10 IoT Startups You Need To Know
IoT is hot. And there is no shortage of companies in the space. We take a look at 10 IoT startups you need to know because they are doing something a little different or a little special.
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a very big deal. Simply huge. Gartner recently found that 43% of enterprises and organizations are planning to use IoT by the end this year and 64% plan to roll it out eventually. Companies you might have heard of -- IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and SAP, among others -- have made enormous investments in IoT technologies and are in the process of turning a hype-rich part of the industry into something very real and very important.
At the same time, the many different meanings and variations given to IoT mean that it has been one of the most fertile grounds for startup companies in years. Of course, the nature of startup companies is that most will fail, so for potential customers -- especially enterprise customers who want to make long-term plans -- the question of which startup companies really matter is of more than academic importance.
[Read 10 Signs You're not Cut Out to Work at a Startup.]
One of the questions to answer when you're looking at the complicated issue of which IoT companies matter (and are likely to survive) is precisely which IoT you're talking about. Speaking in the broadest terms, there are two: The personal IoT of fitness watches and smart home thermostats, and the industrial IoT of process control and predictive maintenance. Technology often leaps from one to the other, but companies tend to focus on one kind of customer and one kind of IoT.
Given all of these variables, it's tough to predict the companies that will be around next year, but there are products and technologies that seem likely to be part of the IoT, whether they're carried by their current companies or not. That's why we're calling this companies you need to know, not companies you should invest in.
Speaking of startups, there's no hard-and-fast rule that everyone agrees with on what puts a company in the category. Our criteria are subjective and open to debate. If you disagree with one of the choices here, feel free to open that debate in the comments.
As mentioned at the top of this article, there are thousands of IoT companies started every year. Which ones do you think we should know about? Have you run across a startup that you think is (or is going to be) important to the industry? Let us know, and let us know what you think about the whole IoT itself. We're always up for being educated by the community here at InformationWeek.
Among the promises of the IoT is that all our appliances are going to start talking to one another in a constant conversation that doesn't have to involve slow, indecisive humans. Greenbird has technology that takes this appliance-based conversation out of your home and into the city as a whole with Metercloud.io. It's a framework that makes the electric utility company a vital part of the IoT.
Metercloud is a middleware framework that provides a communication layer between all sorts of meters, appliances, generation facilities, and accounting systems. Greenbird makes the list because it is tackling both the technical side of the equation and the side that's truly important -- helping electric utilities make money from the IoT. The second piece is almost certain to make adoption of the first piece go much, much faster.
Worldsensing is another "industrial IoT" company, though they focus on a horizontal layer within the IoT rather than a set of solutions for a particular industry or problem. Worldsensing is all about the input, and it provides sensors and input devices for a wide variety of industrial and mobile IoT applications.
Focusing on sensors allows Worldsensing to participate in many different industries, from transportation to natural resource extraction, and to do it in all sorts of ways -- including the all-important "a mountain is about to fall on you" sector. Worldsensing is an example of a company that has found a vital niche and is filling it in industries wherever it appears.
Sometimes you don't need more stuff in your Internet of Things, you just need the ability to make all your stuff work together to do something useful. That's where IFTTT comes in. IFTTT (which stands for "IF This, Then That") is a system for building "recipes" that tie many different pieces of hardware and software together in ways that make them all more useful.
IFTTT is a graphical system that requires very little in the way of traditional programming skills. It also has vast libraries of recipes that people have created and uploaded for anyone to use. IFTTT is important because it has brought the idea of programming your own systems to people who would never think of themselves as programmers, and because it has expanded the idea of the IoT to include software and cloud services that people use every day.
When it comes to the personal IoT, health is a huge driver. EllieGrid is tackling a big problem for a select group of potential IoT users. It is trying to make it easier for older individuals with complicated medication regimens to keep up with their daily pills. Here's the special part: They want to let those individuals' caregivers know that the regimen is on track.
Most of the people active in building the IoT have no real idea how difficult the daily regimen can be for older individuals, some of whom have to take a dozen or more different medications at specific times every day. A little memory loss, a lot of pills that look basically the same, and before you know it doses have been missed. When family members and professional caregivers have no idea how many doses are being taken, the situation is even more complex and urgent.
The news is filled with stories of telepresence robots that will help people "age in place." EllieGrid is focusing on a key piece of the puzzle using IoT technology that is straightforward in concept and complex in execution. Look for companies like this, each tackling a single piece of the puzzle, to ultimately build an ecosystem that lets millions stay in their homes longer while remaining linked to critical health care.
