EVRYTHNG is heavily involved in creating IoT smart home and Insurance provider solutions.  As a result of this innovative work, Curt Schacker, our Senior Vice President of Connected Products, has been invited to participate in Park Associates’ Insurance Webinar panel discussion on September 27th. Curt will be discussing the current impact IoT has on insurance companies in the U.S and Europe.

Curt’s 25 years of experience in the Tech Industry in many senior level positions means he’s had the pleasure of speaking on various panels worldwide, sharing information and understanding into leading edge embedded and communications software topics.  He is passionate for the progression of Web-connected products and sharing this information.

IoT has been disrupting and revolutionizing insurance companies by giving users real-time sensory data from (and about) insured assets. EVRYTHNG offers insurance companies a cutting edge, cost saving advantage to minimize claims. Not only do these solutions save money for insurance companies, smart home solutions give customers peace of mind that their home is better protected from damage and loss.

Register for this free webcast today (http://buff.ly/2cIhHDI) to secure your spot in gaining insight on the business models and relevance IoT has on the insurance industry. This webcast will feature the impact IoT has on insurance corporations, new business cases, applications under development, and strategies for insurance companies to leverage data to provide new services.

This complimentary webcast is set to air live Tuesday, September 27 10 AM CT (11 AM ET), and you don’t want to miss it.

Register now 

Last week I gave a keynote talk at Digital Print for Packaging 2016 in Chicago—it was a terrific event that clearly demonstrated the sector’s continuing shift to digital printing capabilities.

What’s clear is the importance of new industrial digital printing capabilities is about much more than simply reaching performance and image quality parity with traditional industrial printers.

As customer expectations for enhanced experiences and services around physical products continues to grow, and winners and losers are more and more determined by their full set of digital capabilities and strategy, Brands are increasingly looking to make their products smart. Internet of Things activities were initially limited to continuously-connected devices (cars, home monitoring solutions, etc.), but the price of connectivity and smart packaging has declined precipitously, and Brands are now moving to enhance all physical products with a rich portfolio of functionality and applications using new data management capabilities.

The final math from these broader digital and IoT trends is clear.  Packaging and Printing providers have a rapidly growing opportunity to embed serialized physical to digital tags (QR codes, alphanumeric codes, hidden marks, smart ink, etc.) directly onto products and packaging.  Given their position at the beginning of the value chain, Packaging and Printing providers can enable Brands and other ecosystem players to drive applications across the full product lifecycle by associating these tags with an equivalent digital identity managed by an IoT platform.

Enabling Brands’ digital strategies and smart products represents a new strategic opportunity beyond traditional printing; and drives new services and margin enhancement opportunities for the printing and packaging sectors.  These opportunities require the printing of serialized tags at scale, primarily available through the new industrial digital printing solutions.

EVRYTHNG will be returning to SXSW this year, and as usual, we have some stellar talks for you. Please vote now for our SXSW panels!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/66545 – Seth Bardelas of EVRYTHNG will be giving a talk on how brands are transforming the way consumers interact with their products. Consumers get personalized, exciting digital content via the physical product, giving brands a wealth of data about who is buying their products – but only if they don’t give up control of the media and the message.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/66689 – EVRYTHNG is participating on VaynerMedia’s Intelligent Future panel and will be focusing on the emergence of IoT in consumer products.  Innovations in on-product sensors and packaging allow brands to transform their marketing by turning physical products into smart, interactive touch points.

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/60138 – EVRYTHNG is participating on Avery Dennison’s Style panel dicussing the impact IoT will have on the retail industry, and consumer experiences in-store and at home.

The IoT is revolutionizing the consumer product industry and now billions of passive, non-connected products are being ‘born digital’.  This gives consumers new ways to interact with brands, and lets brands create direct 1-to1 digital relationships with their consumers.  No-where more so than in Apparel, where our innovative work with Avery Dennison is transforming the industry.  Whether your interests be in fashion, technology or business, come attend our panels and learn how we are shaping the future of IoT and business.

Complexity in the Smart Home market impacts device makers and consumers alike.  It’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about, and engineering effort on our platform simplifying. As EVRYTHNG CTO and Co-founder Dom Guinard recently wrote on O’Reilly ,“The IoT needs a defrag” – in short: full interoperability across competing consumer ecosystems needs a neutral orchestration layer sitting above them all.

Here’s a blueprint of how this works in practice using EVRYTHNG’s connected device customer iHome.

Via the EVRYTHNG smart products platform, the iHome SmartPlug already connects seamlessly with Nest, Wink and HomeKit. Building on this, iHome has just announced support for Samsung’s SmartThings and Amazon’s Alexa, increasing their addressable market by a cool four million US households*.

Consumers with Alexa devices, including Amazon Echo, Tap, Echo Dot and Amazon Fire TV can use voice commands like “Alexa, turn off the bedroom light” or “Alexa, turn on the living room fan” to operate their SmartPlugs.

Further, consumers can control their iHome devices using their existing SmartThings app too, now that the EVRYTHNG platform connects to the SmartThings cloud in the background to manage all the heavy-lifting.

