I’m working on a GPS tracker business based on sigfox techology. Here is my Pitch made for a local startup contest where I got a prize.
My last pitch about sigfox GPS tracker
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Category Archives: News
IoT conference at @lavajug
Yesterday I made a conferences about Internet Of Things main technologies with live demonstration. Watch it on Youtube !
Montpellier Startup WeekEnd
magicSquare startup weekend
This weekend it was my first StartupWeekend I had kind of event past year having two bootcamps with my usual company for internal startup contest. By-the-way, the startup weekend is a little bit different.
That was a really nice experience I recommend. Basically, we came with some friend with a idea about providing a gaming environment for children where boy & girls can craft their own world and animate it thanks to the brick we are providing, using a programming language composed by domino they can manipulate. They won’t use any screen, only wood & plastic stuff that interacts with their crafted world.
After pitching this, we created a team by “hiring” people found in the crowd of participants. Some was from non selected ideas, some has came by curiosity and we got a nice mix of skills to start hacking the idea. Hacking the business model, hacking the technical solution…
After 2 days of intense work we had a final pitch where the top 3 of ideas has been selected by a jury and got some prizes. Even if our team has not been selected, we had a really great days seen all these nice ideas transformed in a weekend ; starting from quite nothing to become a credible business to develop.
We went to kickstart an idea, hack it, confirm hypothesis, meet people, meet future clients… and get fun ! for all of this it was a great success I’m happy to have done and to share this spirit ; here is a video we made during the event !
magicSquare par Disk91
Thank you all – eva, nico, bruno, gautier, pierrick, teo, alex, mathieu – and the staff & coach team for this weekend. Special thank to @olivez – we are looking at your photos 🙂
I now waiting for the next event like this !
Backed Domino IO project !
Domino IO – IoT enabler
I do not usually post more than a tweet when backing on a KickStarter project but as for this time there is a French guy included in the project, it is a good opportunity to do it !
The Domino IO project is an interesting platform to connect one of your home stuff ! It contains a powerful CPU, the network connectivity and all what you need to quickly make your own design.
This platform is really looking like the SparkCore under steroïd having eaten a Carambola engine. The chip is provided for $10 on Kickstarter ; this is 2.5 time less than carambola and 2 times less than Sparkcore. Sound like the missing element between RaspberryPi and Arduino.
IoT disruption, why it is the appropriate time ?
In a previous post I explained why the IoT is appearing in this period thanks to the network technology evolution. It would not be a complete analysis if I would not care about the social evolution. In parallel of IoT and technologies there are other rising trends : Makers, Fablabs, embedded systems, 3d printing and crowd-founding.
Take a look at personal computing some decades ago when guys like Jobs or Gates make the first line of code and solder the first micro-processors in their garage ; they just used the technological elements available that time and were able to make them doing much more than what they have been made for. They did it because they were able to do it. The same story appends in the late 90’s with Internet : anyone was able to code some PHP stuff and create a service in his garage thanks to this students have created Facebook and many more.
At the opposite, when smart phone appeared in the middle of the 90’s it was a technology that requires strong industrial assets and this technology has been limited to major companies. The smart-phone revolution had been the same opening door to programmer to an new area with applications (apps). In fact all previous hardware evolutions since the Personal Computer beginning was requiring huge technological assets to be part of it.
IoT disruption is breaking these last 40 years where only software were hackable by getting hardware accessible.
Let see why
IoT, M2M, quick panorama on main technologies
This year M2M and IoT are two of the most heard keywords in our technological domain. One of these is fresh new, I mean a couple of year old, when the other one is pretty much older. M2M, standing for Machine to Machine is a capability for two machines (or more) to discuss together and take actions. Like a temperature sensor allowing your boiler to decide when to start or stop. In the industry where automatism are in place since many year, M2M is something in place, running, not new. IoT, standing for Internet of Things is part of the M2M technology but actually raising. In IoT the main word is Internet and it stands for the capability of an object to talk over Internet on its own. Why only now ? mostly because now it starts to be possible.
One day at SigFox
sigfox
I had the opportunity, today, to be at the sigfox kickoff day, in Toulouse, with the company I work for. This is an opportunity to post a summary of the technology as it is today.
Sigfox is a network operator for Internet Of Things running on free frequency band (868Mhz in France). Sigfox is deploying itself network in some countries like France. In some other they have partner to deploy it like arquiva in UK (on going actually 10 biggest cities); abertis in Spain, Aerea in Netherland. Actually some European cities are also deployed as pilot : Munich, Menlo, Milan, Warsaw, Dublin, Autria. San Fransisco & Silicon Valley will come soon this year. The target is to have 60 countries in the next 5 Years. Thanks to the long range radio characteristic of the network, Spain has been deployed in 7 months. As to now, the network does not includes roaming constraints & fee. A French licensed device works in any country where the network exists.
The network is high sensitivity with 2 way communication 140 *12 bytes messages a day uplink / 4 * 8 bytes messages downlink. Each of the messages are sent 3 times on different frequency to ensure it will be delivered. The devices are running ultra low energy with 10-25mW radio power. The technology is plug & play : you do not have any peering process to accomplish to make it works (but you have to activate the device in the backend at least…). Data are sent to a global backend whatever the network provider you are passing through and you have contract with. This backend will let you have access to your data in real time and will execute callback (data post) to you own specific backend to proceed your data.
Limits : due to low bandwidth / small messages architecture, the technology does not allow voice, video … transfer for sure. But it is really fitting security, smart cities (traffic, parking waste, street lights…) monitoring, automatic meter reading, leak detection, billing automation…, tracking & security, healthcare (fall detection, distress buttons…), Agriculture.
Telecom Design TD1207 – low cost sigfox transceiver
TD1208/TD1207
The Telecom Design TD1207 has been released. In fact this chip is a TD1208 you can’t reflash and you have to use with the builtin modem firmware. The datasheet is the same as 1208 the main difference is that you have no information about RAM and FLASH size. The TD1207 is at a lower price than the TD1208 (about -2$).