My TV Remote can create a remote with favorite channels as buttons.
Maksim Ioffe was sitting around his San Francisco living room watching TV one day in 2009 when he noted how ridiculous it was that on his coffee table were no less than five remote controls. He thought to himself, "This has got to go."
But instead of replacing them all with yet another remote, he looked to something he already owned: his smartphone.
Fast forward to 2011, and that germ of an idea two years ago has spawned the Dijit Universal Remote App, which turns an iPhone--or iPod Touch, iPad, or Android phone--into a remote control.
Ioffe is not alone in looking for ways to substitute the smartphone for a remote control. There's actually a whole crop of companies that are trying to break into what some are calling the "smart-remote" business by taking advantage of the device that one-third of all U.S. cell phone owners already have on hand.
"When we started, our own physical controller was what we sold to 100 percent of our customers," said Cullen in a phone interview last week. "Today 20 percent of new customers use a dedicated Sonos controller."
In other words, the rest of them, or 8 out of 10 new buyers, choose to just use the free iPhone or Android app now with their new Sonos system. "It's extraordinary how it's moved," he said. And he and others within the company credit their first iPhone app as "one of the most important things that ever happened to us."
The customer response Sonos saw could easily be considered a case study for where the smart-remote business could go some day.
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