The future is looking bright for Nucleus, a newly launched “connected home intercom system” dreamed up by Lower Merion-based entrepreneur Jonathan Frankel.
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On sale now for a tad more than a month, this flat-screen device allows a user to see, hear, and talk to folks in other parts of the house. The Nucleus is getting many four- and five-star ratings at Amazon, though not without some “hope they make it even better” nudges that the Nucleus team is toiling to fulfill as fast as it can.
Also, lots of Lowe’s stores are already reporting “out-of-stock” status. “It’s not a bad position to be in,” Frankel said.
And Wednesday, Nucleus is to announce new endorsements from some heavy hitters: a fresh infusion of $5.6 million in funding with Amazon’s Alexa Fund as the lead investor. It hasn’t hurt that the Nucleus team built Amazon’s Alexa Voice service into the WiFi (or ethernet) networked product, qualifying it as the first Alexa-enabled touch-screen device. “We’ve spent a lot of time with their people,” Frankel said during a recent home demo of Nucleus. “And they love our vision of spreading easy communications and Alexa all around the house and beyond.”
Besides offering super-fast, room-to-room sound and sight connections, the wall- or table-stand mountable Nucleus devices let you easily check in on the kids and pooch from a distant smartphone or from another Nucleus device planted at a relative’s house, functioning as a (you should pardon the expression) Skype for Dummies. “My 3-year-old has dinner every night with his 93-year-old grandmother in Toronto,” Frankel said. “Neither can work a computer or an iPad, but with one tap on the Nucleus screen, they’re connected.”
More investment bucks will be thrown into “fulfillment” – speeding the flow of product onto shelves from the ships landing on the West Coast to two major distribution depots and then the vendors. The Taipei, Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group that’s building the touch-screen devices is another high-profile investor and endorser of the Nucleus cause and is actually fronting the costs of building the devices. “We only have to pay when we sell them,” said Frankel, just back from Taipei and Shanghai. “And based on our early sales findings, they’ve now decided to ramp up our production with a second factory.”
While most early adopters have initially been buying two Nucleus devices (bundled at $400 a pair) to test the concept, many quickly return to buy more – to spread around the house and ship off to distant relations.
A sprinkling of Nucleus devices through a house can also act as a signal-extending system for a home network, improving WiFi reception in the basement when the internet router is far away on the third floor.
And with that Alexa voice recognition capability on board, Nucleus can summon Amazon Prime songs and Tune-In Radio stations. Soon, it will be able to command “lights on” and “air conditioning up” through smart switches and thermostats.
Schooled primarily in spiritual matters and the law – he’s both an ordained Orthodox rabbi and a Harvard Law grad with Pennsylvania Bar certification – 32-year old Jonathan Frankel claims babe-in-the-woods status when it comes to tech product development. He’s just a guy who got a good idea (in 2012), then decided , with wife Michal’s heartfelt support, to quit his day job (most recently for Boston Consulting Group) and run with it.
For sure, this father of three is now nursing Nucleus like a stressed-out parent would a firstborn preemie. “We’d contracted to get it on the shelves of Lowe’s by Aug. 5,” fully polished or not, he said. “Otherwise we’d have lost our display space.”
Numerous Nucleus reviewers on Amazon’s website have testified to getting emails, phone calls, and even flowers from CEO Frankel and chief technology officer Isaac Levy. “Who does that?” marveled one. “They’ve personally thanked me for buying it and vowed to fix things quickly,” noted another.
Enabling a one-touch, “page-all-rooms” command and fixing the camera’s dim image in low-light situations are high priority. The latter will be corrected “when we turn on an LED light already in the device but not now enabled,” Frankel said. Streaming views will sharpen to “crisp 720p high definition” when Nucleus activates a now-dormant video hardware processor. Stability issues with the iOS and Android apps were both addressed with updates last week.
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