Internet of Things Meetup

/ Puppet Labs/

I'm a fan of all things hardware, and have spent a fair amount of my career figuring out how to connect things to other things.  So this "Internet of Things" has caught my interest.  One of my classmates in PSF Class 4 was Smart Mocha.  They're all about the IoT, and they have started an IoT meetup here in Portland.

R/GA & techstars Connected Devices Accelerator

R/GA and techstars are joining together to create a Connected Devices Accelerator. Sounds cool, but it's in New York City (boo!).  October 11 is the application deadline.

OTBC Hardware Incubator

Steve Morris of the OTBC tolds us about their plans for a local hardware incubator.  Free office space at Axiom in Beaverton.  One of their residents is Sonivate, who we competed against in Angel Oregon and Willamette Angel Conference.  Good guys.

Temboo on Arduino Yun

Matthew Flaming of Temboo presented their service that allows you to access many different cloud services through a single library and cloud service.  He demonstrated Temboo running on an Arduino Yun.  Temboo's choreos are a pretty interesting idea for simplifying access to cloud APIs.  It seems they could reduce the expertise required to access those APIs.  They even have a GUI IDE.

XOBXOB

Bob Gallup of XOBXOB gave an update.  

XOBXOB is a simple cloud service that makes it easy for your projects to join the Internet of Things.

Since the May IoT meetup, Bob has launched an open service.  XOBXOB remains focused on makers.  He got an Editor's Choice award at the NYC World Makers Faire.

Bob's learnings: 

  • IoT vision is still very abstract for most.
  • Makers understand the need for an IoT platform, once it is explained to them. 
  • Makers accept a tiered business model.
  • Education at this stage is important.
  • Business models and value propositions are hard. 
  • Visibility is also hard. 
  • Business models and visibility are essential. 
  • The most important thing is to keep moving. 
  • Mentors are immensely valuable. 

Perils:

  • Staying afloat
  • Maintaining visibility
  • Growing the team
  • Engaging the right mentors

Bob is looking for a technical co-founder.

Javascript on Microcontrollers

Nathan Guisinger gave a talk on Javascript on microcrontrollers.  Why Javascript?  Well, it is quite common.  True.  That would make it easier for "things" to share code from "non-things".  Particularly robot makers seem to be interested in Javascript.  Check out JohnnyFive Javascript library for Arduino, for example.