This is an absolutely brilliant product and a market that is just beginning to be realized. Smart learning thermostats like the Nest, portable environmental monitoring Cubes and personal weather stations from Netatmo that observe and monitor air quality are already taking home automation and monitoring out of the garages of Arduino nerds and putting them into the homes of the less-nerdy but still geeky.
Canary can notify you when people enter and leave your house, and records videos of anomalous activity. It has alarms and push notifications. It monitors allergens and temperature in addition to humidity.
How many homes have you been in that leveraged X10 lighting controls and switches? How many families have no idea what the hell an “exten” even is? These gizmos and the Canary in particular are exactly what is needed to allow people to really make use of this type of technology without shitting up their homes with haphazard Rube-Goldberg-and-wire projects.
Ignoring the DVR, night vision, behavior learning and environmental monitoring, the best part about Canary is probably that it’s all contained in a cylinder that looks like a piece of modern art, costs USD$200 and doesn’t involve drilling holes into your rented apartment.