You know those days when you’re not quite sick enough that your mom would have let you stay home from school but feeling yucky enough that you’re tempted to use up a precious sick day from work? It’s one of those days. And on those days when you feel silly asking someone to come over and take care of you but at the same time getting off the couch to pick up the TV remote seems like an imposition, it would be nice to have a house that was connected to the internet. After all, I can already do my grocery shopping on my laptop so why shouldn’t I be able to turn the light on from my Smartphone?

Turns out, people are way ahead of me. Spark Devices is a startup that has launched a prototype on kickstarter.com called the Spark Socket. You screw a light bulb into the Spark Socket and then screw the Spark Socket into the regular socket where the light bulb would usually be. The plan is to connect these lights to an app that will allow you to set the light to do whatever you want: Turn on slowly when it’s time to wake up in the morning, go on and off on timers when you’re away on vacation or even flash if your phone is ringing. In fact, it was that final use that inspired the creator of Spark Sockets, Zach Supalla. Zach’s dad is deaf and uses a Smartphone for text messaging. But his son couldn’t reach him at home if he took his phone out of his pocket and couldn’t hear it vibrate.

Ok, so there was a really good cause for the development here, but I would argue that not having to get up off the couch is a good cause as well.

I also would like to think that this is just the beginning. It’s easy to imagine that you will eventually be able to run most of the appliances in your house through the internet and a Smartphone. Doing laundry, cooking and running the dishwasher can be timed for the highest level of convenience and moms will leave for work early and set their teenagers’ radios to blare when it’s time to get up.