Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Slow Process of Developing for IoT”.
You know again, i’m going to talk a little bit about how we kind of see internet of things evolving and really how it’s going to become a software driven and an app driven economy in terms of internet of things. I guess i’m just a big believer now that everything takes a lot longer to develop, as than everybody thinks so about 20 years ago i had started another networking company that did hardware tcp, and so we were built into a lot of devices that connected to the First mobile cdma network, but this is a picture of the first internet connected hot water pod, and so this is back in like 1998, it was connected to ntt’s wireless infrastructure and it really provided a way where younger kid or kids with elderly parents could try to Track how their parents are doing by tracking their daily use of something, as often used as a hot water pot, and it was funny because when we met the engineer, who was designing this, what they did was they took a three liter hot water pot and it Ended up becoming a two liter hot water pot and he had installed it at his grandmother’s house, and so when we were there at the shop, he goes hey look, you know, isn’t it cool? I can see that she’s doing fine because she used her hot water pot today and i said well, how does she feel about being tracked like that? And he goes oh well. She doesn’t know – and it’s kind of funny, because you know 20 years later – we’re starting to see a lot more of these sort of ideas. But but again, it’s really kind of made me realize that you know designing hardware can be a pretty difficult thing, and especially today, all we hear about is how much money is going to be available for the internet of things.
How there’s going to be trillions of dollars, there’s going to be billions of devices connected out there and no doubt that’s going to happen, but the beauty of being a futurist is that you don’t necessarily have to be right at the exact time, and so i think The real challenge is going to be what’s going to happen over the next three or four years. That’S really going to start us on this trajectory to kind of make. This sort of thing happen. The hard thing about doing internet of things, i think, is that it’s pretty darn expensive to design hardware, and you know, if you look at a lot of the successes out there. It took a whole lot of capital to make that happen, and a big part of the reason that we kind of view it’s hard to do is that if you’re gon na put a product out to market, it requires a whole lot of competency in a whole. Lot of different disciplines that may be pretty far away from your idea, so you may have a great idea for a sprinkler controller or a light fixture and maybe you’re a great app developer or a software developer. Well, if you actually want to bring that to market you’re, going to have to at least find somebody that can do hardware design, you’re going to have to do firmware for that design, you’re going to have to think about certification right, which can take a long time. If something doesn’t pass, fcc you’re going to have to do it again and that might chew up three months, and so that gets difficult and that’s before you even get to manufacturing, which is what starts to eat up a lot of the costs. What, if your product isn’t that popular? How do you get the volumes to make it interesting? How do you get the cost down, and then you start getting into the area that especially many of us in silicon valley understand which is the cloud and mobile.
So the capabilities, and so with all those capabilities. Obviously it ends up being a pretty big challenge to bring products to market, and so we really kind of view it as how do you bring the app economy to internet of things um? You know obviously looking at something like gps. Well, that market turned on a dime instantly. If you were a gps manufacturer, you pretty quickly became irrelevant as it became an app on a smartphone um.
Similarly, i mean you know, imagine snapchat had to build a digital camera to bring their product to market. They probably don’t get the kind of adoption or create the same sort of community that they have. But it’s because i mean every smartphone has shipped with its own camera. App even apple has their own camera app, but it didn’t become instagram or snapchat.
And it’s because that hardware platform was a platform. It wasn’t just a product that was vertically integrated and even the handset itself, obviously being able to have apps for that. We really think is what drives that whole economy. It changes everything i mean. There’S whole businesses that are built around being able to build that up.
If you look at the cash register business, every cash register is now an ipad with a cash drawer and a credit card reader, and so everything is being driven by working on a service level and an app level. And so, as we kind of look at the internet of things, we wonder what is going to be that 2.0 evolution. Obviously there’s a lot of incumbents out there today, but they’re still very vertically integrated. They have apis that they want you to interface to, but it really doesn’t allow somebody to to reinvent a better app change. The way the hardware is working, you know, how do you make an instagram or snapchat for iot if people are vertically integrating those kind of solutions? I think if you look at you know, this is the makercon, and so, if you look at what’s happening, i mean i i think, what’s happening in the platform.
Business is a pretty good indicator of how this is going to play out. If you look at, you know a lot of these devices right, they probably buy chips from one of the companies on the right hand. Side. The hard thing, though, is if you are two people with a great idea: chances are you’re not going to be able to get the tool chain from any one of these chip, vendors, because chip vendors really just like to ship volume and so they’re quite happy to Sell to six or ten companies in the world who are shipping that volume, and so the first thing that their sales guys are going to ask.
You is oh well what kind of volume you’re going to ship? What are you going to do, and so it becomes very difficult to to get the tool chain which, ironically, is probably run in linux and some gpl type of software anyway. But if you go over to the left hand, side, which a lot of these projects that we’re starting to see from the maker community, the big difference for something like the raspberry pi is it’s a fully open software development environment? You don’t have to design the hardware, in fact, if you’re a great industrial designer, you can build a great tool around that and you could work with somebody. Who’S come up with great software, it’s a complete open environment towards that, and we really see that. That’S how these things are sort of starting to shake out and we’re going to see more and more of those chip, vendors kind of going in that direction, and so gemtech is a company that maybe nobody here has ever heard of, but over the last 10 years. If you ever bought a product from linksys or belkin or u-verse, they probably built it and so they’re one of the bigger manufacturers in taiwan – and it’s pretty interesting, though, because they sort of face a similar sort of challenge. So howard howard, chen who’s, their chairman.
