Opening up the internet of things: Xively

Opening up the internet of things: Xively the new IoT Public Cloud. Heavily promoted by ARM as the mature IoT public cloud, is this the correct approach to M2M and the Industrial Internet ? Surely Logmein has the correct firmware technology, and now the cloud, to get there.

[Reproduced from the Wall Street Journal, 05.15.13)
Opening Up the ‘Internet of Things’
By Anna Leach

With the internet of things, it won’t just be the robots that are intelligent. 50 billion objects will connected by 2020.

It will now take hours instead of months to make smart objects that can connect to the internet, British chip designers ARM Holdings plc promised Tuesday. ARM announced a collaboration with a software startup that it promises will make it quicker and cheaper for companies to make products for the hotly-tipped new sector.

The internet of things is when everyday objects become “intelligent” and can connect to the internet thanks to small embedded chips. ARM designs the chips that go in the objects, and with the new collaboration,  startup LogMeIn Inc will provide the software that takes data from the object and feeds it into an app or website.

“It’s the sort of market where you’re going to have a huge amount of innovation,” said Simon Ford, Director of Online Tools at ARM and lead on their internet of things project — mbed.

“There’ll be startup companies coming from nowhere with new ideas and this technology will allow them to happen because the barrier to entry is very low.”

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The announcement is interesting, says Jon Bradford, Managing Director of Springboard a London-based startup accelerator focused specially on the Internet of Things, because ARM are significant in the emerging field.

“The internet of things is all about very light-weight, very low-powered processors,” he said. “And ARM has always had very light low-powered processors since that’s its background.

“Intel is a rival, but they’re coming at things from a different angle. Intel have always been about processing technology that is wired into walls. That has been based around high-energy devices.”

Intel are working on lower-powered chips, said Mr. Bradford but ARM are still ahead: “This is a market that I believe at this point Intel can’t get close to.”  A spokesperson for Intel cited the recent launch of the low-power Silvermont chip design and stressed the importance of Intel’s powerful chips in managing the vast amounts of data that will be produced by objects: “[The internet of things] is not just about lightweight, low-power processors, it’s about securely integrating this vast array of devices into a single network, and securely managing the “Big Data” generated.”

Endorsement from ARM is a coup for Boston-based startup LogMeIn – and the London-made technology it uses. But providing the software that joins up the smart objects and links them to a user interface is a more competitive field.

Through Springboard’s accelerator Mr. Bradford is overseeing 18 startups with products targeting the same area.“LogMeIn is one of a number of very interesting startups helping to make the Internet of Things come to fruition,” said Mr. Bradford. U.K. startup Evrythng and U.S. startups like Linkify, ioBridge also have products that rival LogMeIn.

With billions of objects predicted to come online in the next five years, ARM’s strategy of making the internet of things more accessible to startups is a good bet, said Jim Tully a Research Director at Gartner:

“Our research says that by 2018, 50% of the internet of things solutions will be provided by startups which are less than 3 years old. We can estimate what the internet of things will be like now. But we know that most of the things that will exist in 2018 we can’t even conceive of because they haven’t been invented yet.”