Andreesen Horowitz and Norwest Venture Partners just handed over $30 million to a new Internet of Things startup that wants to connect all your online social interactions.
IFTTT (If This Then That) has a new approach to connecting all of your devices and apps. Rather than allowing you to manage all your home stuff through one main app, like Wink, IFTTT wants to manage interactions between your social apps.
The Internet is no longer just accessible from your laptop or mobile phone. It’s now part of television sets, baby monitors, ovens and cars. It is increasingly embedded into medical devices and other critical devices. The Internet is everywhere and the Internet of Things (IoT) is a trend that will continue to grow.
Connecting with the growing myriad of consumer health devices is tiresome and expensive for employers and healthcare organizations, especially if it must be done device by device.
But this is where Validic has found its niche. The company has built a technology platform that connects with a variety of mobile health and in-home devices, wearables and patient healthcare applications.
Validic’s customers include providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies, wellness companies, and health IT vendors. These players need to be able to engage and monitor covered lives through connected consumer health devices as part of their population health efforts.
In case there was any doubt in your mind that the Internet of things (IoT) is the future, here’s another feather in that particular cap: Following the recent launch of its industrial Internet visualization and management software, CyberLightning just pulled in $4.2 million in financing to help the company continue development and implement a stronger marketing push in the international market.
When you think about the Internet of Things (IoT) you likely think of consumer hardware products like smart thermostats, WiFi lightbulbs or Quantified Self gadgets, such as various fitness trackers and other gizmos. CyberLightning, however, is an IoT startup of a different kind. It offers a platform for industrial IoT usage, such as utility companies or other providers of infrastructure, to help them monitor their wares via a 3D user interface that makes complex ‘big data’ easier to get a handle of and which can be mission critical when managing smart city grids and other aspects of the industrial Internet of Things age.
The promise of the Internet of things is, in a sense, passivity. Our homes and offices will monitor us, and respond to our needs without instruction. But for tiny wireless sensors all over us and our things to really be feasible, we’ll have to replace today’s power-needy devices with more self-sufficient alternatives.
A new kind of ultra-low-power microchip design could help make this possible.
A new breed of mobile wireless device lacks a battery or other energy storage, but it can still send data over Wi-Fi. These prototype gadgets, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, get all the power they need by making use of the Wi-Fi, TV, radio, and cellular signals that are already in the air.
The technology could free engineers to extend the tendrils of the Internet and computers into corners of the world they don’t currently reach. Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) spreads, the implications for business model innovation are huge. Filling out well-known frameworks and streamlining established business models won’t be enough. To take advantage of new, cloud-based opportunities, today’s companies will need to fundamentally rethink their orthodoxies about value creation and value capture.
While big companies are working hard to impose standards on the burgeoning Internet of things (IoT), little Octoblu is willing to be the translator between whatever protocols to connect every thing with every other thing.
Octoblu came out of stealth mode today with a focus on the industrial side of the IoT. Its core product is the Meshblu platform that, according to a statement, “can be used for the discovery, control and management of any API [application performance interface]-based software application, any hardware or appliance, or social media network.”
Between computers, smartphones, tablets, wearables, and the Internet of things, the number of networked devices around the world is growing rapidly, and all those devices need energy, even if they’re not doing anything. That could be a problem.
