[gduffy]

No, for two reasons:

1) You get no credit with customers for security features, only blame if they get hacked. You must invest in good security engineering because you believe it is a good thing and a good long term investment, it will only cost you in the short term.

2) Unfair competition from large tech and China-based companies, in terms of pricing and incumbent advantage. (And yes, I helped create this situation by selling Dropcam to Google, and profited from it)

In order to win, you'd have to make something better in every other respect (or find some yet-unknown killer feature that average customers actually care about), sell it for the same price, beat them in price wars, and spend enough on marketing to undo the PR damage they've done to the space AND rise above the noise floor.

[Despegar]

Doesn't Apple's HomeKit do this the best? It was designed to be secure (so much that they had to backtrack on requiring hardware encryption chips) and it works locally.