We are basing our entire start-up around IoT, which we've been working on in stealth for a year, as explained in OP this is what prompted us to develop IOTA. It is a necessary ingredient for the vision of IoT that our start-up is focused on. On top of this all of us will invest our personal funds into IOTA, so no we have a ton of incentive to make IOTA a success.
I've copied this from the IOTA thread. The competition is on. I hope our GadgetCoin will win the race.
I can't comment on IOTA but I can share our experience about the Internet-of-Things business.
The issue is, virtually no application/software provider is making money from Internet-of-Things. Not even Xively, the signature company of IoT. We spoke virtually all IoT companies in Europe and USA during the last year, so we understand what others do. Most IoT businesses can survive only on VC or angel investment capital but virtually none of them is profitable. Certainly none of them is profitable from only IoT software.
There are tens of thousands of developers like us dream about the opportunity of 50 billion IoT devices and then soon or later all of us realize the monetization is a very difficult subject. If you want to sell your own platform then you need to compete with Atmel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Fujitsu, Siemens and the likes. Impossible. Why on earth any IoT system integrators - your primary customer base who actually rolls out the devices - would prefer yours instead of the Fujitsu, Siemens or Samsung solution? Any of those large players employs thousands of extremely experienced engineers and offer in-house certification process. We are talking about medical, home automation, industrial and security devices which all need to be certified. It isn't the domain for anonymous, open source companies. I think anybody who understand a bit the industry would agree that it is almost impossible to make money for a start-up in the IoT space without having a partnership with a well-established player.
For that reason
- We are making partnership with established companies and organizations. Finally it works as we are already testing the clients' devices and integrating the devices into GadgetNet. Without the partnership of a real world IoT system integrator nobody would even consider using an untested, uncertified, open source start-up solution. Our first system integrator partner is ZoVolt. They have more than 100 investors, many of them are IoT industry people, they have IP, consultancy experience, access to FCC and CE diagnostic labs and capability of manage certification process. We are talking to other, bigger system integrators to bring them in. We will contribute more and more to W3C to get credibility in developing an industry standard solution.
- In step one we target a niche area, the IoT powered video devices. Both security and video conference IoT devices. We found it is very difficult to compete in the sensor and industrial device (such as PLC) area, but once our application will be stress tested in real life with the most data intensive video IoT devices then we should not have problem with credibility and we should be able to serve all segments of the IoT industry.
The Internet-of-Things business is lot more complicated than application software engineers think. I think any engineer who ever tried to make money from IoT would echo this. We learnt this difficult business the hard way in the last few years and we are extremely lucky that we are still in business. I think we have a good business plan and we are executing that.
Thanks for your support!