Re:Why the Internet of Things Is Going Nowhere
by joezydeco on Thursday October 01, 2015 @09:37PM
(#10316081)
There's already some competition in this space. Digi and Exosite are two examples I named. There's also Helium, co-founded by Shawn Fanning so they get a lot of press for a solution that (imo) isn't fully complete.
So what makes things more complicated is moving to the next step: two-way data. Let's say it's not a fridge now but an oven, loaded with data pushed down from the cloud by a chef at the restaurant's corporate HQ. Recipes. Holding times. Training videos. I'm not quite sure a major restaurant chain wants this data on a server out of their control. It's something I'm still trying to understand from my customers.
We owned the data. Customers had to sign up for the system, but we got them to do it by offering a lower cost service contract if they did. Since we were a large multinational, we already had an IT department to manage the servers and lots of developers to write code and obviously an existing service team, since that was the whole reason we did it in the first place.
But here's the thing. What I really learned from being the technical lead on that project is that there are growing market opportunities for third party companies to do exactly this and take over the responsibility from the restaurant and the fridge maker. You build the hardware (it's usually pretty cheap and simple) and write the webapp/dashboard, and charge a recurring fee for the service.
It's a lot of work for a one-man shop, but I'm still toying with starting a business in this space.