BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

6 IoT Startups That Make Connecting Things To The Cloud A Breeze

Following
This article is more than 8 years old.

The ubiquitous network connectivity, affordable compute power combined with rich insights make IoT valuable for enterprises and consumers. The convergence of devices, cloud, and analytics is creating an opportunity for independent software vendors and system integrators. Developers are preparing for new programming models based on microcontrollers and low-powered devices. To realize the true potential of Internet of Things (IoT), the data generated by sensors has to be analyzed in real-time.

A few startups are transforming application development to meet the needs of the evolving IoT trend. They are building APIs, tools, and platforms that enable developers to build IoT applications that connect devices with the cloud. Here are six promising startups that are building platforms made for IoT.

Konekt

Chicago-based Konekt was in the news recently for raising $1.3 million seed fund to build a connected platform for IoT devices. It brings together a powerful union of cellular plans, cloud infrastructure, and APIs. Though most IoT developers prefer serial communications, WiFi, and Bluetooth, the protocols come with many constraints. Konekt is building upon GSM’s popularity and availability for machine-to-machine communication. The company has three offerings:

  • A global SIM card that works in 100 countries
  • Device management APIs to provision, manage, and troubleshoot devices
  • Cloud data broker and storage for persisting the sensor data

Konekt implements enterprise-grade security by isolating the devices and encrypting the data flowing between devices and cloud. The API only exposes its cloud and does not support other cloud infrastructures.

Temboo

Started in 2013 in New York City, Temboo makes it incredibly easy for developers to connect sensors to the cloud. It is a cloud-based middleware to connect with hundreds of services exposed by storage providers, social media networks, and content providers. Dubbed as Choreos (short for choreography), Temboo generates code snippets to consume the service APIs in popular languages such as PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Ruby. It also has native SDKs for traditional languages and runtimes. Developers just enter their credentials for each of the services that they want to consume, choose their favorite language, and copy the code from the browser into the editor. Temboo partnered with Arduino to include its headers, libraries, and SDK in Arduino Yun, a microcontroller development board that has built-in WiFi. Developers using other flavors, Uno, and Leonardo, can download the library and samples. As IoT development goes mainstream, Temboo has the potential to become the default middleware for cloud APIs.

TempoIQ

Formerly known as TempoDB, TempoIQ is another Chicago-based startup that simplifies storing and analyzing sensor data. In July 2014, the company evolved from a time-series database provider to an IoT backend. TempoIQ has an API layer, storage service, and an analytics backend to perform historical data analysis. Developers can start monitoring sensor data with just three lines of code. TempoIQ’s strength is in its analytical pipeline that defines a sequence of operations that are applied to a stream of data originating from  sensors, resulting in a new output stream of data points. Each pipeline operation contains a mathematical function such as max and min. Sophisticated analysis can be performed by chaining pipeline operations. TempoIQ built SDKs in popular languages for sensor management, data collection, storage, analysis, and alerting.

thethings.iO

Barcelona-based thethings.iO is the latest entrant into the IoT cloud market. It proclaims to be the “Amazon Web Services (AWS) for IoT companies”. Though it seems to be yet another backend with ingestion API and real-time analytics support, the key differentiating factor is in its interoperability. thethings.iO is one the few platforms to expose both REST and CoAP APIs. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a protocol designed to be used in low-powered devices to allow them to communicate over the Internet. It is targeted at sensors, switches, valves, and actuators that are controlled remotely via standard Internet networks. Both REST and CoAP follow the same pattern of using HTTP verbs. thethings.iO uses CoAP to perform operations like activation, reading, writing and subscribing to sensors and channels. After completing the sign-up process, developers can grab an activation code to start pushing the sensor data to the platform. The node.js SDK is available on github.

Xively

Xively is a division of LogMeIn, the company known for the remote access and collaboration products including Rescue, Boldchat, join.me, and Cubby. Formerly known as COSM and Pachube, Xively is positioned as a PaaS built for IoT. Directory services, data services, and business services are the key components of Xively. The platform supports REST, WebSockets and MQTT protocols to connect devices to Xively Cloud Services. There are native SDKs for Android, Arduino, ARM mbed, Java, PHP, Ruby, and Python languages. Developers can use the workflow of prototyping, deployment and management through the tools provided by Xively.

SensorCloud

Launched in 2011, SensorCloud is  a product from LORD MicroStrain Sensing Systems which has the history of developing sensors used in biomechanical research. SensorCloud is a sensor data storage, visualization, and remote management platform. The platform supports the lifecycle of IoT applications starting from data acquisition to visualization to monitoring and analysis. MathEngine is a service to analyze the data stored in SensorCloud. The platform is optimized for LORD MicroStrain’s sensors and gateways. Developers dealing with 3rd party sensors can ingest data via OpenData API or the provided CSV uploader. The open source SDK is available on github.

Bonus: PubNub

While it is not exactly a startup anymore, PubNub is a platform that provides real-time network service. Its vision is to enable developers to build real-time apps as quickly as creating a web page. The PubNub data stream network provides global cloud infrastructure and essential building blocks for real-time interactivity. As one of the early movers in this space, the company claims to process 3 million real-time messages per second originating from 100 million devices in a month. Powered by 14 data centers, the network delivers under a quarter of a second latency from any location in the world. With the experience and track record, it is only natural for PubNub to become the real-time channel for IoT devices. From ingestion to analytics, the platform has everything to build end-to-end IoT solution. PubNub has native SDKs for traditional IoT platforms like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. One of the interesting features of PubNub is the web-based console to view and debug events.

At Facebook’s developer conference, F8, Parse announced the IoT SDK. It allows Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Texas Instruments CC3200 devices. Though top cloud providers such AWS, Google and Microsoft have the essential building blocks for ingesting, storing and analyzing sensor data, they are yet to ship tools and SDKs specific to microcontrollers and embedded devices. Going forward, we will see traditional PaaS and MBaaS vendors adding IoT capabiltiies to their stack.