Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile to Mobile (M2M) are certainly two of the hottest areas of technology. However, there are a few veterans who have been working on these technologies for many years before they had fancy names and became such hot property.
The largest challenge with bringing these types of products to market is getting the entire ecosystem right. This is a much bigger challenge than making the latest wearable technology look cool (though that is important, too). The ecosystem needs to be able to connect to a device, manage it, collect data from it and provide value from that data. And, of course, it all needs to be simple to set up and has to work (at least most of the time!).
Getting it right requires world-class industrial design, hardware design, firmware design, communications strategy and cloud software support. More often than not, you will also need a customer-facing presence in the form of mobile, web and now even watch apps.
Here are some of the areas that we can help you with:
- Choosing a mobile technology, chipset vendor, and cellular provider
- Cellular:
- Negotiating cellular / IoT pricing direct from carriers or through aggregators
- Evaluating coverage / pricing for your needs (USA, North America, Rest of World)
- Building financial models for SaaS pricing / margin for IoT services
- Software
- Firmware Development
- Communications Architecture
- Cloud Strategy
- Mobile Strategy
- Data Storage and Mining
- Hardware Design
- Low Cost Prototyping
- Cellular/WiFi
- Zigbee
- Bluetooth Low Energy
- SOC
- Avoiding long lead time and obsolete and problem parts
- Hardware Manufacturing
- Prototype builds of 10-200
- First limited production run 500
- High scale
- Domestic vs. offshore Mexico or Asia
- Adding IoT into an existing product
- Build vs. buy decisions
- Mobile Payments/PCI