Products for the IoT can come and go. Many of the important companies in the space, though, don't focus on products that end-users (whether industrial or consumer) will buy, but on platforms that will support those products. That's what Litbit has done in creating RhythmOS, an operating system designed for the Internet of Things.
RhythmOS is a communication and functionality platform that sits in the cloud and in on-premises servers, depending on the needs of the business. One of the things that makes Litbit significant is that the company has recognized, from the very beginning, that people and enterprise customers are worried about security when it comes to the IoT. The company has baked encrypted communications into the system -- and that's something that will be a legacy for many companies that follow.
Staying on the theme of security, that's where Microtronics lives with its Keycode Server that provides a "rolling" keycode for unlocking all sorts of devices connected to the IoT.
There are some applications that demand an entry key that frequently changes -- think hotel rooms or the lockboxes realtors use for house keys. The thing is, there are many more IoT applications that would be made much more secure if the machine-to-machine authentication code changed on a regular basis. It would force hackers to go in and frequently redo their work, and that raises the likelihood your system falls into the "too much trouble" category. Microtronics has focused on security, and that makes it an IoT company you should know about.
So far, I've spent a lot of time talking about companies that tackle a part of the IoT landscape rather than going for the big solutions. BluFlux follows that pattern. This Colorado-based company focuses its attention on something that is, for many in the computer world, a form of magic. The company is all about radios and antennas.
Radio-frequency electronics are, in many ways, an entirely different world than those of digital computers and processors. BluFlux is the kind of company that helps IoT firms design the antennas and radio systems that go into IoT products. It's the kind of firm that can also be of enormous assistance for enterprise IT groups who are putting an IoT system in the field but are having mysterious radio communication problems.
Given the importance of video in the Internet as a whole, it's a little surprising that video isn't a bigger deal in the IoT. Part of the issue, of course, is that so many IoT devices are just too small to hold video screens. Another part, the one that consists of protocols, APIs, and other network issues, is what IoT Smart Systems is tackling.
Video isn't all that this company deals with. There are other sensors that form part of its ecosystem as well. The important thing they're doing is treating video as one of the many sensor streams that a full IoT application can require. Working with enterprise and industrial video as part of the IoT, as IoT Smart Systems' LiveStream does, makes the company one you should have on your IoT radar screen.
Drones have been all over news in the last few years, often for bad reasons. Beyond the world of the doofus with a drone, though, lies the growing realm of commercial, enterprise, and industrial drone applications -- and that last is where Skycatch lives.
Skycatch provides drones, software, and an integration platform for making drones a critical piece of a construction site toolkit. By putting everything from detailed job site mapping to "eye in the sky" progress oversight in a single platform -- and adding hooks to tie the data received into the most common CAD platforms -- Skycatch is adding drones to the IoT in way that could quickly make quadcopters as common as surveyor's transits on major construction sites.
Withings is probably the least "new" of the companies listed here, but it continues to make a huge splash in the consumer health category of IoT. The company makes a wide variety of products that measure and track various aspects of the customer's life, but they're all tied together with a fairly simple concept: The IoT itself should be basically invisible.
Withings products tend to be built so that they talk to one another, and to the customer's smart phone, with little to no intervention by the customer. That fits in with the ideas of the vast majority of IoT users who don't really want to be IoT users -- they just want to have more of their life measured or more of their environment controlled.
So what do you think of our list of companies to be aware of in the IoT realm? Any here that shouldn't be? More important, which companies do you think we missed? Let us know about either category in the comments, and we'll begin the debate in proper fashion.
Withings is probably the least "new" of the companies listed here, but it continues to make a huge splash in the consumer health category of IoT. The company makes a wide variety of products that measure and track various aspects of the customer's life, but they're all tied together with a fairly simple concept: The IoT itself should be basically invisible.
Withings products tend to be built so that they talk to one another, and to the customer's smart phone, with little to no intervention by the customer. That fits in with the ideas of the vast majority of IoT users who don't really want to be IoT users -- they just want to have more of their life measured or more of their environment controlled.
So what do you think of our list of companies to be aware of in the IoT realm? Any here that shouldn't be? More important, which companies do you think we missed? Let us know about either category in the comments, and we'll begin the debate in proper fashion.
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