Keep it simple, stupid (a.k.a. the KISS principle). It’s the principle that we always have in our minds but we feel it’s extremely difficult to respect most of the times. Especially, when we’re busy with making new things, we tend to easily forget about it, keep on making, and eventually complicate the result without any good reason.
We currently have three big creations; Naran, Prota and MicroBot. As the number of users increases and our products gain more and more exposure online and offline, we are realizing we’ve been slowly going away from the KISS principle more or less.
For those who still have no idea what these three creations are, here they are.
- Naran : the name of the company (naran has no dictionary meaning but it’s a palindrome in English AND Korean, so we gave it a special meaning for ourselves)
- Prota : the name of the platform running things we build. It began as an operating system and now refers to our cloud platform. The name came from the first five letters of the word Protagonist.
- MicroBot : the name of a product category we give to “retrofitting” smart gadgets. Push and Sense fall into this.
MicroBot as a brand
To keep it simple and stupid (again), we start from our brand because it’s the first thing that our customers see. Starting from Sense, we won’t be telling our users to use Prota. Prota S will be discontinued, and all MicroBots will run on the cloud.
The cloud service will be called “MicroBot Cloud”, and the relay device between MicroBots and the Cloud will be called “MicroBot Hub”. All our existing Prota users (Prota S and Prota Pi users) can upgrade their devices to “MicroBot Hub” for free.
If you have been following us recently, you might be guessing MicroBot Cloud is Prota Charles, then you are 100% correct.
APIs and SDK
MicroBot Cloud will provide APIs and SDK. We will first release REST APIs, and perhaps, if you join our beta program, you can try the APIs already (they are available under Webhooks). When we release REST APIs, the only difference will be how you retrieve the auth tokens.
Prota is the technology behind all MicroBot products, so our developers will still see Prota on the dev website, API docs, etc.
Is the Cloud free?
Yes and no. We will provide the service at a reasonable price, and our current Prota users will get free access to the service (as well as our beta testers. Thank you all!).
MicroBot Cloud enables remote access to MicroBots from anywhere in the world. Amazon Alexa, IFTTT and Google Home integrations will be available through the Cloud, providing much more stable experience to our users.
What next?
MicroBot Cloud will be launched with MicroBot Sense. The upgrade for Prota S will also be available at the same time. Alexa and IFTTT integrations will be there with the upgrade, and Google Home and Clova integrations are coming in a couple of months.
It’s actually not the only names that we simplified. We have worked hard to simplify and optimize our platform and the way we think, and develop our products in the hope of delivering better user experience and solving real problems that matter.
