Episode 4: The evolution of an IoT services business and build a connected garden

Spring is in the air, so this week’s podcast celebrates with a preview of an upcoming connected garden product that looks pretty smart — the Edyn sensor and connected water valve system that will hit Home Depot shelves in May and is available for pre-orders. Kevin I discuss the solar-powered sensors, and although it’s iOS-only for the time being, there’s reportedly an Android app coming some time in the future. We also talk about my plans for nighttime bathroom lighting, an awesome beta app that uses the Android lock-screen to control your connected devices in the home called Reach and more.

Michael Simon, CEO and Chairman of LogMeIn
Michael Simon, CEO and Chairman of LogMeIn

This week’s guest focuses on the business benefits of adding connectivity to your products with guest Michael Simon, the CEO and chairman of LogMeIn, the maker of the Xively service. Xively provides the back end infrastructure for connected devices, and recently launched an upgrade that offered better compliance and rules associated with devices and data. Simon focused on why that matters, what types of businesses can easily take advantage of connected products to offer higher value services and what the evolution of a connected business looks like. At the very end he dives into the architecture of the Xively platform, which boasts an “MQTT-compliant” messaging layer the Xively team built as well as off-the-shelf MySQL and Cassandra databases. I was hoping for something a little more like a knowledge graph given the relationships it would have to track, but apparently that’s not under the hood.

So, listen up for some inspiration on the home front or for your business, and feel free to let me know what you think.

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Download the MP3 file for this week’s show here

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guests: Michael Simon, Chairman and CEO of LogMeIn

  • The Edyn garden sensor doesn’t feed you data, it feeds you information.
  • Using the Hue, SmartThings and a motion sensor for some nighttime bathroom lighting
  • Some sweet software for your Android lock screen from Reach
  • How to move from a connected product to a connected business
  • How do you architect a system to connect millions of endpoints. Simon can tell you.