Home Products
Helium22 is designing a range of products for the home — built around privacy, longevity and technology that works without asking for your attention.
In development. Helium22 is currently designing and developing a range of products for the home. They are not yet available to buy — this page explains what we are building and the thinking behind it.
Why the home
Most of our thirty years has been spent on business technology: systems that have to be reliable because people's work depends on them. The home has gone the other way. It has filled up with devices that are cheap to buy, quick to obsolete, dependent on somebody else's cloud, and surprisingly demanding of your attention.
We think that is a solvable engineering problem rather than an inevitability, and it is the reason we have started designing for the home ourselves.
What we are building towards
The specific products are still in design, but the principles behind them are settled, and they are the same ones that run through everything else we build:
- Your data stays yours. Where something can run on your own hardware rather than in someone else's cloud, it should. That is the same principle behind MailSplat scanning your mailbox in your own browser and Metis Desktop screening content on your own machine.
- Built to last, not to be replaced. Repairable, updatable, and useful for years rather than until the next model. We spend our working lives repairing and extending other people's systems; we know what makes something last.
- Quiet by default. Technology in a home should do its job and then leave you alone. No notifications competing for attention, no dashboard that needs managing.
- Honest about what it does. Plain descriptions of what is collected, what is sent anywhere, and what happens if we are not around in ten years.
Where this sits
Home Products is part of the wider move described on our Patent Pending page: after three decades of building technology for other organisations, we have begun designing products of our own. Several concepts are in development, and we are preparing to seek patent protection for the ideas that warrant it.
That is also why the detail here is deliberately light. Describing an invention publicly before an application is filed can remove the ability to protect it in most of the world, so specifics wait until the paperwork is in the right order.
Interested?
If you would like to hear about these products as they get closer — or you are a retailer, manufacturer or investor who would like to talk sooner — get in touch. We are happy to be specific under a confidentiality agreement.