Developers show off new gadgets at 'Lauch' event in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Judging by some of the gadgets on display in San Francisco, Thursday the future is now.

At a two-day event called Launch, developers brought their latest connected devices into the marketplace.

San Francisco loves food and technology, so when a piece of technology starts cooking food it's guaranteed to draw a crowd.

"You pop in cartridges of fresh ingredients, kind of like a Keurig machine," said Sereneti Kitchen CEO Timothy Chen.

They'll sell those ingredients as kits each with a pre-programmed recipe.

"Cook now and the machine starts cooking for you," Chen said.

It may be the best proof yet that there's no such thing as a dumb question.

"It was my two younger sisters who came up with this concept where they said why can't you push a button and cook food?" Chen said.

Cooking your meals for you is just one way the innovators are using advanced technology to solve really basic problems -- the kind people might otherwise just accept as a fact of life.

"Traditionally, smoke detectors and their 9 volt batteries tend to go out of power in a year or less, and they start that annoying chirping," said Richard Stark, Roost vice-president.

The $35 battery lasts for five years and has wifi. It'll warn you when it's running low.

"When the sensor hears your smoke alarm going off, it then can alert you wherever you are," Stark said.

Want to protect your home from intruders?

"Butterfleye is a smart home monitoring device," said Brandon Nader, Butterfleye marketing manager.

With an infrared camera, it can tell the difference between people and pets, to avoid false alarms. Soon, it will even recognize your pet.

"It can detect a raccoon or if it's just your dog in the backyard playing around,"Nader said.

So often, gadgets are born out of a daily nuisance.

"I had 12 window blinds in a row, I just got tired of opening and closing several times a day," said Ksenia Vinofradova, founder of flipflic.

So flipflic does that for you and works with smart thermostats to adjust the blinds before the heat or the air conditioning.

"So we can save up to 18 percent on the energy bill," Vinofradova said.

You control it form your smartphone, the same device where we do a lot of our reading.

"And the screen and the text is a lot smaller," said Beeline Reader CEO Nick Lum.

A color pattern keeps a person from losing his place to read 20 percent faster.

"It's like the carriage return action on a typewriter, so that right to left motion, you can just make it a lot faster if you have color to guide the way," Lum added.