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Some of these products strike me as being created because one of the owners of the startup thought it was cool, not because they went out and actually tried to identify peoples' household problems and figure out ways to solve them.

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That may be true for some, but I suspect most of these internet-based devices are little more than an excuse to get on the surveillance-as-a-business-model bandwagon. All you need is a clever excuse to gather a new type of data that isn't currently being collected, and you have something to sell to "big data".

Fortunately, even the non-technical people I know have started to wake up to these scams, and are now avoiding any "smart" product.

I also get the impression many of these things were dreamed up out of minor inconvenience.

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