Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Former Spark Is Now Particle”.
Hi, i’m david and i’m here with zach, to talk about a big new announcement. He has zach. Why don’t you tell us about the announcement yeah so uh, i’m zach zappala, i’m the ceo of particle, formerly known as spark or spark io um and uh yeah. We changed our, we changed our name today, so uh we uh, we decided it was time for us to to to move away from a sort of crowded trademark space and and pick our own name, that we could be really happy with going forward.
That’S really exciting! So why don’t you tell us about what particle is? Are you a board company? Are you a platform company tell us about yourself yeah, so we make tools for people who are creating internet connected products, essentially we’re trying to enable the the internet of things the the and give people what they need to create. Uh internet connected uh appliances and toys and sensors and all that kind of stuff, so we make development kits uh we’re most well known for the spark core. Um is our sort of first dev kit.
That’S designed for wi-fi connected products we uh last last year we announced its sql, which is called the photon and we’re just shipping that next week and uh – and we also recently announced a cellular platform, called the electron which was on kickstarter a couple months ago. Right and one of the exciting things about the uh, the cellular platform is you guys are actually going to be a provider. Can you tell me more about that because i’m that’s all all stuff, i’m not too knowledgeable about totally well. So one of the patterns we saw when we had this parkour out there was a lot of people were building things with it.
That didn’t feel like wi-fi, was the right solution so, like a great example, is there’s a big agriculture company that was making doing sensors on farms and they were trying to do it with wi-fi. We were like we shouldn’t like okay, it’s hard to get a wi-fi network out there shouldn’t you be using cellular and they said well yeah, but it’s really hard and uh. It’S not it’s not easy to go and you know sign a contract with att or t-mobile or whoever it might be. So we’re just hacking it together with wi-fi, and we thought it sounds like there’s a problem there and maybe we can help solve it. So what we did is we did the same thing with cellular that we do with wi-fi, which is create a development kit and a cloud platform that it can connect to.
We also worked out relationships with cellular carriers, so we can be the carrier. It’S called an mvno, it’s a mobile virtual network operator, so we can give you a sim card and a really cheap data plan and say here you go. This is everything you need.
You don’t have to like. Go sign a contract or sort of go through negotiations. You’Ve got everything you need for building a prototype and you can use all that same stuff in production.
When you start to scale up, that’s really amazing, then you don’t have those awkward calls with your your cellular providers, saying i’m trying to hook this thing up and they say: what’s that yeah? That’S that’s really awesome. So you also have um. You have an ability for people in the community to make their own. What do you call them shields and arduino speakers say shields, but tell us about that. So yeah we um. We recently had our first we’re calling a compound, which is basically a sort of a collaboration between us and our community members. So um there’s a one of our community members.
A guy named eric was developing a ble tool and he thought you know this ble tool would be great if it had kind of sparked stuff, like our ide or our cloud back end, and he came to us and said, could i develop something in your ecosystem And we said that’d be awesome, we’ve got lots, we have a lot to do. We think ble is really interesting, but we we’re it’s it’s not on our roadmap, so we’d love to see you do it and we’ll support you, and so we sort of work together to build this thing called blues, which is on kickstarter right now. It’S bluz and it’s a bluetooth development kit that, when connected to a phone or a gateway, can hook back to our cloud platform, which gives it a lot of magic that makes it secure and easy to use and all that kind of stuff. So we’re hoping to do more of that, where we can sort of partner with our our community members to help them build their own businesses using the tools that we’ve already created.
That’S that sounds fantastic. Will people be able to then buy that um that board on your new particle website, yeah yeah, absolutely so we’ll be stocking blues as soon as it’s available, which i think is you know, sometime later later this year towards the end of the year um and would Love to do that for anyone who’s interested, so we’ve got a lot of people who are coming and you know buying stuff from us and we’d love to see more of our community members participating, and you know, take advantage of of the ecosystem that we’ve started to Develop yeah and you really have i mean what, in the last year, you’ve released. Two two boards you’ve had a name change. I mean i, i hate to ask it, but what do you have planned for us? Next? Oh, that’s! A good question um! So we’ve got enough 2015’s kind of like booked up because uh with everything – that’s happened so far with the electron coming. Next, that’s uh! That’S kind of keeping us busy this year, um going forward. Thinking about what happens next, we’re trying to figure out um the future of internet of things is about this stuff being so cheap that it can go everywhere and we’re trying to think about how we can help make that happen. How can we get get it to the point where you have this stuff? That’S basically disposable um that uh, where you can add connectivity to anything. So that’s that’s kind of on the roadmap for us sure and correct me if i’m wrong, but with the photon, you guys also have a plan where you can you help developers spin off the chip? Is that correct? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah exactly so, we’re really interested in the transition from prototyping to production, which i think in this space is like.
A lot of maker tools are really good at getting you to prototype, but then you kind of have to rebuild from scratch. When you actually think about production, you have to do design for manufacturing and, like all these things, to reduce your bill of materials so um. What we’ve done is we’ve we’ve made so photon. This is the photon and the and the module on it, which is this shiny metal thing. Um is called the p0 and we uh we sell that module that comes pre-loaded with our firmware and has the microcontroller in it. So you can basically put this module in a product and deliver it at scale and um and that works. You know. Ten hundred thousand million units you can transition straight from your prototype into production.
That’S great! Well thanks a lot for talking with us yeah sure, thanks for having me .