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Securifi Almond Reviewed

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hungarianhc

Regular Contributor
Is anyone else intrigued by these? Apparently the Almond router is one of the best reviewed routers on Amazon. Link here.

I'm actually most intrigued by the upcoming Almond+ router. This is going to sell for only $99 via Kickstarter, and it will be 802.11ac, include zigbee + z-wave for home automation, and have an integrated touchscreen. Given how highly reviewed the Almond is, I'm really excited about this one. Here is a link to the Almond+ page.

Anyone have thoughts?
 
couple of random thoughts...

at the price point - it's not sustainable - been there, done that, have the t-shirts to prove it - it's being sold at a loss, and volume will just make it worse, burning up investors money until they either get bought or roll it up.

D-Link showed a touch screen router at CES2010 - never shipped... margins are too thin as it is in the CE router business, any additional development costs need to be carried over in volume to make it up - it's a falling knife from there....

http://www.cnet.com/8301-31045_1-10429277-269.html
 
Well, it's being done right now. There are currently 400 Amazon reviews w/ an average score of 4.5 stars.

As for the Almond+, it went on Kickstarter this morning. Here is the link. I snatched it up quickly. $95 is a great deal, and I'm encouraged by their previous success.

The bad news is that it isn't going to ship until September 2013. Oh well. It's not like I have any 802.11N devices yet anyways.
 
Hello there, I am with Securifi. This post caught our attention due to the incoming traffic.

I cant claim I am a frequent reader of this forum but I do check it out from time to time.

We would be happy to send you a free review unit of the original Almond. I suppose Mr. Higgins would be the reviewer. Whoever it is, please send a message to sales@securifi.com with your address and let us know you are from SmallNetBuilder and we will ship you the review unit. Thanks.
 
Hi Jigawatts,
We'll give it a shot. I've sent a mail as requested.
 
Mr.Higgins, Thank you for the prompt message. Our CEO just replied to you and a review sample is on its way.

A few words about Almond and Almond+.

Most folks on this forum wouldn't need a touchscreen to setup their routers :-D. You are all very networking savvy compared to the average Joe. But Almond could be a great router for your parents or non-tech friends so they wouldnt bother you everytime they forgot their password or something like that. Having said that, some of you would find Almond to be the easiest range extender to setup since you dont have to mess around with changing IP addresses and so on. At this time Almond's range is medium but we are working on making that also better.

Now Almond+ is a different story. We believe this is truly a quantum leap for router technology. Forget about the touchscreen and 11ac, no other router manufacturer has integrated ZigBee and Z-Wave with even an 11n router. There is growing interest in home automation and we will not be surprised if other router manufacturers start copying us.

Here is a demo of Almond+ working with off the shelf Z-Wave thermostats and door sensors.
 
@Jigawatts - please don't take my comments out of context.

I wish you guys over at Almond my very best - it's a tough business so work have and don't give up!

sfx
 
@sfx2000, no offense taken at all.

I agree that Router business is very mature and tought; the only reason we are doing well is because of strong differentiation.

You might have seen the news that Belkin acquired Linksys..
 
@sfx2000, no offense taken at all.

I agree that Router business is very mature and tought; the only reason we are doing well is because of strong differentiation.

You might have seen the news that Belkin acquired Linksys..

Saw that... commented here on a couple of threads - if Cisco is walking away from this market - that's a tell... too many ODM's out there selling chipset reference designs that work good enough at a very low cost COB Shenzen...

Remember, this market is very price sensitive, and very unforgiving of products that don't meet expectations. Getting into the margin aspects - watch the BOM costs and NRE - BOM costs can kill margin, and NRE can be unexpected drags on the overall project P&L worksheets...

Getting product on the shelf is a challenge (shelf space is half the battle), but the support aspects - ensure that you have the right team in place - they're the make or break, IMHO... if you have a world class team there, they can make all the difference.

and then iterate the hell out of what works.... and kill off what doesn't - without thinking twice.

best of luck - I'm sure you guys have a good team, not just on the engineering side, but also on the product/business side - make it work!

sfx
 
couple of random thoughts...

at the price point - it's not sustainable - been there, done that, have the t-shirts to prove it - it's being sold at a loss, and volume will just make it worse, burning up investors money until they either get bought or roll it up.

D-Link showed a touch screen router at CES2010 - never shipped... margins are too thin as it is in the CE router business, any additional development costs need to be carried over in volume to make it up - it's a falling knife from there....

http://www.cnet.com/8301-31045_1-10429277-269.html

Hi there,

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to address your concerns here.
Although I don't know your background, I just wanted to let you know that Securifi is a profitable business and we're currently busy expanding into new regions to make the Almond and Almond+ (when it launches) available to as many potential customers as possible.

If you guys have questions about Securifi's products, please feel free to get in touch with me. I've recently joined the company and unlike my colleague Jigawatts, I've been a frequent reader of SmallNetBuilder for quite some time. This site is a great resource for the more technically inclined users, but keep in mind that Secufifi's products are targeting a very different group of users, of which many have no understanding of networking, the terminology used and quite often don't have advanced computer knowledge at that. As such we feel that we have a slightly different place in the market that many of our much more affordable competitors that offers products that most of you could set up in a few minutes, but that your average consumer would struggle to use.

Cheers
 
Last edited:
Hi there,

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to address your concerns here.
Although I don't know your background, I just wanted to let you know that Securifi is a profitable business and we're currently busy expanding into new regions to make the Almond and Almond+ (when it launches) available to as many potential customers as possible.

If you guys have questions about Securifi's products, please feel free to get in touch with me. I've recently joined the company and unlike my colleague Jigawatts, I've been a frequent reader of SmallNetBuilder for quite some time. This site is a great resource for the more technically inclined users, but keep in mind that Secufifi's products are targeting a very different group of users, of which many have no understanding of networking, the terminology used and quite often don't have advanced computer knowledge at that. As such we feel that we have a slightly different place in the market that many of our much more affordable competitors that offers products that most of you could set up in a few minutes, but that your average consumer would struggle to use.

Cheers

That's pretty cool - just keep security in the forefront, along with performance and cost.

I've been quiet lately as I've been part of a group of ex-telco engineers with deep experience in the PHY/RF layers of LTE/Wimax/CDMA, along with chip development group working on a Cortex-A15 based solution for the pro-sumer market.

Our focus is on stability, performance, security, and scalability - and yes, we're using a BSD baseline.

We've already been able to prove no traffic degradation to external nodes (we're not doing 802.11 WDS) and can keep 300+ Mbps across multiple hops with multiple constant streams across different levels of QoS.

should be fun ;)

Best of luck!

sfx
 

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