End of 2018. Six years of writing this thing down. This is the one where the most honest entry in the ledger is a blank — Atom spent a third of the year wearing a collar with nothing on it, and that was the right call.
Before the year-end tally, the annual humility exercise: scoring what I predicted twelve months ago.
Scoring the 2017 forecast
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fi smart collar ships consumer device | 70% | Closed seed funding, announced — ships 2019, not 2018 | ✗ (timing) |
| Litter-Robot III Connect (WiFi) ships | 90% | Yes, and it's in the house | ✓ |
| Petnet first multi-day outage | 65% | Three more single-day outages, still no multi-day catastrophe | ✗ (partial; trend is real) |
| Consumer microchip-activated feeder reaches retail | 60% | SureFeed's connected feeder is real, but it landed in 2017 — I mis-dated it | ✓ (partial; wrong year) |
| Whistle successor with health sensors announced | 50% | Rumored all year; nothing official | ✗ |
| HomeKit-certified pet camera | 35% | Nothing | ✗ |
| Mars acquires another pet-tech startup | 70% | Mars Petcare agreed to acquire AniCura — a 200-hospital European vet network | ✓ (bigger than expected) |
| Pet-health-data-to-vet platform gets traction | 35% | Nothing meaningful | ✗ |
Three clean hits, two partials, three flat misses. Call it 45% — my worst forecasting year in six. The instructive part is how I missed. Almost every miss was timing: Fi slipped a year, the SureFeed Connect feeder shipped a year earlier than I logged it, the Whistle health rumor never got an announcement. I keep predicting on quarters, and pet hardware ships on a clock I don't control.
The AniCura hit is the one worth dwelling on. I forecast "Mars acquires another pet-tech startup" expecting a Whistle-sized tuck-in — another collar, another app. Instead Mars Petcare went and agreed to buy AniCura: not a device company at all, but a network of roughly 200 animal hospitals across seven European countries, closing late in the year after the EU cleared it. That's a different bet entirely. Mars already owns the food (Pedigree, Whiskas, Royal Canin), the trackers (Whistle, the old Tagg IP), and now a wall of the clinics. The thing I should have been forecasting wasn't "which startup gets bought" — it was "Mars is assembling the whole loop: what your pet eats, what its collar measures, and the vet who reads both."
What got added this year
- Litter-Robot III Connect (the model that shipped late in the year, finally installed). Joule took to it inside a week. It's the first genuinely connected litter device in the house, and the first one I'd recommend without a caveat.
- A second backup feeder. I now run a non-connected, mechanical-timer PetSafe Smart Feed alongside each Petnet — one for Joule, now one for Atom too. The redundancy is no longer theoretical (see below).
What got removed
- Atom's Whistle 3, decommissioned in August. The battery had degraded past usefulness — a tracker that needs charging every two days isn't tracking, it's a charging chore with a collar attached. Replacement: nothing. Atom went bare-collar for four months and the dog did not notice. I did. The decision was deliberate: the only cellular dog tracker worth buying was a newer Whistle, and after two years of Mars locking down Whistle's API post-acquisition, I wasn't going to spend money rewarding that. So I waited for Fi.
That four-month gap is the truest thing in this year's review. The honest state of consumer dog tracking at the end of 2018 is: the best move available to me was to buy nothing and wait.
What worked
- Litter-Robot III Connect. A real quality-of-life win and a surprising amount of latent health signal — it knows how often the box gets used and roughly by how much weight, which for a single cat is a usable baseline.
- SureFlap Hub, still boringly reliable. Joule's outdoor patterns now have eighteen months of unbroken history. Boring is the highest compliment I pay infrastructure.
- Feeder redundancy, validated. Petnet missed three feeds this year across short outages. The mechanical backup caught every one. A dumb timer with no cloud dependency beat a smart feeder with one, three times — which is its own quiet lesson about where to put intelligence in a system that has to work when the network doesn't.
What didn't
- Petnet's slow decline. No single outage was long. But the frequency is climbing year over year, and the company still won't say anything about it. Silence from a vendor whose product I rely on to feed my animals is not a neutral signal.
- The Mars–Whistle relationship. It hasn't improved; it's gotten worse. The API restrictions tightened again, more community integrations broke, and my own data-export pipeline is now effectively Litter-Robot plus SureFlap. Whistle, the device that started this whole journal, contributes almost nothing to my data picture anymore — not because the hardware got worse, but because the owner decided openness wasn't strategic.
There's a pattern across both of those: the device kept working, but the company behind it changed in a way that made the device worth less to me. Petnet by neglect, Whistle by deliberate lock-down. After six years, I trust hardware I can hold more than I trust the cloud account it phones home to.
Forecast for 2019
| # | Prediction | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fi ships its consumer collar | 80% |
| 2 | Petnet has its first genuine multi-day outage | 75% |
| 3 | A Whistle successor with on-board health sensing is announced | 55% |
| 4 | A second credible smart-litter device challenges Litter-Robot | 60% |
| 5 | Mars's vet-clinic strategy becomes visibly tied to its devices (clinic + collar data) | 65% |
| 6 | First credible HomeKit pet device | 35% |
| 7 | A GPS-fence consumer collar (virtual-fence, no buried wire) appears | 45% |
| 8 | I buy a Fi for Atom and stop paying Mars | 70% |
What I'm buying in 2019
- A Fi the moment it ships and the first reviews look real. Atom's bare collar has a slot reserved.
- A second Litter-Robot only if we add a cat — not in the plan, but I've learned not to write "never."
- Whatever Whistle ships post-Mars: probably nothing. I'll vote with my wallet.
What's next
The Fi launch is 2019's headline — the first time in years there's a cellular dog tracker not owned by Mars. The Petnet question is the slow-burn: does a feeder company that's stopped communicating make it through another year? And smart litter, having proven itself in my own house this year, is the category I expect to actually grow.
Six years in. Four pets — one dog, one cat, no additions — and a dog collar sitting empty on purpose, waiting for the one device I'm willing to pay for.