Headworx

Last week's LED Professional Symposium sparked many discussions about IoT business models. It starts with lights, but after all lights are no longer about being a light source. Lights are sensors. Lights are routers. Lights are computers. And most importantly, lights form infrastructure mesh data networks.  Connected lights transform ceilings into digital ceilings and this really becomes now the essence of IoT. Lights are not lights. And a network that connects them is not a lighting control network. It is a multi-service infrastructure / sensory data network. Feilo Sylvania says the value of presence heat map data harvested by lights is 6-7x higher than the value generated with the most energy efficient lighting system. So if this data really has that much value, immediately the ownership dispute kicks in: who owns it? And this is a deep gray area now: nobody dares to clearly answer this question. But clearly two models are going to emerge: the "Cisco model" ...

In the middle of the very busy Bluetooth Working Groups Summit, I'm very happy to unveil some harbinger news on the upcoming IoT standard we've been working on for some time now. The Mesh Working Group has won the Working Group of the Year award. This means a lot to the working group and it also means how important this development has become to the Bluetooth standard. We have all reasons to believe this is shaping to become the most successful IoT protocol. We are still in a stealth mode but I encourage all who express interest in the IoT revolution to come and join Bluetooth SIG to become part of it.

One thing, which is absolutely striking me when talking to customers, trying to convince them to support the development of the Bluetooth Mesh standard is many of them asking "will it support proprietary extensions?". This question is brought even before they go and check if it is necessary in the first place. Proprietary is easy. And proprietary promises some short term rewards: "we will keep this space for us". 20 years after the Sony MiniDisc people still want to create their own minidiscs. One thing the proprietary proponents never take into account is that standards ultimately prevail. Think MP3. Think HTML. Think Ethernet. Think Bluetooth. Think AES. Of course creating a standard is an effort that is orders of magnitude bigger than going a proprietary route. But to anyone thinking big, proprietary is not an option. Even the biggest company like Apple does not have enough power to enforce proprietary solutions on emerging markets. Think HomeKit: a nice se...

I experienced a series of laptop disasters, exactly when I'm completely overloaded with finalizing the design documents for (the most) important IoT standard. Murphy's law... First I happened to spill some tea on the lid but the machine kept working, so did I. It lasted for 15 minutes and then gave up the ghost. In a hurry, to continue my (almost) uninterrupted work I hijacked my co-worker's machine (identical model of Lenovo Yoga) put my hard disk in and kept on going. Unfortunately the hijacked machine was in a poor shape: very noisy fan and some broken internals. I managed to rebuild it using the parts of the dead one and thought the problem was over. The rebuild process involved swapping the motherboard and also swapping the touch-pad, so it cost me almost a day. The following week I found the hard drive gave up the ghost too: "SATA device not recognized" greeted me last Thursday morning exactly 3 hours before a planned train trip. Desperately looking for ...