Business Aspects of the IoT: Making Products Smart

evrythng.com© Evrythng Limited | Dominique Guinard

The Business of Making Products SmartFrom research, to a startup idea and its execution…

Dominique Guinard CTO & co-founder @ EVRYTHNG


Part I : The research….[flickr.com/photos/nwabr]


Say Hello to the Internet of Things

[http://www.svjlesite.fr/]


An Increasing Number of Connected Smart Things…

A very large ecosystem of smart things, complex application development


Need for a Common Internet of ThingsApplication Architecture

• Application development with smart things:– Requires expert knowledge:

• Hardware/software heterogeneity

• Lack of common application protocols

– WSN [Mot2011]

RFID [Sch2008]

• Hypothesis: The Web (application archi. of the Internet) can be the application architecture of smart things as well.

• Research Question: «How can the Web be leveraged to ease the development of Internet of Things applications and bring it closer to non-specialists?»

[Mot2011] Mottola, L., & Picco, G. P. Programming wireless sensor networks: Fundamental concepts and state of the art. ACM Comput. Surv.

[Sch2008] Schmitt, P. Adoption und Diffusion neuer Technologien am Beispiel der Radiofrequenz-Identifikation (RFID). PhD Thesis, ETH Zurich.


Part I : the Web of Things research…Simplifying Application Development in the Internet of Things

[flickr.com/photos/docman]


Web of Things Application Architecture


8

Device Accessibility Layer

• How do we make smart things accessible on the Web?• Generic design process[Gui2010] for smart things as Web

resources:– REST[Fie2000] and Resource Oriented Architectures[Ric2007]

15.08.2011

[Gui2010] Guinard, D., Trifa, V., Wilde, E. A Resource Oriented Architecture for the Web of Things. IoT 2010

[Ric2007] Richardson, L., & Ruby, S. RESTful web services, O’Reilly Media.

[Fie2000] Fielding, R. (2000). Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures. PhD Thesis


GET

GET, PUT

GET, DELETE

Resource Design

Representation Design

InterfaceDesign

Implementation Strategy

http://<DOMAIN>:<PORT>/genericNodes

/temperature/sensors/node1

http://<DOMAIN>:<PORT>/genericNodes

All together... For Devices!


Booooooooooks!

RESTFul Web Services, O’Reilly RESTful WS Cookbook, O’Reilly


11

Findability Layer

• Once smart things are accessible on the Web, how do we enable users to find the right service for their application?

• Enabling Smart Things to be indexed by search engines (lightweight metadata)[Gui2011]

• Local lookup and discovery infrastructure [Gui2010a,May2011]

15.08.2011

[Gui2010a] Guinard, D., et al. (2010). Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

[May2011] Mayer, S., Guinard, D. An Extensible Discovery Service for Smart Things. WoT2011

[Gui2011] Guinard, D., Trifa, V., Mattern, F., & Wilde, E. From the Internet of Things to the Web of Things. Architecting the Internet of Things (pp. 97-129)


12Dominique Guinard

Sharing Layer

• Once smart things are accessible and findable on the Web, how do we share them?

• Social Web of Things [Gui2010b]

15.08.2011

[Gui2010b] Guinard, D., Fischer, M., & Trifa, V. Sharing using social networks in a composable web of things. WoT 2010


Social Access Controller (SAC)


Sharing in Friends and Things

http://vswot.inf.ethz.ch:8091/gateways/vswot.inf.ethz.ch:8081/resources/sunspots/spot1/sensors/temperature


Composition Layer

• Once smart things are accessible, findable, shareable on the Web, how do we enable their easy composition by non-specialists, into new applications?

• Physical Mashups [Gui2010, Gui2010c]

15.08.2011

[Guinard2010c] Guinard, D. Mashing up your web-enabled home. ICWE 2010

[Gui2010] Guinard, D., Trifa, V., Wilde, E. A Resource Oriented Architecture for the Web of Things. IoT 2010


Energy-Aware Mashup

• Developers:– Smart Meters as

an RESTful Web API:

– Mashup with any language supporting HTTP

• Users:– Used by several

families around the world (Energie Visible)


EPC Network in a Nutshell


• Developers:– RFID Readers & Data in a

black-board approach– Wizard-based creation of

Widgets– Merging Web data and real-

world RFID data

• Users:– Simple Web page providing

real-time business intelligence

– Deployed at the SAP future store

EPC Mashups

Demo!


Electronic Article Surveillance

[Naef2009] Naef, L. ClickScript a visual programming language in the browser. Master Thesis, ETH Zurich

[Gui2010d] Guinard, D., Floerkemeier, C., & Sarma, S. Cloud Computing, REST and Mashups to Simplify RFID Applications, WoT 2011

Demo!


R&D continues on webofthings.org…

http://www.webofthings.org

http://www.webofthings.org/



Booooooooooks!

Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP

Getting Started with the IoT, O’Reilly Make:

OR… http://www.webofthings.org/dom/thesis.pdf

http://www.webofthings.org/dom/thesis.pdf


Part II : from research to business…[flickr.com/photos/daviddmuir]


A Fast Increasing Number of Smart Things…


The world of « dumb » products

• Heinz Ketchup: 650 m bottles/year

• Baileys:82 m bottles/year

• Coke:620.5 b servings/year

• Hershey Chocolate:525 m bars/year

• Mars1 b bars/year in the UK

All kinds of objects will have intelligence and the ability to communicate. P&G ships billions of objects per year, imagine them all connected.

− Chetan Sharma, leading wireless analyst, 2011


Your World is Being Tagged TODAY!


Unique identity = unique relationships


A Facebook for things

An Active Digital Identity profile for every thing.

Think of a Facebook for things − individual things with unique digital profiles, like we have, to update, share and add to…

a Facebook for things

Objects

Tags

EVRYTHNGCloud

Services

Applications


EVRYTHNG as the IoT Engine

• Cloud storage and services for your Active Digital Identities• RESTful API, low-footprint friendly (Arduino and co)• Libraries for: Java, Ruby , ARM Mbed, Arduino– Many more services/APIs coming soon!

Demo


Case Study: Diageo Father’s Day

• Marketing campaign for father’s day in Brazil– Built on top of the

EVRYTHNG Engine– Mobile Web and

Desktop apps• ~230’000 whisky bottles

tagged with unique QR codes

Demo


Case study: Mobile as a Sensor

• Thngs are not only products• Find, review and share laptop-

friendly workspaces• Rapid development of Web

apps without worrying about data storage design & maintenance

• 24’000 physical locations modeled as ADIs in our engine

http://worksnug.com

http://worksnug.com/

http://worksnug.com/


Case study: Mbed by ARM

• Development boards for fast, flexible and low-risk professional rapid prototyping.

• Collaboration with ARM to create EVRYTHNG-ready mbed devices with ADI auto-provisioning (self-registering consumer electronics)http://apm.evrythng.com/

http://apm.evrythng.com/

http://apm.evrythng.com/


Wired on coffee!

Demo


Booooooooooks!

Industrial Internet:O’Reilly Radar (FREE!)

OR… http://evrythng.com/blog

http://evrythng.com/blog


Part III : … the execution![flickr.com/photos/dvids]


EVRYTHNG Founders: Savory Mix!

Niall Murphy, CEO

Dom Guinard, CTO

Vlad Trifa, CPO

Andy Hobsbawm, CMO


EVRYTHNG Facts

• 3 locations, 17 people:– Zurich: Dev team: 5 developers, CPO, CTO– London: Business development: CEO, CMO, COO, sales,

advisors– Los Angeles: sales

• Financially backed by Atomico Venture (fund of ex-Sykpe founders)

We are

hiring!


Development Methodology: SCRUM

• Standups: 20 mins / day• Planning sessions:

– 1, 2 days– Poker

• Sprints: 2 weeks• Retrospectives• x Product Owner, x Scrum Masters• Very flat hierarchy of devs!• Definition of done• Minimal documentation


SCRUM: Challenges

• BIG (non-IT) clients don’t accept it:– Big spec / documentations required upfront (SOW)– Don’t trust the « sprint system »– Works well for non-bespoke apps?

• Difficult to integrate the « business » team to the process

• Planning is hard:– Dealing with the unknown?

• Developers don’t see the value– Standup -> standup? Late arrival… Unconcerned…– Planning sessions as « torture »– Developers want to… develop!


Our tools

Organization / Productivity • JIRA + Greenhopper• Confluence• Google Docs / Drive• Graylog 2• Bamboo CB• yED• GitHub

Infrastructure• Maven• Amazon EC2

– Runtime / API

• Hetzner servers– Internal IT– 5x cheaper than EC2!


Booooooooooks!

Team Geek, O’Reilly Scrum en action, Pearson


Business Learnings @ an IoT Startup

• A strong business team is KEY:– Find the right partners!

• Produce what the market is ready for, incubate your dreams!

• Minimal Viable product: ROI of perfection isn’t high enough!

• Exciting to face real/physical constraints (angry customers, investors,…)


Technical Learnings @ an IoT Startup

• Hardest bit is to coordinate between business and developers interests…

• Mostly about finding the right team!• Gap between prototypes and prod apps is enormous!• Challenge the hypes!


Dominique [email protected]

http://dom.guinard.org@domguinard

Thank you

mailto:[email protected]



http://dom.guinard.org/


Useful Links

• Web of Things community:• http://www.webofthings.org

• Web of Things Thesis:• http://www.webofthings.org/dom/phd/thesis.pdf

• Signup for EVRYTHNG account (for your next IoT / WoT projects):

• http://dev.evrythng.com


http://www.webofthings.org/dom/phd/thesis.pdf

http://evrythng.com/

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Business Aspects of the IoT: Making Products Smart