Words about Weeve straight from the CEO
The need to democratize data, the IoT landscape, Weeve on solving security issues and more.
“My vision is the democratization of data. This involves giving individuals back control over their own data by creating new, secure protocols and networks. These protocols and networks enable the trade and transportation of attested data streams to Weeve’s marketplaces. Commercialized data then becomes a digital asset.”
Having been a serial tech entrepreneur, Business Angel and IoT innovator with more than 25 years of experience in the information technology and telecommunications industry, I have closely observed the early adoption cycle for IoT over the years.
My first IoT company Relayr, aimed to solve current IIoT problems. Legacy systems, data silos and the lack of consistent industry standards are all too familiar problems for me. It is like Deja-vu, reminding me of my experiences in the 90s in ICT, when I worked for Cisco.
We built relayr as a middleware and IoT solutions providing company for the digital transformation of industries and enabled interoperability through industrial-grade platforms. This allowed businesses to create new solutions and revenue streams with data collected from any device, through any connectivity, throughout any IT ecosystem.
As an early IoT innovator, I can safely say the road, until now, has been filled with challenges. Like other visionaries before me, I continue to persist in establishing a new order, because I see the promise that lies ahead. Weeve, our new company, leverages blockchain technology to connect IoT devices to data marketplaces. From inception, we, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek (co-founder / CTO) and me have stressed security-by-design. By focusing on the fundamental aspect of security and trust before even talking about the connected world and data tradin, we are shifting data ownership and instilling trust and security back into data, while simultaneously breaking open locked, inaccessible data silos. The significance and value of data as a digital asset has come into light during the Cambridge Analytica where Facebook’s user data was leaked. Weeve ensures that your IoT data is secure and commercialized by you, the data owner. By stressing security-by-design, Weeve ensures that innovation does not override security and data privacy.
The problem with new IoT devices is that, both consumers and corporates are fascinated by IoT innovations that have already hit the market. These “smart” devices have sensors that communicate seamlessly over the Internet with other devices or the cloud, generating data that make the world safer, more productive, and healthier. An endless stream of new smart and connected things hit the market every day and a big challenge becomes more and more obvious: silos are forming where things should in fact be connected.
For example, take a smart home: Smart CO2 and smoke detectors (from Nest), smart locks from lockitron, smart fridge from Bosch, smart lights from Philips, smart TV from LG and so on. These devices all communicate to some server on the Internet, forming the premise of the Internet of Things of Internet-connected devices. However, IoT is a highly fragmented space, as these Internet-connected devices forming the web that IoT is, lack secure connectivity: They can’t even talk to each other at all. All these devices produce big data that goes without analysis and is effectively useless.
Forbes has argued that Data Scientists spend most of their time cleansing data, rather than analysing and using it. It is inconceivable to imagine the time required for individuals and legacy companies to derive insights from trillions of GB of big data streams created by IoT.
Weeve has gone one step further after making sense of big data. We are creating a singular platform, where users will be able to control their array of fragmented devices through a unified interface. it would defy logic to create multiple platforms and apps to control your ‘smart’ environment. I don’t even think that the user should be involved in managing these devices. In the future, these devices will be capable to sense, communicate and make decisions, autonomously, but with Weeve they will be doing this securely. The idea of security-by-design and connected future forms the basis on which we have built weeveOS and the Weeve Network upon.
The weeveOS instills trust and security in producers and consumers across all IoT levels by leveraging the TEE-OS and the MQTTS comuunication protocol (https://medium.com/@weeve/introducing-weeveos-the-first-operating-system-designed-for-blockchain-enabled-internet-of-things-1521572812c2) on top of the Blockchain technology, while simultaneously circumnavigating scalability issues. More so, it allows for the commercialization of data as a tradable digital asset, by democratising it.
At the core of the IoT business case is that (Weeve’s) stakeholders are producers and consumers of data, a nascent digital asset, and that shifts their role to value creators.
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In the second series of ‘Straight from the CEO’, I will elaborate on solving imminent IoT challenges with Weeve, our business model and our wonderful team.
