKEAiA17LDBRDElqOGq8vR7m8SJAA1AC0_wmrAdHam4TnVEtbJLpmESCb1bBMIKMbb5IaWrnj0MRoCO8bw_wcB
It is sensitive though...
Looking at the photo you used to illustrate this item, misses the same point at your artical.
The woman in the bathroom only has 2 shelves with a few nicely spaced bottles of goop, every bathroom I have seen that is used by a woman is full of bottles of stuff to make themselves more beautiful. They just can't stop themselves buying another bottle of beauty aid, so the manufacturer should be onto a winner, except most women only add social media apps to their phone. so possibly not.
Bottles / creams in the bathroom are the same as shoes:
Women > 30
Men < 5
Before you flame me go home & count
Have you ever seen an empty shelf anywhere in a home? Shelving is where the real money is. And think of the possible applications! Shelves that search and inventory themselves is just the beginning. And don't forget cosy licensing deals with makers of things that fit on shelves. The mind boggles. Profit, here we come!
Given that brushing hair causes a lot of static electricity and that same electricity is the foe of anything electronic, I wonder how they deal with that.
Or did I miss the hidden "feature" of this device that its self charging from all the stray static
Also wonder how it copes with being given a rinse out under a tap to wash off all the gel.
What a completely pointless product.
"That manufacturers thought the idea was hair-raising enough to take to market is also revealing – some people seem to think shoppers will buy anything these days so long as it comes with an app."
The thing is - there are shoppers that will buy anything, even something like this.
Plus: free PR.
Win-win.
In line with the thoughts of one or two earlier commentards, having already seen an unconnected but smart Japanese toilet seat, I can imagine (if it doesn't already exist) , a smart bog.
It will sample your daily products and analyze them for food content, alcohol and other chemicals, possibly it will also be able to check DNA to identify the crapper on the crapper.
Having done it' s business with your business it will send results via open text to your insecure a droid/ithing, whereupon your health insurance will hack it along with you employer, the government and the rest of the snooping world. Net result ; no health insurance because of diet and anything else they can find to deny you with, no job because you had toke at the weekend and the government will treat you as a potential paedoterrorist because thats what they do. Coming soon to a khasi near you!
I flew through Tokyo last year, and whilst in the lounge I decided to use the restroom.
The toilets, of course, were "smart". And, unknown to me until I sat down, heated.
Now - it's possible that to the Japanese mind, a heated seat is a nice touch of luxury...
To me, however, a warm loo seat in a public restroom means only one thing: "uurgh, someone's only just departed from this one, oh god better sanitise it, and bleach my buttocks for good measure".
Most unsettling.
To me, however, a warm loo seat in a public restroom means only one thing: "uurgh, someone's only just departed from this one, oh god better sanitise it, and bleach my buttocks for good measure".
Always struck me as funny how many of us would pay a premium for a heated car seat on a cold winter's morn, but the same on a toilet seat and we run screaming!
--> Keep finding them in the public toilets after the council fitted heaters. Gotta grab the wallet to check for, er identity.. Yeah, that's it..
"For more than 50 years, Kérastase has pioneered luxury hair care that's at the forefront of scientific research"
Lets see those peer-reviewed papers then...
Seriously though, I think it's about time the scientific community had a trans-national body that exists purely as a legal entity representing scientists that can sue weasely advertising fuckers for misrepresentation.
This post has been deleted by its author
It's the Smart Cup 10000! Because, just because.
A plethora of expensive sensors ring the mouth and ass of this fine Smart Cup 10000, as well as the chimp-holder, AKA handle. There is a limit to the heat that the cup can take, due to the on-board computer, battery, SD slot, and LED rig mounted on the Smart Cup 10000's ass-end. Nothing over 110°! But you'll forget all about that, because you need to charge the Smart Cup 10000 before every cup of drink you plan, and now have to pre-plan, to properly enjoy the device! So, after a nice 4 hour charge, you're ready to drink up and collect data! Just fill the charged Smart Cup 10000 with your favorite bevarage, under 110°, grab and release the handle, wait for the LEDs to light up to tell you if there is a full charge, wait 10 seconds for the Grinder data gathering software to load and, wait for the LEDs to turn from red, to flashing red, to purple, to slow-flashing purple, to yellow, to fast-flashing yellow, to slow-flashing green and finally to green and you're ready to drink up and collect that data! Wait, we forgot to format the SD card. Okay, don't drink just yet, with the solid green LEDs lit, insert a new micro SD card into the slot and wait for the slow-flashing purple LEDs... etc, etc, etc, etc.
Smart Cup 10000 info:
capacity: 6 ounces, 128GB, 6 hour battery life, 80Gb/s data collection throughput
price: $800
replacement battery system: $800
charging system: very expensive, custom connector on a cheap switching 5v 1A p/s
Smart Cup 10000 App v1.0: free!
Purpose: we have no idea, we just want to sell a shitload then disappear, like those guys with the shitty smart-scooters did!
Soon parted.
Of course this is obvious. Then I look at my wife's collection of hair brushes, which is around 7 or so. Many of these are used at the same time WITH a hair dryer (blasting away!). And I wonder why it takes so long for the female of the species to "get ready".
She is really good looking though, I have to admit.
7? 7?
Bloody hell.
I own two, one I brought about 10 or 11 years ago because I left my last one in a hotel somewhere. However it's bristles were to stiff so it's not the cat's favourite plaything (and despite being left next to the cat's bed, often gets grabbed by humans of the female persuasion who wish to brush their hair - how silly can some people [checks article again] never mind...) The other has nice soft bristles, is locked away in a cupboard so no one else can get to it.. A cheap thing brought from a supermarket on a whim, think it cost less than a buck.
My mummy taught me how to brush my hair when I was like 3 or 4.
More than 40 years and a whole lot of cruel-to-hair living later, I still have most of it, just using what I knew as a 4yo.
Does that mean that the people who buy these products are clearly NOT smarter than a 1st grader?
Or does it say that, if you haven't learnt how to brush your hair (and tell whether or not it needs drying) by the time you can buy a $200 hairbrush (and who the fuck would spend that much money on a hairbrush?????), you have a wee bit more to worry about then whether it might get a bit frizzy today.. Maybe the "frizzy" is inside the head?
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