Over the past couple of years, many enterprise IoT applications have produced disappointing financial results. Several high-profile industrial IoT projects (which I will not mention here) got bogged down in implementation and were pared back substantially. Some IoT products and solutions have done okay, but most have underperformed expectations. As of June 2019, Gartner’s highest-rated IoT Platforms — PTC, Software AG, and Hitachi — still had not risen to the ‘Leaders’ (Magic) quadrant.
What happened? Were the revenue models wrong? Or was the tech to blame? And what will happen next?
The Problem
In Feb 2019, I wrote an article (The Strategy…
But it will be much bigger than the Internet.
On Tuesday, July 27, 1869, the naturalist and glaciologist, John Muir, wrote an interesting observation in his journal :
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Pause and consider this for a moment.
Even within narrower contexts, this is true. Technologies, for instance, are inextricable from solutions.
Technologies can be defined as discrete elements though, even if they are bound to other things. Buzzwords, on the other hand, often aren’t well defined or discrete.
For instance, a salesman recently said to me, “We’re doing 5G AI. “
Well……
Exploring Alternative Sources of Funding
A stem-cell researcher I work with could help cure sickle cell disease with a simple product. When I first heard this, I was skeptical. How could one product, a lab equipment product, have much effect on a disease? Now, a year later, it’s clear that the science is there, but the engineering isn’t. Eventually, sickle cell disease will be remediated. How fast this happens, and how fast similar innovations become possible, depends partly on the VC vetting process — a process we made a wager on. This is a story about the experiment we ran, the bet I lost, and…
Over the past two years, I have spoken with technical folks, salespeople, and executives at more than 100 IoT-related companies, and I have learned two things: 1) IoT is huge, 2) almost everyone defines IoT differently.
In this article, I share what I have learned about IoT platforms and one way to categorize and think about them.
What Is an IoT Platform?
IoT is much more expansive than what most of us think of as the traditional Internet. It is growing faster too. There are more devices, protocols, security concerns, RF frequencies, architectural components, services, data, and related products. IoT is massive and broad.
As…
This article explores three fundamental causes of failure for emerging tech projects and how to avoid them.
Failing has become an important and cherished part of our shared cultural tech heritage, like hoodies and all-male AWS re:invents. But plain failing may not be enough anymore. Almost anyone can put cocoon hammocks in a loft office and build an app nobody uses. To stand out, try failing creatively. One example is Watermelon Oreos.
Okay, I admit it is important to be willing to fail a certain amount to innovate. Yet what is an acceptable failure rate? An exec told me recently…
Daniel Sexton
Tech Strategist. www.redchipventures.com
