the internet of things middleware battle

after having mastered the social graph (aka facebook) and the knowledge graph (aka google knowledge graph), it is now the time to tackle the "physical graph", also known as the "internet of things" (IoT). this was the mantra of the 2012 paris edition of leweb. and while more and more consumer products appear, behind the curtains, the "battle of the middleware" just started.

while the concept of IoT is around since 1999, only now smart consumer products appear. be it clever thermostats (nest), emotional email writing interfaces (muse), seemingly intelligent connected toys (ubooly) or the omnipresent activity monitors (fitbit, fuel). and they are just the beginning of a wave, which should reach it´s full extend in 10 years according to tony fadell, founder of nest. 

there is something, which lies under the surface of those equally interesting tools and toys though. how do all those physicals devices get connected and how are the data managed in a meaningful way for the user? when exploring this, one discovers a "battle of the middlewares". 

whatever new trend the it-sector is running after there is one common phenomena to be observed - and IoT is no exception to this. everyone like´s to be "the one" in the middle - the one to rule them all. thus not only enabling a multitude of services with reduced implementation time but also harvesting through system lock-in in the long run.

at leweb alone three middleware solutions for IoT were introduced. smarthings, an ambitious kickstarter project trying to cover the whole stack, from development platform to dedicated hardware. sense, from the founder of the wonderful but not so profitable nabaztag, more focusing on the data integration side. and finally ninja blocks, a startup looking more at the hardware side with a open source approach.

but that´s not all yet. there are more folks on the battleground than those three:

on the european level, the internet of things initiative and the open source solution for the internet of things in the cloud try to set the general framework for the connected world of things. then there is the early IoT middleware project hydra and if that would not be enough, there are another nine contex-aware middleware systems at hand. 

and if the middleware multiverse would not be enough, big corporates like ibm enter the battle and throw the messaging queuing telemetry transport protocol "MQTT", the equivalent of the http protocol for objects, into the game.

so what todo with all that?

well, when setting of to tackle a physical graph project, one might consider the following three things. first, lookout if there is a softwarestack already existing that allows a faster implementation time of one´s own project.

second, all those projects are a actually a "map" where to find the right talent to implement one´s own project. 

third and finally given the time frame until mass adoption for IoT products, financial investments to create real physical goods, the additional costs & time for pivoting requires even more focusing on the minimal viable product in combination with alternative investment approaches like crowdfunding. but that´s another topic to be covered.

startupweek2011: the four winners

the startupweek 2011 - a new startup conference including a startup competition held in vienna - had four winners: the conference hosts, the startup region vienna, mysugr & mysugr. and this is why.

for the first time ever a significant startup-conference was organized this very week (3. - 7. oct. 2011) in vienna. besides the startup competitions at leweb and europas the startupweek left a serious mark in the european internet startup scene.

empowered by the success of their startuplive events, the conference organizer STARTeurope , supported by initial factor, mixed four ingredients for their success. their very own entrepreneurial spirit, the professional network of inital factor with the announcement of their new fund speedinvest & the involvement of techcrunchUK, aka mike butcher (find his coverage here).

being overbooked with max. 1.300 paritcipants allowed, including 100 speakers, 500 startup applications with 50 invited startups from all over europe, STARTeurope delivered a professional managed conference.  the cross over of the monarchy style location with the future of european internet startups just added to the success.

while vienna is recognized for the quality of living, it does not have  the label as being a startup city -  like london, paris or berlin. quite to the contrary, there are some austrian startups which stated in private discussions, that they should have started their business directly in london and not in vienna/austria. one main reason being the lack of venture capital funding.

luckily for the growing vienna startup scene, speedinvest offeres now a initial funding source. one must not overlook though, that follow up investments will still require the startups to look abroad. with only one local private early-stage investor, startups in vienna do face a local monopoly. thanks to the mobility of new startups like egoarchive, which recently moved to copenhagen, this can be only considered as a problem for those not willing to follow the money. 

therefore combining quality of living, a growing ecosystems of startups with new funding possibilites, vienna just upgraded itself in the european startup landscape.

and then there is mysugr. their startup idea born out of their own personal experience with diabetes, the founders frank westermann and fredrik debong (also co-founder of STARTeurope) won the hearts and the wits of the jury and the audience. 