You know came by and visited us and he goes look here’s the problem that we manufacturers face. He goes, we don’t know who the next gopro is going to be and what he said is he goes ten years ago is a little bit easier. He goes what we used to do is we’d, say: hey it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars in nre. If you want us to build something, he goes and that kind of weeded everybody out who was serious and not serious because they could only support.
So many designs, but then what he said, because because we literally work out of a little cottage house in downtown palo alto, he goes he goes. The problem i’ve got now. Is i come to silicon valley and he goes. Everybody looks like you guys.
He goes. I come, i have to drive around to some residential neighborhood, i’m walking around to some house. Some guys come out and flip flops and he goes well. It’S going to be a hundred thousand dollars, he goes and they all put off the checkbook and write a check.
He goes he goes so i don’t know how i’m going to address this and so kind of looking at this. We kind of came up with a strategy that we think is an interesting one for the whole internet of think space, and so what we did with them is they’re coming out with a whole line of what we call hardware internet of things, products and so, for Example: here’s one it’s a sprinkler controller. Now what’s interesting about it is one of the biggest manufacturers in the world is building it, so the building materials is actually pretty low. They know how to do the wi-fi.
So all the complexities about building radio circuit boards and making sure it passes regulatory, it’s all done. They know how to do that. They have the chambers in their offices, fcc ul, csa certification, it’s done so. What does that mean? Well, the difference is you: don’t have to go to mediatek or qualcomm and get the tool chain, because we’re going to provide that to you and what we do at weaved is we do all the cloud services that iot devices need so connectivity, mobile connectivity, messaging security Around making sure this thing doesn’t get hacked from a an outside hacker, we provide all that in so what this means is, let’s say, you’ve got a great idea for a sprinkler controller, or you know, maybe it’s a smart plug, or this is a little light.
Fixture adapter that goes into any recessed lighting fixture that happens to have wi-fi a 600 megahertz computer inside all the memory that you need in bluetooth. Well, what you can do now is if you’ve got a great idea and you’re a software developer, just buy one of these kits, we’ll give you the tool chain. So, just like a raspberry pi or just like intel edison, you can program to it. You can add those capabilities. We have a full production cloud environment that already people like phillips and a number of people who are shipping. We have 500 000 users using it every month and that’s already all baked in so now. Once you finish your software, all you have to do is say: okay, i’m ready to go to production. You just provide your code to gemtech, tell them what color you want.
Your plastics give them your logo file. They’Ll! Ask you! If you want it air, shipped or boat, shipped and now, six weeks later, you’re going to be in production, so you haven’t had to make the investment or spend the time to build up. The hardware you’ll just be able to bring that idea to market and a lot of the difficult parts about bringing your idea to market for hardware hardware, design, firmware all the certification issues, finding a manufacturer setting up a scalable cloud infrastructure. Even the mobile apps have already been taken care of, so now what you can do is you could, if you’ve got the snapchat for iot well, there’s lots of different platforms that maybe will fit the form factor that you want to do and part of the reason.
This is all possible is that you can go get a wi-fi chip today. It has a 600 megahertz risk score in it 32 mags of memory. You know 32 megs of flash 2×2 wi-fi, so it can be a wi-fi extender and all that costs under two dollars, and so the key is make it into a form factor where you can build on top of it. Think of this not so much as a hardware product, but think of it as a platform, and we really think that’s what’s really going to kind of push this into a whole different space, because the apps are what we think ultimately are going to drive this market And it’s not just going to be the consumer app, so this plug so again same thing: it’s a linux! Computer that anybody can program.
This version happens to have an infrared controller, so if you’ve got a great idea for a universal remote control, this could be. That turns out in the whole industrial world, um there’s this uh industry association called notion and what they do is they do lighting sensors and they’re in about 500 billion 500 million buildings in the world, and so what they’re going to do is they’re going to take This module because it’s very inexpensively built they’re, going to add their radio to it and then now they’re going to ship this out to all their buildings as a way of internet enabling those buildings and they’re happy because they didn’t have to build this. They didn’t have the source of manufacturer, and so we think these are the kind of applications that are really going to drive that out. So, just to finish off, we’ve got a little video talks a little bit about what’s bob a developer and he loves to travel a while back bob programmed a cool, raspberry, pi application to feed his fish sam, and that worked great when bob was home.
But the problem was: whenever bob went away on trips, he had to find someone else to care for sam. Well, one average morning bob discovered the weaved iot kit developers site. It was just what bob was looking for, and bob was stoked it had all the software and cloud services bob needed to turn sam’s feeder into a robust iot device, a downloadable app. So he could control and monitor his fish feeder, remotely and securely peer-to-peer connection services for private two-way communication over the internet and even push notifications.
So he would know if sam was in trouble now, as it turns out, other people needed bob’s feeder too, with the weaved iot kit for raspberry pi bob was able to scale his little home-based project into a profitable company, and now he and sam are doing just Fine, with literally millions of makers out there we’re guessing, there are more up-and-coming developers, just like bob who could use the iot kit by weave. So um thanks everybody and if you find any of this interesting, we will be at maker faire this week and if any of these hardware products are saying they’ll be up on kickstarter by the end of the month as well. So .