This Little White Box Can Run Your Home Entirely By Remote Control From Your Phone

Steve Kovach/Business Insider

One of the biggest trends we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was every day devices that could connect to the Internet. 

There was a fork that alerted when you were eating to much. A refrigerator with Evernote integration. A washing machine that sends a notification to your phone when the cycle is complete. And so on.

The trend is called the "Internet of things," which is just geek-speak for connecting stuff to the Web and controlling it all from your smartphone or computer. SmartThings is one of the companies exploring the space, and it got a lot of buzz last year when it raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter, blowing past its $250,000 goal.

So, practically, what does it do?

SmartThings isn't just one product, but an open platform software developers and gizmo makers can build into. Developers can create apps and devices that feed into the system to do stuff as simple as switching your lights on from your phone or as nuanced as starting your coffee maker when a motion detector sees you're out of bed after 7:00 a.m. SmartThings has about 3,000 people signed up to develop for the system.

The startup does sell its own hardware kits for the basic stuff though, and it's all controlled with a hub device that you plug into your Wi-Fi router. That hub can automatically talk to other devices in the SmartThings ecosystem.