Things Lab’s CEO interviewed by The Cryptonomist
On the 11th of February, 2019, our CEO Stefano Della Valle shared with The Cryptonomist a few insights about what’s happening in the IOTA Ecosystem, what we are doing as a company and talked about our products and our partnership with HPE Italia.
Edit (14/02/2019)
The article which appeared on The Cryptonomist was first edited (without involving the author in the process, which is very worrying since it is a personal opinion) and then deleted for reasons to us unknown, other than being generically “disliked” because of its content by the IOTA Foundation and High Mobility. So far no entity got directly in touch with us to explain their disagreements and clearly point out the “false information” included in the interview, so this is still the unedited original version of the piece. We can guarantee that as far as we know the content is reasonably truthful and in no way false or diffamatory, we are nevertheless open to discussion if someone finds it inappropriate or misleading in any way.
What are the latest news related to the IOTA project?
The activity of the IOTA Foundation is constant and diversified on many projects. In addition to the core team that oversees the development of the main platform, i.e. the Trinity nodes and the wallet, there are at least two other teams working on specific projects.
One is Qubic, which is essentially a system of oracles that will generate data with consensus, and the other is ICT, which is a distributed version of the nodes designed for real-time applications in specific contexts. For example, ICT has been adopted as a communication component between players of a new online game.
The development of the standard node progresses according to the roadmap. The latest version implements the local snapshot of nodes that allows even small machines to participate in the distributed network with minimal costs. This new feature, however, involves the loss of the history of non-economic transactions which are no longer necessary to ensure the consistency of the ledger, this means that Permanodes, i.e. nodes which provide the entire history upon subscription, become available in parallel.
So, how would you define the overall status of the project?
I would say that we are coming out of the development, testing and validation phases, to enter the operational phase in production. The platform remains formally in beta (the Bitcoin network is also still in beta, despite its tenth birthday), but the level of reliability and efficiency is now suitable for providing business services.
Are there any IOTA-based projects about to be released?
Yes, the news of agreements with leading companies and industries follow one another, but most importantly, live tests of certain applications that target the automotive and tracking market have begun.
In particular, I would like to mention the high-mobility.com platform, featuring among its partners Volkswagen and Porsche, which have been part of the IOTA group for some time now, but also Mercedes, which has no formal relationship with the Foundation and has therefore validated the idea independently.
In the field of industrial automation, I would also like to point out that Bosch has released the new development kit for its IoT solutions, in which, in addition to the usual protocols, IOTA is present with the entire functional library.
What services does High-mobility.com offer?
It is a platform that currently targets web and mobile application developers and provides very effective tools for car communication. The vehicles are equipped with devices that can collect more than fifty different pieces of data and publish them on IOTA in real time. Apps can then use this data and provide services to vehicle owners. After the test phase, the apps will be published and available for purchase. This is a very interesting use case that takes advantage of many of the features of the IOTA platform:
- The data is published on the distributed ledger, but the High-Mobility platform has one or more private nodes integrated with the public nodes that guarantee the apps both reliability and the necessary response times
- The data produced by the vehicles are included in a “Masked Authenticated Message Channel” that protects the privacy of the vehicle owner
- Compliance with the GDPR regulation since the data are not stored permanently, but will be deleted from the network after a certain period of time
- Use of pay-per-use apps in order to reward IOTA developers
An interesting application of this platform was presented in Toronto a few months ago: thanks to the information collected from the vehicle, an insurance broker was able to provide insurance coverage of the vehicle with a price that varied according to the conditions and behaviour of the driver, even giving insurers the opportunity to bid dynamically.
And what are you doing in Italy?
The Italian IOTA community is very active thanks to various groups of independent developers involved in both open and private projects. The next Italian meetup will be held on April 3rd and 4th as part of the IOTHINGS event.
From the business point of view I can tell you what we are doing with Things Lab, a company created specifically to do research and development on IOTA technology, of which I am the administrator.
First of all, we are working on a very specific and interesting theme: “the identity of things”.
It is a building block that can be used in many contexts, from anti-counterfeiting and industry 4.0 to traceability.
We are also developing solutions for industries aimed at exploiting the advantages of the IOTA ledger (in particular the security and confidentiality of data available on the public network).
But I would say that the most interesting news is the partnership between Things Lab and HPE.
Can you give us any information about the details of this partnership?
Of course. But first of all, I would like to point out that Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the first major player in the IT/ICT market that has understood the importance of IOTA technology and, in collaboration with Things Lab, has started to propose it to its customers in order to address the needs that today are not fully met by traditional solutions.
In my opinion these are two great news: with a pinch of pride I point out that the initiative was born from the Italian HPE management and I hope it will soon spread to other countries, but above all, it is the first time (at least officially) that a global IT company adopts and proposes solutions based on a public distributed ledger.
As for the details of the partnership, we want to work together to provide medium and large companies with solutions to multiple problems, making full use of our expertise, IOTA technology and HPE systems.
Then, given our nature as developer-researchers at the extreme limits of IT/ICT innovation, we will look for synergies and possibilities of integration of IOTA with HPE’s project “The Machine”.
“The Machine”? What is it?
IOTA is in charge of IoT and IoT devices produce data. Billions of devices will produce a huge amount of data that can be used for multiple purposes but at least three of them require a special system: deep learning, real-time problem solving and trend analysis. These application contexts require processing as much data as possible in real time.
HPE’s The Machine project aims to create supercomputers which, in addition to having a large processing capacity, also have a huge amount of memory with low energy consumption and very high access speed.
My idea, which I would like to verify in the field, is that IOTA and The Machine can be integrated allowing to simplify data collection thanks to IOTA and then being able to achieve massive processing with The Machine. It is also interesting to verify the integration scenarios between Qubic and The Machine, allowing to obtain consent (and therefore publicly recognised validity) of information derived from the amount of data made available by The Machine.
Very interesting. What can you tell us about Qubic?
Development is in progress and I think we will soon see some concrete results. For those who look at IOTA as a speculative token, I think it will be an interesting moment.
How so?
Qubic is a distributed data processing system that produces consensus on both the output and the input data used. The nodes that execute the Qubics (equivalent to Ethereum smart contracts) will be remunerated.
So in practice Qubic will be the equivalent of the mining system of Ethereum or Bitcoin, except that instead of consuming energy to “mine”, the Qubic nodes produce useful data that someone is willing to pay, so a useful and efficient energy consumption because it involves only the amount of nodes necessary to validate specific data.
This scenario, on the one hand, opens up to interesting applications that we could call an advanced version of cloud computing, on the other, it triggers an economy of the IOTA token.
With Bitcoin and Ethereum the token is necessary in order to use the ledger and this has produced the growth of value over time; IOTA becomes essential in order to use Qubic and it is therefore reasonable to expect the same effect on the price.
