Does the Market Need a Hacker’s Remote?

We have another new Kickstarter product. Watch to see Matt’s reaction to the M1 universal remote. This remote may have some other features that could be concerning to some, what does Matt think?

CapForge has worked with 1000+ ecommerce businesses and other small businesses and has seen some great products out there! 

In this series, we look at new products on the market and see if they are worth investing in. Think along the lines of Shark Tank, but with no real money involved just for fun. 

Video Transcript: 

Product Promo Video:

Meet the M1. Your all-in-one tech companion. A monster tool in contact form. Imagine a world where you no longer need to fumble around with multiple remotes. With the M1’s infrared capabilities, all your remotes are under one universal controller. Preloaded with a library of commonly used remote commands functions, like volume adjustment or temperature control are always at your fingertips. Read and store NFC cards and tags scan and clone RFID cards and fobs. Analyze signals open gates doors and boom barriers. Featuring onboard Wi-Fi. Also, deploy your own payloads and scripts. That’s a bad USB. Use GPIO pins to interface with hardware transfer data seamlessly between your M1 and computer. Interact with devices and even extend functions with Modules. The M1 by Monstatek.It’s a tool for today, built for tomorrow.

Matt’s Review: 

Okay so, first thing that was interesting about that video was I didn’t understand why he kept going like this [Matt grabs shirt collar and shakes up and down] I thought, what does he have lice some kind of eczema skin condition? Turns out he was just trying to indicate that he was hot, cause the first thing he used the remote control for was to turn the air conditioning on. Oh okay, I was feeling bad for him. I thought he, you know, had some kind of a medical problem. 

It’s interesting from the standpoint of being a universal remote because, you know, I know I personally have tons of remotes for stuff. The garage door, the TV, the fans, a variety of things, and this guy seems to have even more uses for his remote. Beyond that though, I don’t have a lot of use for hacking tools and I’m assuming that the audience for this probably knows why you would wanna clone fobs and RFID tags and things like that. It’s not something, it’s not the world I live in, so I’m not sure what the value is there. But just a universal remote in general to replace all the remotes that I have would be kind of handy. Of course, if you lose that one, then you got a problem. You got all those other remotes that you threw in a drawer somewhere. You have to go dig them out again. But it, yeah it’s interesting tool and they have raised over 800,000 dollars on a 10 thousand-dollar goal. So obviously there’s a lot of other people who think this is also pretty cool and are looking to get their hands on it. So I would imagine they’re gonna be able to get this made and released and if it works anything like they’re suggesting could be a pretty cool project.

But I also think that there’s probably just a lot that you’re meant to do with it that I don’t, doesn’t relate to my world. So, and it definitely using the hacker, talking about hackers in there makes me think that there’s probably uses for this tool that, you know, not everybody would be on board with. So that’s definitely a possible downside, a red flag to this that would make me think, you know, maybe it’s not as good as just the general remote tool, the universal remote replacement. The other side of it for hacking is a downside. So I don’t know interesting idea and it looks like again though, they’ve got plenty of money to make it, get it made. So we’ll see how it goes from here.