Headworx

The news of Enlighted shutting down the lighting controls business have been a real earthquake for the industry. Once the absolute champion and the leader in the lighting controls and IoT space has ceased to exist. Sadly, they have not been the first ones. There was Universal Douglas in 2023  and  Touché in early 2025 . But the Enlighted case has really transformed the company name into a verb. In a very bad way: "to be enlighted" almost feels in line with "to be musked": "to be musked" can mean to be treated poorly or "screwed over" by a company, often without apology. For example, buyers of Tesla vehicles might say they were "musked" if they experienced unresolved issues with their cars. This is a play on Elon Musk's surname and is used pejoratively. So have you been enlighted? We can help. The common theme across all the above mentioned "gone out of business" events is - they all were proprietary / vendor - locked solu...

Push notifications are now everywhere and apart from being super annoying, they have really become useless. By default every app (and most web pages too!) try enabling all forms of notifications by default and it takes a lot of fluency in handling phones and computers to set them up properly. Which mostly means "disable". I think the time has come to really reverse the defaults. They should be "do not notify me about anything". And then users would be able to select the small set of really important things they want to be actively poked about. The problem has gotten even worse as most apps / services are multi-modal - they live on PCs, phones, watches, even in earbuds. And a single event gets multiplied by being pushed to all the devices. Then some services, apart from sending a notification send an email. Which sends a notification f its own. Shopping and payment apps are the worst. "we have received your order" - "we have started processing your pay...