We're crossing that bridge... A note from Kini inventor, Mike Zabetian

More than a few times over my career, I’ve been in new product discussions that go something like this:

“What if users have multiple instances of this new widget and get confused about which is which? We should let them name them, but we should also assign other attributes to tell them apart. Oh, and we’ll need to keep track of their time zones in case they aren’t all located in the user’s time zone…”

At that point, a smart product manager would usually say, “By all means let users name these widgets, but let’s not worry too much about people having lots of them and all the extra work that comes with that. That’s a good problem to have. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Quite often, we never got to that bridge. Either the widget was never completed because the project funding ran out, or it shipped and, while it was a good widget, users never rushed out to buy additional ones.

Well, I’m happy to say that Kini is finally crossing that bridge! This week we released two new features that address Kini proliferation. Here are some actual requests we’ve received:

• “I have a few Kinis at my home in Oregon and some at my house in Florida. Can you display the local time for each Kini so I can better make sense of the movements they’re reporting?”

• “I’ve got a Kini in Sydney and I’m in Tennessee. When Kini tells me something moved at 2 a.m., it can be pretty alarming until I remember that it’s actually 7 p.m. in Sydney. Can you do something about that?”

• “I’ve got a dozen Kinis around the house. Some are monitoring much more important things than others, but they all use the same notification sound. Can I assign a shrill sound to the critical ones to really get my attention, while using a more relaxed chime for the others?”

• “I’m sight-impaired and use Kinis to know when my front door, side door, interior doors, drawers, safes, and cabinets are opened. The notification sound gets my attention, but I’d love for each Kini to have its own sound so I know which one it is without having to open the app and have it read the Kini’s name to me.”

Kini now handles both of those.

If you have Kinis spread across multiple time zones, Kini will now display each Kini’s local time throughout the app. That makes it much easier to correlate activity with your housekeeper’s schedule, a pet sitter’s visit, or anyone else who might legitimately be there.

You can also assign a unique notification sound to every Kini from a library of 50 sounds. Some are calm and unobtrusive. Others are intentionally impossible to ignore. When a notification arrives, you’ll immediately know which Kini is reporting activity—before you even look at your phone.

So yes, we finally crossed that bridge.