July 26, 2014
The creation of the Internet of Everything has been going on for a while now. It is easy to find estimates of the number of connected devices some years from now and how much the market will be worth but still hard to find the evidences that it actually happens and in which pace. A year ago I declared that we entered the teenage phase meaning that early moving customer started to go from power point and plans to pilot trials and roll-out. I still believe we are in the teenage phase but another important indicator – mergers and acquisitions – is starting to show that we are coming closer to the real take off. Because of this I will try to track relevant M&A deals in my blog onwards.
Intel recently acquired
Basis Science with their advanced health tracker,
Google has spent about $5B acquiring
Waze,
Nest and
Dropcam but PTC’s recent acquisition of
Axeda for $170 million in cash following their $112 million
Thingworx acquisition in December are even more interesting to me.
PTC provides systems and solutions to a long list of very large companies globally and they obviously believe being a leader in IoT system and service enablement is key. I believe the Internet of Everything will be grown-up in less than two years from now and insist that the key difference from when people and companies were connected to the Internet is that ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse this time.
1 Comment | 
Business Models, Cloud computing, IoE, IoT, M2M, M2M Service Enablers, Tools and platforms | Tagged: Axeda, Basis, Business model, Dropcam, Google, Intel, Internet of Everything, Internet of Things, M&A, Nest, PTC, ThingWorx, Waze | 
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Posted by magnusmelander
June 24, 2014
Mergers and acquisitions indicate rapidly growing markets ahead. Google made a 3.2B$ acquisition of Nest in January. Now they just followed on with an acquisition of the Wi-Fi surveillance camera maker Dropcam for 555M$. Thermostats, smoke alarms and cameras – what is Googles plan? I think it is the homes and maybe offices they are after. There are many thermostats, smoke alarms and smart cameras available but Nest and Dropcam definitely comes with a cool design which should at least bring home healthier margins. People love nice products! Google has always been interested in Wi-Fi and it’s not a wild bet that there will be Wi-Fi in homes and offices. But this can’t be enough, they must be going after a service model with recurring revenues and collecting data from these devices to store, manage, analyze and sell. I have always claimed that “data is the gold of M2M” and I am confident that Google shares that view.
Provided I’m right, I still questions that idea. Even if Google spend another couple of B$ to buy companies with cool things (Sonos could be a good target) they will never get market share over maybe 5-10% and scattered around. I understand that they could sell the information back to the users of these devices but that seems to be a difficult path to get the money back. And if they try to sell the data elsewhere I would believe the owners of the devices and policymakers would have a view on that. But Google knows all that. The recurring revenues are obviously attractive but it feels questionable to pay this much to get there.
On top of all I believe their will have to be at least three separate wireless networks in homes: an unmanaged Wi-Fi with good performance but only best effort services, a really secure fully managed network for security related applications like door locks, surveillance and medical monitoring, and maybe even a third managed low bandwidth network for connecting things like fridges, coffee machines, etc. And even worse, we will see a mix of WAN and LAN technologies being used as well. I simply don’t see how one can deliver sensible services like surveillance or smoke detection over an unmanaged best effort Wi-Fi network. Successful companies with such services like Verisure today typically manage their own network.
So I am probably wrong. Goggle sees something I don’t. And they also understand the down-side of connected hardware since Nest just had to recall 440.000 smoke alarms due to a potential risk that they didn’t alarm immediately. But I am happy for their acquisitions since it stimulates entrepreneurs, customers and other companies who consider playing a sincere role in building the Internet of Everything.
1 Comment | Business Models, Consumer market, IoE, IoT, M2M | Tagged: Business model, camera, Dropcam, Google, Home network, Internet of Everything, Internet of Things, Machine-to-Machine, Nest, Smart home, Smoke detector, Sonos, Surveillance camera, thermostat, Wi-Fi | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
The creation of the Internet of Everything has been going on for a while now. It is easy to find estimates of the number of connected devices some years from now and how much the market will be worth but still hard to find the evidences that it actually happens and in which pace. A year ago I declared that we entered the teenage phase meaning that early moving customer started to go from power point and plans to pilot trials and roll-out. I still believe we are in the teenage phase but another important indicator – mergers and acquisitions – is starting to show that we are coming closer to the real take off. Because of this I will try to track relevant M&A deals in my blog onwards.
connectcompute 