Last evening about two dozen people showed up at the SmartThings office. It was the first rollout of ‘kits’ we’d pre-ordered through their Kickstarter funding adventure and I was pleased to have been chosen to attend and get my kit, even though I’m not a developer.

A typical SmartThings kit contains a hub you plug in to the internet and a smartphone app to control the hub. Then you set up sensors for open/close, presence, switches and more. Developers create apps that deliver multiple-sensor functionality—and these SmartApps are downloadable from within the smartphone app—and SmartThings has built a developer kit to spark the building of apps for all sorts of markets and applications. Fortunately SmartThings also embraces and supports open standards and protocols, so they’ll work with damn near everything made and this preliminary list of compatible devices, out of the 900 or so already on the market, will give you an idea of how expandable and scalable this smart platform truly is and why you’ll want it.

The opportunity for SmartThings is SO crystal clear that I’m really excited for them and what I am certain will be resounding success. They have first-mover-advantage, lots of buzz, good funding, retailers highly interested, and listening to CEO Alex Hawkinson and CTO Jeff Hagins (team here) last night my belief deepened that they already have an amazing start toward making their developer platform a reality.

In my opinion SmartThings is home automation finally done right. It is more affordable than anything else I’ve ever seen on the market. Not only did these guys blow past their Kickstarter.com initial funding (tried to raise $250k and got over $1.3M in 30 days) they’ve also recently raised a $3M seed round of capital. Plus, their over 5,000 ‘backers’ on Kickstarter read like a whos-who of technology leaders and the buzz about them is incredible.

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Last night I picked up my SmartThings ‘kit’ at their offices at an event for early, early adopters and developers. As you probably know by now, SmartThings contains a hub you plug in to your internet hub or switch and then use a smartphone app to control the hub. Then you set up sensors for open/close, presence, switches and more. The team, and a few developers, have already created some ‘SmartApps’ to download. This sort of surprised me, but after installing my SmartThings hub and sensors last night I realized that I want to immediately buy more! I’ve already scoped out what I intend to buy:

• 6-10 smart outlets (probably from GE and $40 or so apiece)
• At least 6 smart switches (probably from GE and also $40 or so apiece)
• Probably 3-4 Spark sockets that will let me turn on lighting turn on and do so by time (about $50 apiece)
• Schlage Deadbolt lock that uses either a key, a code, or is controllable within the SmartThings app (about $170).

So my initial $300 ‘investment’ in my SmartThings kit will grow to more than $1,000+ and that’s just the beginning!

Here is a post and interview I did with co-founder Ben Edwards last August (and released it the day their Kickstarter campaign debuted) as well as YouTube videos like this series of SmartThings YouTube videos if you’d like to see more.