Author: jeffyactive
-

Society can HOPE for a better Link
Last weekend, at the Eleventh HOPE, we took a front row seat for the talk entitled LinkNYC: Free Public Wi-Fi That Isn’t Free or Public knowing it would critically challenge the recent local deployment of connectivity infrastructure, not unlike that which is core to our vision. LinkNYC is an infrastructure project currently being rolled out…
-

Investing in a Value-First Sharing Economy
Last month we had the pleasure of reading The Sharing Economy and subsequently meeting the author, Arun Sundararajan, with whom we shared our praise, at the New Cities Summit. The book, which we’ve added to our bibliography, eloquently ties together many of our pioneering thoughts on innovation and economics, which we’ll discuss here, starting with…
-

LPLAN as amenaBLE to M2M as LPWAN
This week we attended the Wavefront IoT Roadshow where much of this year’s hype was around LPWAN technologies which allow simple, inexpensive radio devices to communicate short messages with cellular base stations kilometers away. An excellent example of the potential of this technology is the SMOCKEO smoke detector which automatically and securely communicates status and…
-

RFID Journal Live 2016
Our team have just returned from RFID Journal Live, the largest RFID conference in the world. We had previously attended in 2013, an experience we discussed in this blog post where we concluded that: we continue to pursue our vision of simple, accessible active RFID, and we strongly encourage other vendors to follow suit in…
-

A Fool to Open Source
This week, while paying a visit to one of our Fortune 500 clients, they asked us why we open sourced our software. “Anyone could just copy your work” they said. “Aren’t you afraid that someone steals your business from you?” Wow. We hadn’t thought of that. We just figured we were following the Lean Startup…
-

Retail is Ready
On August 30th, 2012, presenting to a packed room of mentors from the FounderFuel accelerator, we pronounced that our technology platform’s first focus would be on retail. The monochromatic slide above is how we broke the news. Were they convinced? Anything but. Retail isn’t ready, they said. Then, almost exactly a year later, Apple released…
-
Thinking the Unthinkable, Connecting the Unconnectable
This past week, at Bluetooth World 2016, the Bluetooth SIG unveiled a new slogan: “unthinkably connected”. Core to the new branding is how everything, including life, is inherently connected. Watch the video and meet the new blue. We couldn’t help but notice, during the opening sequence, the striking resemblance to that of our 2013 Startup…
-
The Pervasive Sharing Economy
When we talk about the sharing economy today, Uber and AirBnB are the inevitable go-to examples. Automobiles are underutilised resources. Connect drivers and passengers via their mobile devices to an online marketplace and utilisation, hence efficiency, soars! Unoccupied rooms and residences are underutilised resources. Add mobile connectivity and an online marketplace and the value of…
-

Vint Cerf and the Good Fight for the IoT
At the 2nd IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things we had the honour and privilege to hear Vint Cerf, a true role model and one of the fathers of the Internet, present a keynote on the IoT. More than that, we had the opportunity to snap the photo above as we shook his hand…
-

The Bank of Personal Data
At the second IEEE World Forum on the Internet of Things in Milan, Italy, Roberto Minerva of Telecom Italia gave a keynote speech covering everything IoT from the perspective of a telecom operator. Among the topics discussed was the inevitable question of “control of data”. Who should control your personal data? How should your personal…