Business Aspects of the IoT: Making Products Smart

evrythng.com© Evrythng Limited | Dominique Guinard
The Business of Making Products Smart
From 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 Things
Application 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

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]
[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
Interface
Design
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

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]
[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)

Sharing Layer
• Once smart things are accessible and findable on the
Web, how do we share them?
• Social Web of Things [Gui2010b]
[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]
[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

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

R&D continues on 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

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
• Mars
1 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
EVRYTHNG
Cloud
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!

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

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

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/

Wired on coffee!

Booooooooooks!
Industrial Internet:
O’Reilly Radar (FREE!)
OR… 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)

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 Guinard
dom@evrythng.com
http://dom.guinard.org
@domguinard
Thank you

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

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