It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating.
The stuff that could have been invented 5-10 years ago but was not interesting enough to warrant the effort
I've been hearing about fridges-that-order-groceries for at least ten years. It's one of those dumb ideas that just keeps coming up, despite the fact that there's no demand for it. Basically, I don't trust my fridge with my credit card... and besides, I don't want to order groceries by delivery anyway, particularly not the kind of perishable goods that I'd be keeping in my refrigerator.
I suppose I wouldn't mind having a fridge which knew what was in it, so I could check what I needed to pick up on my way home before I left the office. But I doubt the system could be made smart enough that it actually saved me more mental effort than it consumed. The low-tech version is to simply put cameras in your fridge so that you can check its contents remotely... but even if I had this set up I doubt I'd use it all that often.
Maybe I'm being overly harsh on the smart-fridge idea. But I think it's representative of a huge class of dumb ideas: let's use fancy technology to save some minor effort for the consumer, at the cost of the consumer now having to go to the effort of acquiring, learning and maintaining yet another fancy piece of new technology. Screw it, I want my microwave with dials back.
> Convenience in foods will continue. Anything that takes the steps out of a process will become successful. Witness the "chip/dip" combo packs that Frito Lay is now selling. Open the package, you have chips and dip right there. No need to go to the fridge! At the testing area, Jays demonstrated a combo pack that had mini pretzels and honey mustard that was extremely tasty. Other examples included a pre-cooked baked potato that includes the sour cream, butter and salt and pepper inside the package. All you have to do is nuke the potato for a few minutes and you've got instant lunch.
I'm really not sure how fast food product ideas contradict my point about adding unnecessary complications to home electronics, but... damn, a one-step microwaveable baked potato sounds great.
What about commercial fridges like restaurants? Or work place refrigerators? I can see the set-it-and-forget-it feature working well in these scenarios.
While I might enjoy the convenience, the way I stock my fridge just isn't a constant datapoint. If there are no eggs in my fridge, it might be because I don't want any eggs for a while, not because I didn't think of buying any.
To solve this, you'd need human interaction etc. etc. and you soon arrive at a point where you just stock the frigging thing yourself anyhow. For a one-household effort, this really doesn't warrant the effort.
A different story could be approaching it as some sort of communal effort, say the combined amount of fridges in one multi-story house or student dorm. If you could plan your meals /assisted/ by your fridge and it could tell you that the guy next door has eggs that are free, you wouldn't need to buy a whole carton just because you want to bake a cake, thus possibly reducing waste.
In the end, this puts us back to the old privacy implications versus efficiency problem that remains largely unsolved.
Or, more realistically: not economically viable enough to warrant dropping millions of dollars into R&D that may never be profitable. Google's piles of cash change this.
I'd prefer ones that warn you when they get too warm via text message. Might not do anything if the power went out, but if the door was slightly ajar, it'd be a lot better to get an alert than to have all your ice cream melt and your meat thaw.
Oh, and they should start putting windows in the doors so that people don't stand there with the door open, thinking about what to eat.
I'm pretty sure all of that is trivial for a good engineer to wire up these days. Though if we ever had a 'smart' enough fridge, I could also see people integrating things with the various social dieting apps or whatever.
The stuff that could have been invented 5-10 years ago but was not interesting enough to warrant the effort