Foxconn-Funded Tech Startup Eyeing Spring Launch of Wi-Fi Home Intercom Product

Tech startup Nucleus hopes to overhaul the 50-year-old home intercom market with a Wi-Fi-based do-it-yourself wireless touch-screen system, CEO Jonathan Frankel told us Thursday. Philadelphia-based Nucleus, recently fortified with $3.37 million in seed funding -- including $1.5 million from its contract manufacturer Foxconn -- is taking pre-orders for a connected home device that can hang on the wall and combines the family phone, intercom, video chat and security alert functions. Pre-order price starts at $209 per unit, with availability slated for spring, and drops with the number of devices purchased. An eight-unit system is $179 per device, said the website. Nucleus has an 8-inch screen with a wide-angle lens designed to capture a complete room in one shot. It has night-vision capability and a noise-canceling mic and responds to voice commands. Users can tap on the touch screen, or issue a voice command, to reach family members in another room to convey a message or check on a sleeping baby, Frankel said. “Instead of running up and down the stairs, or yelling or texting in the home, you just tap or use voice activation to connect between rooms in the home.” Wi-Fi enables the communication to extend to Nucleus devices around the world, he said. In typical usage, a parent might call a teenager to dinner using just an audio call from room to room but call a grandparent in another state using video chat, with connections occurring in a “fraction of a second,” Frankel said. The wide-angle lens and noise-canceling mic allow users to walk around the room and have a conversation with someone “like they’re in the room with me,” said Frankel. Nucleus is based on the open-source WebRTC communications platform that keeps all devices “constantly connected,” said Frankel. Nucleus can connect to the Nest cloud and an Insteon hub to add smart home product control including lights and door locks, he said. The Nucleus app allows users to extend usage to a smartphone, giving devices a Wi-Fi-based push-to-talk-like functionality. Frankel gave the example of being able to tap on the app to reach his wife rather than having to place a call or type a text. Nucleus was designed for the DIY channel but will offer a power-over-ethernet adaptor for the CEDIA channel, he said. The company will roll out the product in stages and hopes to be in most major retailers over the next 12 months, Frankel said.