What Things are being connected and how? Here’s a brief summary from our perspective at LeWeb’12:
SmartThings
SmartThings may look like connected home meets Kickstarter, but at LeWeb they announced a $3M round for a much larger vision: the Open Physical Graph. It’s great to see investors excited about an open ecosystem, and this may very well be the catalyst for major advances that extend far beyond the Internet of Things!
Ninja Blocks
Ninja Blocks is another Kickstarter hardware project that’s making big waves. At LeWeb they announced that they’re opening not only their software but also their hardware. Now anyone can build on an already capable platform that includes a connected computer (Ninja Block) and an if-this-then-that style web interface (Ninja Cloud). While the current examples lean towards connected home, it’s clear that the platform can be applied to much, much more.
SIGFOX
SIGFOX is an M2M infrastructure for Things, and it already covers just about the whole of France, requiring only a thousand or so base stations. Things can communicate over kilometers, sending messages of a few bytes. And their target is a $1/year/Thing and a $1 device. If you’ve ever priced hardware and plans for M2M over cellular, you’ll appreciate how disruptive this is!
Sen.se
Sen.se is an open platform in beta that explicitly intends to extend beyond Things, including humans, environments and much more in the mix. SmartThings and Ninja Blocks have far more advanced platforms, but perhaps their twist on the vision will generate traction. They ended their presentation with the tagline “The Meaning of Life”™ (yes, with the trademark), but gave due credit to Monty Python.
Orange MyPlug
The MyPlug from French giant Orange is a connected-home play that has the advantage of easy configuration: it uses a cellular plan with three years of service included in the purchase price of 80 Euros. Conclusion: the carriers can fight SIGFOX’s cost/simplicity advantage (at least for non-battery-operated devices) but, without an open platform, can this ever become more than a novelty/experiment?
Koubachi
Let’s wrap up with the Koubachi, a $99 WiFi plant health monitor. That description alone highlights many of the problems of the present-day IoT. First, if the sensor costs more than the Thing it’s monitoring, the economics simply don’t work. Second, simple sensors shouldn’t speak WiFi (did you enjoy that alliteration?). In fairness, CEO Philipp Bolliger acknowledges this fact, lamenting the lack of a ubiquitous infrastructure for Things. And finally, how will this device connect to and communicate with the open platforms described above?
In summary, it’s wonderful to see so many visions already extending beyond the Internet of Things, but then you have Nest CEO Tony Fadell suggesting that the Internet of Things is a decade away. As is often the case, it’s less an issue of the technology being ready and more an issue of society being ready. The hyper-connected world needs to become far more compelling if we want it to percolate to the top of everyone’s wishlist anytime soon!
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