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Cooking app maker wants a standard for smart kitchen devices

SideChef would have your hand tools and ovens working in harmony.

There are plenty of smart cooking devices to help you bring masterpieces to the table. However, they don't usually talk to each other -- your sous vide tool doesn't know the weight of the ingredients you measured on a scale just a couple of feet away. SideChef wants to fix that. The cooking app developer is building a platform that lets kitchen gadgets work in unison. Once you pick a recipe, every device would know what to do. Your oven would start pre-heating, for instance, while your mixer would run at just the right speed to blend everything together.

This isn't just wide-eyed optimism on SideChef's part, as it's talking to "several hardware brands" about making this a reality. Just how well it'll work is up in the air, though -- it'll depend on getting the right partners (such as big appliance companies), building sufficiently open code and otherwise avoiding the pitfalls that come with trying to create standards.