App enthusiasts and/or home automation fans are likely already quite familiar with IFTTT. One of the bigger forces in the Android tinkering world, IFTTT stands for If This Then That, and it's actually a pretty accurate description of what the app does. Essentially, users can use triggers and recipes to make the app look for a condition to happen on a device or in an app. Once that happens, it will trigger a specified action, even if that action takes place elsewhere, so long as everything is rigged up right. IFTTT users can create a variety of mind-blowing functions, so it's no surprise that the app found its way onto the Amazon Echo and that was apparently, only the beginning.

IFTTT has officially given the go-ahead for the guts of their app, the recipes and their capabilities, to find homes in new products. Naturally, the first wave of IFTTT recipients will be home automation products. Since IFTTT is already integrated with the Amazon Echo and programmable recipes can use an IoT hub as a conduit rather than transmitting from device to device, home automation is a natural fit for IFTTT. Using a web-based backend, IFTTT and the 40,000 some odd recipes that the firm has publicly released can now run on just about any device, and talk to just about any other device. The idea is that IFTTT will act as a backend for crosstalk between devices and services that would otherwise require a decent amount of time and money in engineering.

When IFTTT was founded, the company made a number of bold claims for the future. According to CEO Linden Tibbets, many of those claims, once thought to be pure science fiction, are coming true. Just a couple years ago, the company managed to pick up $30 million in funding from a variety of investors during a smart home boom centered around the potential for IoT to take off. When that didn't happen, IFTTT was left waiting for another boom, and the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple's upcoming automation AI are giving them just the boom they need to burst onto the scene and in a bigger way than ever before.