Becoming Alchemists

Proud to announce that we’ve been selected for next batch of Alchemist Accelerator in Menlo Park. It is a six month program backed by leading VCs and is only for B2B startups. Heard lots of great stuff on how Ravi Belani and his team run the program, so really looking forward to it.

Some other big news coming up as well, more updates next week 

Urban Mill

Urban Mill / Startup Sauna outside Helsinki is definition of new cool. Laidback, anarchistic, hipster incubator lab next to Aalto, the major tech university. Anyone can get in and hang around, desks are available on a “first come first served” basis. Old factory buildings, high roof and no walls. Open space – in every possible meaning.

Active Life Village in Urban Mill, Helsinki

We knew immediately that this was a perfect location for one of our smart home labs. Urban Mill is defined as a “co-working and co-creation platform prototype for urban innovation”, sporting several initiatives that fit perfectly with ours. ActiveLife Village is all about wellbeing for senior citizens, lots of wireless home solutions and technology. Asema is doing great stuff in smart energy management. We can create a really cool cluster of companies out there, allowing developers to innovate in even more sectors than we had imagined. 

Our lab in miniature

Arctic Raspberries

We spent two days in Oulu this week, working with Tony & co from Symbio “rapid prototyping team”. They had done a great job in short time, and we now have a functioning hardware prototype! After testing porting OpenWrt and Zigbee USB dongle to Raspberry Pi, Pandaboard and SABRE Lite development boards, we decided to go with Raspberry Pi. It has better support from the community, and is easily available to any DIY geek that want to try our technology out at home. 

Our Raspberry Pi with Zigbee USB dongle

The compromise is that we cannot support too much of transcoding and other CPU heavy operations in the prototype. But that’s ok for prototype and lab experiments.

It was our first visit to Oulu, but definitely not the last. Really impressive competence cluster, located just short of the Arctic Circle. Given recent changes at Nokia, there are now heaps of start-ups doing world class R&D and innovation, mostly focused on smart and embedded devices. Oulu rocks!

The Interconnected Home

Just listened to a GigaOm podcast on what is wrong with the Internet of Things - Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham discussing what makes sense and what doesn't. Om Malik talks about things not being ready yet, and that devices need to be more transparent and work with each other, introducing a couple of (to me) new phrases - the "interconnected home" and "in-home computing fabric". Well worth listening to:


Stacey is in my opinion the most insightful blogger on Smart Homes and Internet of Things, so if you want to stay up to date just follow her Twitter

Prototyping on Steroids

Domos is primarily an operating system, i.e. a software platform. This is also where we have our core competence. So when we realised we had to make hardware prototype to be able to connect all the cool devices and sensors out there, we clearly felt outside our comfort zone. I had been working towards big OEMs in China, and knew the upfront costs of getting to prototype level could easily run up to $100k. And even worse, it could take months to make. Not great for neither budget nor momentum.

We have now reduced the prototype cost by 90%. And delivery time from months to days. How? Thanks to very cool rapid prototyping technologies:

1. Low-cost hardware development boards like Raspberry Pi, Pandaboard etc have been adopted by makers and geeks around the world. The ecosystems build-in support in open source software projects. In our case, OpenWrt - a Linux distribution for embedded devices that included support for Wifi access point functionality – recently added communities working on RPi and other development boards.



Raspberry Pi - a $35 PC (image from PCMag.com)    

2. Additive manufacturing We’ll be using a technique called Selective Laser Sintering that provide robust, industrial grade casing for our prototypes at zero upfront cost. Best of all, we can test out design ideas at low cost before making final decision.
   

   

   SLS printed house

These rapid prototyping techniques almost completely remove the upfront investment. In return we get a higher unit cost of around $500 - $1,000 per unit. But we only need 10 units to power our Smart Home Labs, so for us it is a no-brainer. And we can do all this in Europe, allowing rapid and iterative development. The big takeaway is that innovators can test their creative ideas in rapid iterations with very limited upfront investment. The result? An explosion of cool, smart gadgets and wearable devices.

I just love technology.

Why we need an OS for the smart home

Homes are slowly getting smarter, but are still far away from reaching its mass market potential. We now have phones that can help us navigate the world, but does very little inside our four walls. We have cars that will soon be on auto-pilot and wearable tech that make Minority Report look yesterday. Surely our homes should be up next?

Yes, they will – but at the current rate of innovation, no time soon. There is no lack of great technology, and the value proposition should be compelling. So what is stopping adoption? The simple answer is – your wifi router.

The wifi router is the single point of connection between all cool sensors, gadgets and devices that are available for the home. They all need to connect through your wifi to connect to their respective cloud and mobile apps. And yet, there has been almost zero innovation on wifi routers when it comes to enabling the smart home. Innovation for smart homes is naturally app-centric these days. And why shouldn't it be, of course you would want to control your house through your mobile?

The answer is “yes”. And “no”. You want the apps. What you don’t want is a separate app for each device. And a separate cloud login. And a separate connector hub. And a separate protocol. There are great smart things out there today, but the underlying infrastructure is simply not scalable.

Smart home infrastructure without Domos

This is why we need the operating system. And why it needs to be on the wifi router. We need to decouple devices from apps. Let device makers make devices. Let developers make apps. Enable open competition and innovation.

In technical terms, the operating system adds an abstraction layer that enables developers to make one app that leverage all connected devices, on any protocol.

The devices are here. The apps are here. The open protocols are here. The smart router OS is the missing link. 

We plan to build it.

Back in da Hub

Another London workshop, and meeting Bill and Dorien from a cool product development company called ARRK. The prototype casing was a big concern for us, expecting large upfront costs on tooling and moulds. Not very bootstrap friendly. We have no need to worry though.

Dorien showed us some super samples of what they can do in prototyping with laser 3D printing and cuts. Exactly what we need. Cost is affordable and process very flexible. But what really impressed was the quality of the end prototypes he showed us. Got to love tech innovation.

"Seriously, you have 3D printed all this?"