10 Days. 10 Stories. Part 6–2015
Grab the IoT tiger by the tail and jump headfirst into the brave new world of low power wireless area networking (LPWAN) & rapid prototyping. 2015 kicked off with a solid backlog of customer projects, delivering cybersecurity professional services for subsea flexible riser surveillance systems. Because we had the year fully planned out it gave us the freedom to incubate some new ideas on how we could leverage modular, pluggable Internet of Things devices.
First step was supporting the AirBoard Kickstarter campaign. fieldcloud was the first backer, seeding the launch. At the end of the campaign over 1000 backers from about 40 countries funded $65k. Enough to start volume production.
During the campaign we met up with Olivier Menard the AirBoard's creator and Jean Poma, who was community manager during the Kickstarter campaign.
fieldcloud hosted a livestream AirBoard party in our workspace during the campaign to showcase this little embedded device for rapid, modular IoT experimentation.
It was during this time that we invited Jean to join the fieldcloud team to drive new IoT business around the AirBoard.
At the end of the campaign we discovered that SigFox had invited the AirBoard team to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Olivier wasn't able to attend due to other commitments so we made a plan to have fieldcloud represent the AirBoard and spend time with the SigFox team in Barcelona. MWC15 was definitely worthwhile and we got to meet up with many old telecom industry contacts, including the CTO of a well known Canadian mobile operator who wanted to our opinion of IoT connectivity market trends.
SigFox actually had the AirBoard on display at their stand at Mobile World Congress. How was cool that!
Next port of call was a trip to FabLab London to meet up with Tony Fish (another old telecom industry contact) & Andre Gregson + our friends from Arkessa to have a chat about modular IoT rapid prototyping.
Back in Grenoble, John Dimatos from the Kickstarter team came to visit and have a chat with the startup ecosystem. Prior to mid-2015 it wasn't possible for French companies to run a Kickstarter campaign using a French legal entity. The only way was to incorporate a foreign company (typically US, UK or Dutch based) as vehicle. As there were some great success stories, including the AirBoard, Kickstarter wanted to ensure that their entry into the French market was on the right track.
fieldcloud signed up to exhibit at the very first French IoT trade show, SIdO (Salon Internet des Objets) held in Lyon. We put on a great demo, weaving together the ns-box running edge gateway applications with the AirBoard communicating over ZigBee. It was during SIdO that we met our very first non oil & gas corporate customer, the market leader in water technologies.
One month later we were invited by Kickstarter to Paris for the Maker Faire and met up with Julio Terra to showcase the AirBoard and do some evangelization to the French maker community. Totally by chance we met up with the Arduino team during the event, who were impressed with the AirBoard's modular form factor and Arduino compatibility. We were invited to a special event in June 2015 at Arduino's home base in Turin, Italy.
We established a partnership with Atim Radiocommunications, starting with their SigFox pluggable modules and later with LoRaWAN.
After the Paris Maker Faire we headed off to Turin, Italy to spend time with the Arduino folks during the Torino Mini Maker Faire and the inauguration of Casa Jasmina a connected living lab apartment.
A totally awesome highlight at Casa Jasmina was hanging out with non other than famous cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling! Bruce was one of the co-founders of Casa Jasmina with Jasmina Tešanović and Massimo Banzi.
Back in Grenoble we were building a new, compact IoT box based on a Raspberry PI single board computer and an Atim SigFox/868MHz FSK add-on board. The idea was to create a solution for a local ISM band radio gateway for private networks with either Ethernet backhaul or messaging using the SigFox network. This product became known as the 8GATE.
In autumn 2015 fieldcloud and Atim exhibited at the very first Grenoble Mini Maker Faire. We had some cool IoT demos running with sensors, gateways and even a 1985 vintage Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K+ microcomputer connected to an AirBoard via RS232. The embedded application was configured to send text messages from the ZX Spectrum over a private 868MHz ISM network to a Twitter API gateway service!
Another new event called IoT Planet was held in Grenoble during October 2015. We had a small booth during the event and speaking during during a startup pitch session.
The talk we gave at IoT Planet started with "This is not a pitch", because it wasn't. We wanted to talk about the broader issues and opportunities with the Internet of Things and share our thoughts about how the landscape was changing. Below is a transcript of our presentation.
1. Keep Calm and Game the Change. Do you get the feeling sometimes that standards initiatives feel more like gaming the change, instead of changing the game? I do.
a. Multiple, valid but incompatible implementations
b. Vested interests
c. Legacy compatibility
d. Rent seeking from dominant players
We’ve seen this before.
2. With all the industry hype it’s easy to believe in the quest for the ultimate IoT standard. A framework to control entire markets.
3. Right now there are many, many initiatives. Seriously. Some pre-date IoT, some are geared to preserve incumbent positions and some are progressive and admirable. Do we really need a new ultimate standard?
4. …………… Or would it be better to rather merge or retire some existing initiatives? Adding yet another standard to an already crowded situation impacts our credibility.
5. Standards aren’t only about building better mousetraps. Consider the market opportunity to sell mice crash helmets! Sure it’s a threat to the mousetrap business, but what an incredible opportunity for economic transformation. That’s the power of disruption.
6. Keep in mind that the landscape is changing. Monolithic 20th century dinosaurs are dying and little penguins are thriving… How does this affect standards development?
7. IoT is not a single ecosystem. Just like planet Earth. We need to focus standardization efforts to create and nurture many thriving ecosystems, including ones that might seem out of place or even irrelevant. The Maker Movement, open source software and open hardware are some that spring to mind. Tomorrow’s critical mass is going to emerge from these spaces…
8. …creating an unstoppable force…. Something which fieldcloud is proud to be part of. Just recently Grenoble held its first Mini Maker Faire with over 9000 visitors over the two day event. These are future engineers and scientists, they are learning new techniques for making tomorrow’s products.
9. In hindsight, the Internet community has been incredibly successful through the use of rough consensus and running code. For the Internet of Things I would like to add extensible, remixable hardware to this winning formula.
10. Innovative real world IoT applications will be assembled by ponies, amplifying the value delivered by unicorns. Standards should help not hinder. Standards should lower barriers to market entry.
11. So let’s Keep Calm and Change the Game.
a. Make it easy for startups and SMEs to participate and contribute to the standards process.
b. Keep a light touch, with continued emphasis on rough consensus, running code and extensible hardware.
12. A quick word about us. fieldcloud provides professional services, hardware products and secure network connectivity services. Our historical focus is the upstream oil & gas industry. But we are also makers at heart and are helping new startups and SMEs thrive in their ecosystems. For the last 6 years we have been 100% self-funded, cash flow positive and very, very busy helping our clients create new value. Hope you enjoyed this, I certainly have.
It would probably be appropriate to close this story with a quick summary of our oil & gas cybersecurity professional services engagements in 2015. During the first half of 2015 we were in Southampton, UK hardening PC-based SCADA packages, supporting the client through a 3rd-party cybersecurity audit and executing Factory Acceptance Testing. This package from our client was in fact the only system to pass cybersecurity audit without major issues, exceptions or remediation. It was very a cool experience. During the second half of 2015 production of these systems moved to Aberdeen and we spent a great deal of time between all the interesting IoT events described above working through system hardening, configuration, factory acceptance testing and auditing.
Sadly the upstream oil & gas industry was suffering a major downturn and our client had no projects in their pipeline for 2016. So we were obliged to pivot out of our original core business and look for other industry sectors. More on this in our next story…
10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.
