Experimented with connecting the Raspberry Pi to a Relay Switch to enable my Ikea lamp to be controllable remotely.
I've hooked up Slack so that you can "message" a bot in the chat app to ask it to turn on/off the light and it will reply to you when the lights are switched on/off.
Beside this, I've also hooked it up to IFTTT and Do Button via a restful API, so that I can program it to switch on by itself everyday at 2300hrs or via geo location. And I can manually trigger the on/off via the Do app button on my phone.
