San Francisco, CA — IoT (Internet of Things) startup MoodSense recently released its flagship product — a mood ring which constantly tweets your mood.

Brett Fargus, the company’s CEO, explained, “this is the next evolution of the Facebook status update.  Now, as you go through the day, your followers can see exactly how you are feeling in real time.  It’s the ultimate accessory for today’s narcissistic self-promoter.”

Fargus continued, “everyone remembers the old-style mood rings.  They were imprecise and people had to be within proximity to you to gauge your mood.  You also had to catch a glimpse of the ring to see the color, which could be challenging based on how animated a speaker you were talking to.  What we’ve done here is to capture both the physical beauty of the ring and the technology of modern times.  No one needs to guess at your mood anymore, whether they can see you or not.”

“Our patented MoodSense™ technology powers it.  Tiny sensors in the ring measure heartbeat, perspiration and temperature.  We then combine it with data from a tiny microphone to gauge your tone of voice, inflection and pitch to determine your mood.  Our studies on our employees have shown near 100% accuracy!”

“MoodSense™ removes the out-dated need to actually learn to read people’s body language or subtle context clues as to how they are feeling.  Now, you can use the same familiar interface you use for everything else (your phone, your tablet, your PC) and know precisely how the other person feels about your interaction with them,” declared an exultant Fargus.

Business Application

“I wear mine all the time and have my Twitter settings set to tweet every 5 minutes.  My employees in meetings with me frequently check their phones to see my status and have actually adjusted their style in meetings with me simply based on my precisely defined mood.  It’s really brought my satisfaction levels up and I think made my employees more productive!”

However, not all employees at MoodSense shared Fargus’s enthusiasm for him using his own product.  An engineer, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “meetings with him are a nightmare now.  If you aren’t watching that damn Twitter feed and he starts showing anger or impatience and you miss it, that’s a career limiting move.  It was bad enough when people had to actually use people skills to read him, but now that it’s out there for the whole world to see, he pretty much expects it.”

“One night, I think he forgot to take the ring off before he went to sleep.  I woke up the next morning to a stream of tweets that no man should ever see attributed to his boss,” he said with a shiver.

Security Concerns

Security experts warn that, as with most IoT devices, security was not at the forefront in the development of this product.  “There basically is no security around this device.  A simple hack I found on the web let me right in.”  Indeed, there have been notable hacks already.  Someone hacked Fargus’s ring, causing it to constantly tweet “Me so horny”.  After securing the device, the stream read “Angrier than the heat of a thousand suns” for days.

When asked about security concerns, Fargus smiled and told us, “yes, we’re very aware of the security issues you’ve brought up.  Version 2.0 of our RingOS will have much greater security built in.”  Immediately after the exchange, Fargus’s status read “kill the rabbit, kill the rabbit, kill the rabbit!”.

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