Like many of you, I like visiting my parents. But, you know how sometimes the doorbell rings and no one wants to answer the door. Yea, just had that happen – and mom’s doorbell isn’t working so loudly these days.
So, in talking to mom, we talked about doorbells and I mentioned that it would be really cool if her doorbell did this:
- Person presses the button
- They hear the doorbell “ding-dong”
- Instead of you hearing the doorbell, you mobile gets a MMS message which is a picture snapped of the person as they are sitting in front of your door
- If you recognize them, you respond to the message “open” and they get an unlocked door and another chime to come in
- If you don’t recognize them, you don’t respond to the message, but still have a log of their visit, and can just message them later that you were occupied
- Bonus point: attach this to a system like Foursquare so that a person rings the bell, and gets a check-in request SMS back, they respond, and you validate them, and then you can automatically open the door.
Mom liked it. She’s actually pretty geeked out about the idea and wants it installed yesterday. Now I know what to do for the next Mother’s Day gift.
It would come in handy, and totally take off some of the stress of looking out the window when you don’t want to get out of bed to see who it was knocking at the door.
I wonder if there has been someone who’s done this already (haven’t searched on it yet). It would make a whole lot of sense, and would help to make homes a good deal smarter – that is, unless your mobile is in the home and out of range of a cellular signal and it was the pizza delivery person (whoops).
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