The Internet of Things, a concept now about two decades old, continues to represent incredibly huge commercial potential, yet much of it remains unrealized. Cost is a big reason why.
“The Internet of Things has thus far been the ‘Internet of Expensive Things,” said Steve Statler, senior vice president of marketing at Wiliot, an IoT technology start-up that is hoping to change that through its development small, thin, low-cost, intelligent computing tags capable of sensing and communicating to the cloud a range of environmental data about any product or packaged they are attached to.
Wiliot packages the resulting offering as “sensing as a service,” a subscription approach to IoT under which subscribing companies would pay “pennies per asset,” Statler told Fierce Electronics. “We want to shift from an internet of billions of expensively-connected things to an internet of trillions of less expensively-connected things,” he said.
The San Diego company recently announced it has raised $200 million in a Series C funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to help fund its ambitions to do that. SoftBank joined a long list of existing big-name Wiliot investors, including Amazon Web Services; Avery Dennison; M Ventures, which is the corporate VC of Merck KGaA; NTT DOCOMO Ventures; Qualcomm Ventures LLC; Samsung Venture Investment Corp.; Verizon Ventures, and several others.
How it works
Wiliot’s tags, what the company called IoT Pixels, can be made in the form of thin, stamp-like labels can be attached to a wide variety of products and packages to collect data and transmit that data via Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to the Wiliot Cloud, allowing companies in many industries to access data pertaining to temperature, humidity, fill-level, package movement, condition, status and location. The insights gained can help them to better manage their supply chains, costs, revenue expectations and even recycling strategies, the company said.
If that sounds a bit like RFID, it could be viewed as a next-generation, lower-cost more intelligent take on RFID. Wiliot used to manufacture the tags and sell them, but now it licenses its IoT Pixel technology to other companies, including major RFID tag suppliers like Avery Dennison. Those companies can make the IoT Pixels on the same machinery they use to make RFID tags, Statler said, eliminating additional cost for new manufacturing equipment.
Wiliot’s tags also leverage Bluetooth, a widely available mode of connectivity already embedded in smartphones and other devices, so the IoT Pixels don’t require additional, special-purpose RFID scanners. But, Wiliot’s tags also deliver more value than traditional RFID tags because they are “intelligent computing chips” that can gather a wider variety of data, encrypt that data and transmit it to the cloud, representing a “significant evolution from RFID,” Statler said.
Data security
Wiliot tags have multiple encryption keys using AES 128 encryption technology. That level of security could allow them to be placed on and remain on products intended for use in consumer homes and businesses, continuing to securely transmit data to product providers even as end users are using the products. This could help end customers take advantage of automatic reordering and replacement capabilities, and help product providers to better manage their relationships with their customers.
Though Wiliot licenses its technology to companies that may have their own ideas how to use it, Statler said Wiliot created its tags with end customer privacy in mind, and that “whoever pays for the tags is the owner of the data, and they are accountable for it.” A service that uses the IoT Pixels to help enable capabilities like automatic reordering should be “an opt-in for consumers, not an opt-out,” he said.
The company plans to announce the latest version of its IoT Pixels within the next few months.
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