"Internet of Things" a Main Theme for CES 2013

CES 2013 was held last month and a recurring theme was “connectivity” (aka Smart Home, Smart Grid, HomeConnect, etc...) - spanning connected product categories such as ultra-high definition TVs, hot new smartphones, sleek appliances and other retakes on everyday household products. The revolution of connectivity that has been promised for many years is finally being realized.

With wireless connectivity (WiFi, cellular) almost everywhere, it's become trivial to connect to the Internet from wherever you are. While this trend allows you to stay up-to-date with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, it also means that the devices you use on a day to day basis can connect easily to the Internet. A connected 'device' can be pretty much anything that has a microprocessor in it...that's right, those little things that are in cars, household appliances (from coffee machines to refrigerators), home security systems, smoke alarms, smartphones, computers and more. If you stop and looked around, it's very likely you can see at least a few devices with microprocessors in them. If you haven't seen products that allow your plant to tell you when it needs to be watered or ones that allow you to remotely feed your pets, you will soon. The growing prevalence of cloud devices (devices that you can interact with in the cloud) and web sensors signal a revolution that is referred to as the “Internet of Things”.

Most people today have at least one cell phone. The cell phone market is a mature market - even though there are still hundreds of millions of cell phones sold every year, the number of cell phones in the world will be more or less equal from year to year, regardless of how often people change or update their phones. The market for Internet of Things devices is in its infancy. The average household in the USA has 25 electronic devices, and although today very few of these are connected to the Internet, the CES trend shows this will quickly change. In addition, devices such as thermostats that were previously “passive” are now being enhanced expressly for the purpose of having an Internet connection because of the connectivity to the home-owner. As this trend marches across the private and commercial sectors, connected devices will be found in every company, every farm, every factory, every industrial installation...you get the picture. The deployment of connected devices and web sensors is at a tipping point.

Connecting devices is what Exosite does: enabling companies to connect their Internet of Things products to the cloud, to each other, and to their users. We want you to be able to understand your world better, making it more convenient to access information that would help you make decisions about your environment...either one that you are in day to day, or one that you need to monitor remotely.

Our off the shelf connectivity products allow you to quickly prototype and then deploy products with new modes of interaction and connectivity: Would you like to trigger an email every time your front door is opened between a certain time period? Want to easily data from your factory floor into your customer's hands? Want to be able to remotely switch your devices on and off from the Internet? Is the challenge of energy monitoring and load balancing a factor for your systems? Do you need easier ways to perform software updates?

All of these modes of interactions can be done by connecting off-the-shelf hardware to our cloud data platform. We support a wide range of hardware, starting with the hobbyist-favorite Arduino, to commercial cellular modems, to popular development kits from Texas Instruments, Renesas, ST Microelectronics and Atmel. We enable you to get going fast, and also provide engineering services to jump start the development of cloud-enabled devices (and the back-end enterprise-class cloud data base system) that offer convenience, security, or other solutions to their end-user...

Get in touch if you have any questions or comments!