We are extremely excited to announce that the SIGNUL Beacon Channel has officially launched on IFTTT!
IFTTT (If This Then That) integration was, far and above, the most frequently requested feature during the inception of SIGNUL. We were very fortunate to get the opportunity to create an early release Beta channel thanks to the great folks at IFTTT. Today, we’re proud to be able to share that channel, along with some of our favourite IFTTT recipes for everyone to use.
How does SIGNUL work with IFTTT?
First of all, a quick IFTTT refresher. IFTTT is based on a very simple formula called a “recipe”. It looks like this:
Our SIGNUL channel allows you to use SIGNUL Enter/Exit Zone Events as the Trigger in your IFTTT recipes:
Pretty cool – now, you are triggering simply off the presence of your smartphone (which likely means your presence, if your phone is tied at the hip the way ours are).
From there, the possibilities become very exciting! IFTTT ties together literally hundreds of services which span everything from social, to home automation, Google Drive, and more.
How Physical Context Can Streamline Your Digital World
In our opinion, the most exciting part of all this is the ability to influence your digital world simply based on your physical context. This can be a bit tricky to digest at first, but once you think about some of your day-to-day routines, the applications become apparent, and extremely relevant.
Here are a few of our favourite recipes and what we use them for:
Slack – Check Ins
Slack has changed the way teams collaborate and enabled a paradigm shift in effective remote communication. We use SIGNUL + IFTTT to automatically post arrival and departure messages to our Slack channels so that we know when folks are actually at the keys.
Twitter – Messaging
Tweeting is an incredibly versatile action. Ranging from everything to posting a daily update, or sending a DM to a friend when you leave work, Twitter benefits greatly from context changes like arriving at work, leaving work, getting home, getting to the gym and more.
Google Drive – Timesheets
Maybe you’re trying to get more from your day, or maybe you need employees to check in and check out for billing. Integration with Google Drive, and Sheets in particular, can create automated time tracking and check-in/check-out systems using SIGNUL+IFTTT. This has been a very popular integration for many of our early commercial users.
Home Automation
During the Indiegogo campaign for SIGNUL, we heard one message loud and clear – people saw a lot of great applications for SIGNUL and control of their home automation products. IFTTT is the ideal platform for this bridge between the physical and digital world because most of the world’s top home automation providers have created IFTTT channels for controlling their products.
We’re extremely excited to see what automation people can enable using SIGNUL+IFTTT and hope to see amazing things that were not possible before. Smartphone as presence is a very powerful concept in home automation.
Wrap Up
We’ve just scratched the surface here with our initial introduction. We sincerely hope you are as excited as we are, and can only imagine some of the creations that will be possible once everyone starts to harness the power of the SIGNUL Channel.
Please keep us posted, share your cool recipes, and let us know what you have wired up. Happy IFTTT’ing everyone!