mysugr makes logging the daily diet easy and provides help for the diabetic on how to manage his daily nutrition with the help of their mobile app. unlike competitors like "on track diabetes" the app and the services around are a "medical device" grade. mysugr is in alpha mode, but take applications here. see also a video where fredrik explains what mysugr does here.

so why is mysugr a two time winner? 

not because they won both prices (€30.000, 3 weeks in silicon valley) of the startup competition. not because the rocked the audience to standing ovations including a champaign shower for mike butcher - the outstanding host of the startup competition finale. 

but (one) because the showed that it is worth to bring one´s very own startup idea to live and fight it through. and (secondly) for the exposure they generated by inspiring the audience & the jury at the pitching competition. this will turbo-boost them in their next steps towards customers, investors and industry cooperations. 

while the future of mysugr looks promising many challenges lay ahead of them. the same holds for the startupweek2012, as the organizers set their own bars high. being a startup by themselves, that will however only encourage them to make it even better in 2012.   

estc2009 & leweb: do startup competitions bring visibility?

what do have collibra, flimmit & gnowsis and stribe, tigerlily & cloudsplit have in common? they are all young startups. they all hard won prices at two recent international startups competitions. and they need to be seen by potential customers & investors.

startups face many challenges, one of them is visibility. a way to address challenge, is to compete at startup competitions, like at estc and le web.

the third european semantic technology conference (estc) startup competition had 16 invited startups from 12 countries competing. at seven minutes per pitch only the well prepared teams

could bring their message across. many forgot to talks about how to make money though - or did at least not have the courage to present a „freemium“ model. see here for the video coverage.

at le web, being more internet-minded, the 16 startups as a majority looked to earn money with premium services, based on users gained by free basic services.

as business angels and venture capital money is currently scare in europe and probaply will be for 2010, sticking out of the crowd and gaining attention is a key. so how did the winners perform?

stribe already competed before. making it into the techcrunch50 in 2009 was the first attempt. leweb was the next, this time finishing in 1st place.

but does it really bring attention? does winning competitions bring the wanted visibility? gaeol delalleu, cto of stribes, thinks so. at leweb, he was approached by five venture capitalists.

looking at a streamgraph of the corresponding twitter activity, visibility seemed to get a strong push around leweb as well.

the profile of stribes is in the twitterworld strongly associated related with leweb is obviously strongly correlated with the startup competition.

illustrations thanks to http://www.neoformix.com.

collibra took a different approach to get visible on the fist hand. they made it into a price waterhouse coopers report and won the scientipole initiative award before gaining the first place at estc. if they got approached by vc is not know until they will start to leverage the prize when they start pitching for money in the next year. to know more on collibra listen to this interview.

based on the shere size differential (1:10) between estc and leweb as well as the fact that the semantic world is just about (!) to discover the use of tools like twitter, the results are less meaningful and the streamgraph did not reveal the option to change the timeframe according to the event.

a smaller, more focused event like the estc can significantly boost visibility, as investors attending the estc are already focused on semantic technologies.

what both, stribe and collbra, have in common is, that they have no immediate need for investment. however both are powering up for next rounds in 2010. the visibility is already gained.

leweb´08 startUp registration opened

too late for the ongoing seedcamp competition this time? the next possiblity to pitch on an european level is coming up.

leweb´08 startUp competition is now open for application. the competition is organzided by seedcamp. leweb was added as a link in the blogroll.

for all those who need some more presentation preparation and which went through all the demo videos already, there just starting ignite/web2.0expo new york will film the presentations, so keep watching for them.

ten more financing sources for start.ups

ecva, avco, bkv, web mission, plugg, leweb, web2.0 expo, demo, fit-it and impulsprogramm are now @ the start.up mindmap.

evca, the european venture capital association gives an up to date overview about the european venture capital players. on the national level, the austrian venture capital association (avco) and the german equivalent, the "bvk" provide good starting points for a vc-longist.

another international start.up competition, the "web mission" also found its way on the start.up mindmap. while mainly for uk startups, it’s always good to scan new ventures.

there are launchpads/conferences like plugg, le web, web2.0 epxo and demo as well. furthermore the public subsidy programs fit-it and impulsprogramm were added, which provide subsidies/grants from areas like semantic systems to design.