Jonathan Frankel wanted to install an intercom in his Lower Merion home to be able to communicate with his three young sons.
The price tag? $3,500, according to one contractor, for the same intercom his parents used 20 years ago.
So Frankel, 29, decided to make a better, cheaper one. Nucleus uses WiFi, an HD camera and a touchscreen to let people communicate throughout a house. It’ll also work as a baby monitor. Nucleus isn’t taking orders yet but soon plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign to bring the prototype to market. The device should sell for less than $200, Frankel said.
Frankel, a Harvard Law grad who used to work as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, did a consumer test by making a Google ad for a similar product. It got him $4,000 in pre-orders, he wrote on Medium.
There aren’t any products that do what Nucleus aims to do, Frankel said on ProductHunt, though “there are plenty of one-way Internet-connected video monitors (Dropcam, Piper, Canary, etc.).”
So far, Frankel is the only one who’s been working on the company full-time (he has also worked with some outsourced software developers). Frankel says he’s soon bringing on a senior software engineer who previously worked at a large videoconferencing company.
