This is my first personal, monthly update about the evolution of the IoT market. If you’re doing something interesting in IoT please let me know.
A piece of IoT marketing genius which caught my eye recently was SigFox’s claiming of the “0G” moniker – in the world of 5G hype it’s a nice example of looking the other way. SigFox seem to have now hit critical mass, having established an interesting franchise model for country-by-country deployment.
Winnow has received wide coverage for their launch of Vision, which uses machine vision to automatically recognise waste thrown into the bins of commercial kitchens. They can save around 4% of waste – already 15 million meals a year – and they’ve only just started. Winnow is such a great poster-child for second-generation IoT: companies on a mission to do something useful which just happen to involve IoT as an ingredient technology. I like that Winnow is also rather category-defying – I doubt that anyone ten years ago would have predicted an application like this, yet now it seems to be emerging as a new vertical, perhaps called “Smart Waste”.
Another recent development which caught my eye is Nodle – started by peer-to-peer technology innovator Micha Benoliel, the idea is that if you’re a vendor building an app which uses Bluetooth to do “drive by” readings of your sensors, then instead of using the Android/iPhone Bluetooth stack directly, your app accesses it via a Nodle layer. Works exactly the same, except that now when your users’ phones happen to see sensors belonging to other vendors, it relays the information to them – and likewise you get to use their users’ phones to collect your readings too. Everyone wins, very clever, and just a few months after launch they’re claiming millions of devices on what is effectively a new operator network with zero infrastructure costs.
A topic of persistent debate for all of us involved in IoT is how exactly to price for services - across different applications there can be huge variation in the recurring value of a device, and as vendors experiment with different pricing and business models that can cause ripples back up the value chain to the providers of the pieces from which they’re built. Or sometimes the effect goes the other way – from the pieces to the end product.
Meanwhile at DevicePilot our latest news is zero-code integration with all major IoT platforms, and fully responsive dashboards for mobile.
Hope you found this interesting, always very happy to have feedback, and I’ll drop you another line in a few weeks.
-Pilgrim
DevicePilot CEO
