re: The Internet of Things...

I completely agree. I never did it to ship to the masses. I was just toying with node and angular and made something for a little project I had with my buddy. Ever since, I've thought of ways to make it easier like adding a barcode scanner using an API to get info on it, but that would be just as much of a pain in the arse. Once we got everything in there once or twice, the database autocompletes while you type, and you just add the quantity. Like you said, though, until the refrigerator does it on its own, it's not something many people will do. He's an electrical engineer and I'm a software engineer so we're more likely to go through the growing pains.

What would be rad is if they started using NFC in packaging for that sort of thing. I built a prototype NFC app for "contact sharing" for business card distribution, and it performed really well. Put in the info, and you can write your info onto stickers, cards, wristbands, etc. and if someone has the app, it automatically starts it and adds the contact when you touch it to your phone. Nothing groundbreaking, but with that built into a fridge, it'd make this concept more viable. Touch the item to a spot, it's entered. When you pull it out, tap it, and it updates. NFC tags can be embedded in anything. Stickers, bracelets, business cards, etc. That's the only way I see it working in the near future.

In fact, one of the reasons I built it was because we wanted to make a "BeerBot" that was basically a moving ice chest with several types of beer in it, and it'd come to your location, dispense a drink, and go back to its charging stand. I got it avoiding walls with basic pathfinding using a Kinect for imaging and depth and coming to the location of the phone (approximately). In the end, it just ended up being too much work to really get done in terms of the actual moving parts. That app came out of it, though.

I went off rambling on the subject, but my point was that the idea was a really stupid and trivial idea. My roommate claimed he'd never use it, but in the end, it ended up being used way more than either of us thought. It was just a simple app built in a day that just happened to fill a need that someone didn't know they had.