Calling Insteon users: Heads-up!

[Cameramonkey]

If you decided to do some home automation and chose Insteon, dont reset your gear. It will be bricked. Insteon appears to have abruptly shut down with no warning. Including the central servers required to setup your gear.

Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes

The app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.

arstechnica.com

And even more offensive, the website they own to sell their gear appears to still be up and running, able to take orders from unsuspecting customers. Granted they may have disabled the checkout, but I doubt it.

And from /.

The smart home company Insteon has vanished. The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. From a report:
Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media. As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.

Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's proprietary networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Insteon's "unique and patented dual-mesh technology" used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking, which the company said created a more reliable network than wireless alone. The Insteon Hub would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app.