Plug and Play

Of course, consumers don’t care about cloud-to-cloud connectors on the back-end, protocol conversions or standardized data models.  They just want new products they buy to play nicely with other products, apps and services they already have.  The more confidence consumers have that iHome’s products will work seamlessly with other smart home devices or apps straight out-of-the-box, the easier it will be to make the purchase decision.

Device manufacturers, including iHome, don’t want to worry about the underlying complexity either.

“Our strategy from the start was to make the SmartPlug range compatible with all the major IoT smart home ecosystems.  This was one of the key reasons we built our iHome Control™ product line on the EVRYTHNG platform,” said Gary Schultz, Director of Business and Product Development at iHome.

‘Hey EVRYTHNG, switch on the cloud-to-cloud connector!’

EVRYTHNG’s cloud to cloud connectors provide a quick way of integrating at a platform level via standard, scalable APIs.  It means any smart device operated by the EVRYTHNG Smart Products Platform can interoperate with many other devices and clouds.  Not only that, but with REACTOR™ our powerful, programmable rules engine, sophisticated instructions can enable devices to respond to real-time data from other devices to make your products cleverer and more useful.

You can find out more about our new Cloud-to-Cloud Connector for SmartThings by downloading the datasheet here.

Yes, working with different Smart Home ecosystems can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. By adding more and more of these prebuilt cloud integrations, EVRYTHNG is making the Smart Home simpler and, well, smarter.

*Market sizing estimates extrapolated from publicly available sources.

Offering up the challenge; ‘Ask me anything!’ to a potential audience of 230 million Reddit users is a small step into the unknown.  This is what our intrepid CTO and co-founder Dom Guinnard threw himself into last Friday, when he hosted a Reddit AMA session on the Internet of Things, to coincide with the launch of his new book, Building the Web of Things, written with fellow EVRYTHNG co-founder Vlad Triffa.

Building the Web of Things book by Dominique Guinard and Vlad Trifa.

It was a chance to hear from a wider group of people about the IoT – a kind of informal barometer of geek public sentiment.  So what did we learn about attitudes towards the IoT?

Excitement. Fear. Optimism. Cynicism.

All in equal measure. And although it wasn’t what you could call a scientific survey, we definitely got a clear sense of what matters most to people.

Security top of the agenda

Unsurprisingly, the recurring theme that came through was the perception that the IoT and smart home technology in particular, makes us less safe. Couldn’t we stop all devices from directly connecting to the Internet, Dom was asked. Say, have a smart home manager or a central server on a ‘home LAN’, which controls all access to all smart products?

This, said Dom, is where today’s IoT gateways or home hubs come in. (EVRYTHNG, for example, has THNGHUB a local cloud gateway which provides a single access point to the home environment).  His prediction was that the next wave of IoT developments will see companies taking their learnings from securing big web systems into the embedded system world.  And as far as the devices themselves go, although security cannot ever be absolute, using existing protocols and in particular their open implementations like OpenSSL, means vulnerabilities can often be spotted and patched very quickly.

What about my privacy?

Just as important was the subject of privacy, which comes hand in hand with security.  How could the metadata about our everyday lives be used against us if we are hacked?  And what about the data that consumers voluntarily give to brands? Does the average user know exactly what it is, and how it will be used?  Shouldn’t there be a standardized model or vocabulary, a little like when you download an app and are informed what data will be accessed.

Dom’s view was that whilst such fears are completely understandable and in some cases justified, pragmatically it’s about the ‘give-gets’.  Its vital that brands give consumers full transparency of data ownership, and make sure the benefits are clear on what users get in return for giving this data.  The discussion acknowledged that this is a wider subject which revolves around national and international laws (think about the differences between the EU and the US regulations) and so governments play a leading role in turning the grey areas black and white.

How to raise standards

The lack of standardization around protocols and languages was brought up numerous times.  How does Dom view this, especially given his book focuses on this very topic?

Standardization will happen, just not as fast as we would like.   The IoT is slowly converging to the internet, in terms of network, with Zigbee, Zwave, Thread, Bluetooth all now being bridged to Internet protocols.  At the application layer, the Web and its associated open standards, dominates.  This is the ‘how’ of the IoT.   For the ‘what’, there are a lot of developments around the semantic web, which aim to promote common data formats for smart devices.  Key to progress is ‘openness’.

EVRYTHNG Co-Founder Dominique Guinard mid flow during his Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session.

What else got people going?

And then there were other questions a little more personal; ‘how smart is your home?’ ‘What devices do you have and recommend?’  It turns out there isn’t much time for TV in the Guinnard household – he has 20+ devices, both off-the-shelf products and homemade sensors – which all take time to maintain and troubleshoot.  What would be really great, to make the whole smart home work smarter, is a unified dashboard, giving consolidated status and management of all his products. (Adding more weight to the argument for using shared, open web standards – but that is one for another blog.)

And many more question besides – how will the world store the vast amount of data generated by the IoT, what part Bitcoin will play, and of course, how do you get a job working in the IoT industry (EVRYTHNG are hiring…)?

60 minutes of insightful, thought-provoking, troll-free Q&A.  Some fast typing, some fast thinking, and, then it was over.   IoT AMA AOK.

Click here to check out the full AMA session.