Headworx

I am half way through the Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon . Don't know the remaining half (yet!), but already this book is getting my personal book of the year 2013 award. It is a wonderful story driven by what Stone calls Jeffism: "We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.". I have never heard anybody declaring publicly what is so close to my own entrepreneur's heart. Here is the full paragraph quoted:  “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to so...

It looks like we have passe the "app" hype. Started by Apple in 2008 it lasted more or less to 2012. And now apps are commodity. Yes there will be hits like the Angry Birds and there is a strong foundation of apps most of us use daily, but apps are no longer sexy. Apps in 2013 have become a commodity. In 2013 the new phenomenon called the Internet of Things (IoT) has started dwarfing the app cycle. What is now IoT has begun as M2M (Machine-to-Machine communications) several years ago. And now in the IoT of 2013 a new trend has been created: every thing needs an app. Whatever appears on Engadget and is not a phone or a laptop or a tablet, has its own app. From music systems to bicycles to shoes, they all start coming app-enabled. And the manufacturers start slowly to realize the user experience of the accompanying app is becoming equally, or even more important, compared to the "thing" itself. The reason is, for many things, it is the app the users interact wit...

This week I've spent a lot of time discussing the hardware options for our next generation home automation controller. It all looks fine on paper. We will include this and that radio module and this and that port and so on. But as the options are (almost) set in stone now, digging down deeper into the electronics and layout of the radio modules, I realized there is one significant risk coming, which we have to add to our equations. The risk is called LTE, or LTE 800 in particular. The frequency arrangements for the 800 MHz band (covered by the ECC Decision 2010/267/EU) assume Frequency Division Duplex operation with the downlink (a tower to a modem) located in the lower 791-821 MHz band and the uplink (a modem to a tower) located in the upper 832-862 MHz band. The uplink LTE 800 band is awfully close to the 863-870 MHz band assigned to various Short Range Devices, including many home automation standards in Europe (Z-Wave, 6LoWPAN, EnOcean). There has already been reports pub...

At the end of August 2013 I announced we were rolling the plane to the runway. It was a metaphor, of course, one that allowed me to depict the very important juncture our company was at. I wrote we had built the perfect engine and we attached it to a beautiful fuselage and we were about to start. And then after the V1 (the point of no return) I promised to make one more announcement. My plan was to say our plane had no wings. Referring to the old proverb about taking a leap and building the wings on the way down. But I won't say this anymore. The reason is, we still do not have wings, but our fuselage is in a vertical position. Yes, this is a rocket. The countdown has ended. And we have a liftoff! This week the new product and the new strategy has been announced internally and all I can say literally everybody on board is absolutely enthusiastic about it. I am tempted as hell to unveil it publicly, but I simply cannot. It is still too early. Probably the most difficult secr...

A personal view of the CEO and co-founder. At WiHo.me we're enjoying a roller-coaster ride. I mean it is wild and full of energy and the turns and pivots are violent. An experience I really like. At the same time, as it seems there (finally) is a chance to make money in this business, I hear questions about what happens after. Asked both by some of our angel investors and some friends of mine. And raising my eyebrows... because I have no plans for the "after". I really do enjoy the ride. So the longer it lasts, the better. It is about the road, not the destination. What really gives me the fuel to burn are the everyday challenges, brain teasers and puzzles to be solved. This has been so engaging I can't imagine the "after". Honestly this was the primary reason behind starting the company. Back in 2009 I was retired, after two successful startups. It was so boring I could barely withstand this state of mind (doing nothing and being a highly paid consult...

IP-based connectivity and IPv6 in particular is being praised as the unified future of the Internet Of Things. While it may be true in general, the devil, as always, is in the details. My automatic property gate has an IPv6 address. I can control it from any place on Earth. My driveway floodlights have IPv6 addresses too. They too can be controlled from anywhere. Because my controller, which is a smartphone, knows the addresses of both the gate and the floodlights. But remote control is not cutting edge at all. It is not even an automation, not to mention intelligence. Remote control is manual control. But what if I wanted to add some automation to the setup? Say, when my gate opens and it is dark outside, the floodlights should light up. Imagine the gate is smart. Meaning it knows the location and can compute the sunrise and sunset times. Let's assume the gate is even smarter: it can compute the "and", activating the lights when it is dark while it is opening. So...

A week ago I met a long time friend of mine. We talked about my current business. I already sold him two of my previous companies. Sort of. But each time he was the driver and influenced the decision to buy. And we talked a lot. Because a lot has been happening in my current business. By the way I am no longer allowed to call my startup a startup - one of our angel investors wants to present us to the world as a mature company. Which we really are - I've added it up recently: 64 men-years of R&D. That is a lot! But a kid will always be a kid to her father. No matter how old they both are... Anyway. I was describing the landscape of the Internet of Things and low power connectivity and software stacks from tiny wireless processors that live their lives harvesting energy from light (photovoltaic), temperature differences (Peltier) or motion (tiny dynamos) to widely scalable servers in the Cloud. Then I described the myriads of applications we can define on our platform. Appli...