I don’t tend to believe that the launching of a new platform directly means that a market will be disrupted, because the word ‘platform’ is overused and misunderstood. However, with a financial backing of $775,000 by the VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Metamorphic Ventures, Mode is able to leverage the expertise of VC’s that have been in the tech space since the beginning of the internet. Especially KPCB caught my attention due to their previous investments in Google Inc., Twitter and many other very successful firms.

More on the technical side, Mode promises to ¨serve as a backend for IoT companies¨. Furthermore, ¨By handling all of the backend services, such as user and device management and secure real-time access control, companies that use MODE can focus on the things that matter the most to their users, like hardware manufacturing and mobile user experience.¨ This quote directly from the Mode website shows that it is a perfect fit for projects that customers at SODAQ engage in, enabling us to support their data management while we focus on creating the best devices for custom and autonomous IoT deploment.

They have created an API in which the majority of the communication between the device and their platform is standardised, which will hopefully create a technology shift between the larger corporates such as Philips and Bosch. Their API can be used in smaller private environments too, which is perfect for corporates who still have fears in opening up their data.

In terms of timing, I don’t think mode could have done any better as the Maker Faire in the Bay Area as well as the Internet of Things World in San Francisco are both this week. They will have direct access to all the customers they need, and hopefully they will continue to grow. With SODAQ I am going to contact them, to see if we can promote the platform to our customers and gain some visibility through them too.

Here is the link for the platform: http://www.tinkermode.com/

Whether it was the executive from Cisco during the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in London in October 2013 or the hardworking teams at the Maker Faire Newcastle in April 2015, everyone seems to have a different name, ambition, and prediction about the future of the internet.

The most recent trend I have noticed while traveling to different conferences and events is that big corporations tend to make up the fancy words to seem like they know what they are talking about, while the smaller companies are lost between the endless types of technology they can use  for the creations that they don’t even want. I have heard terms such as ¨The Internet of Everything¨ replacing just ¨The Internet of Things¨ and even rediculous creations such as ¨The Fog¨ being a layer between our devices and ¨The Cloud¨.

In all 3 years the progress has continued in off-the-shelf devices and components have continued to shrink. However, for the makers the progress has not occured fast enough yet. Cisco claims that there will be 20 Billion devices in the world by 2020, but currently the technology for developers often lacks quality and doesn’t convince the masses. Arduino has been the standard board for development for the last years, and requires a range of shields in order to actually be used in the field. As seen in the picture on the right, modified shields must be used to connect devices to the GPRS network, which is very costly, unreliable, and power-inefficient. Thankfully, along with a group of developers, I have had the pleasure to be at the frontier of IoT device development.