Marvell's Kinoma Create
21 October 2014 - by Maxine Bingham, Editor-in-Chief

Marvell, the semiconductor company, today publicly launched Kinoma Create, a truly unique, JavaScript-powered Internet of Things touch-screen construction kit for makers. Launched as a startup within Marvell, Kinoma Create used Indiegogo to ensure interest by the IoT design community. The campaign ran from March 7 and closed on April 16, 2014. The goal was to raise $10,000 – the campaign was oversubscribed by 500+%. Kinoma Create will be available in November. Cost is $149.00 USD. Because the Kinoma team is virtually being run as a startup within Marvell, we’re covering it in our Startup Spotlight.

We spoke with Peter Hoddie, VP Kinoma Create, at Gigaom’s Structure Connect Conference about this very cool development system.

According to Hoddie, “Kinoma Create’s mission is to power the next wave of connected device prototyping via a pro-developer experience that integrates hardware, software and tools conceived expressly to be powerful, approachable, and fast. The product arose organically; we wanted something that would enable us and users to do their IoT prototyping right. We choose JavaScript as the programming language (although you can hack on Linux if you really want to) because we wanted to give people an on-ramp via a higher level language. We believe that if we want to help the future IoT makers create, we have to meet them where they are.”

“With KinomaJS,” Hoddie added, “developers can quickly connect the fundamental building blocks of any IoT device, including user experience, network communication, digital media, and hardware. The unique pins service in KinomaJS allows scripts to manage, interpret, and filter data from hardware on digital, analog, I2C, and serial interfaces.”

KinomaJS enables devices to communicate using several established and emerging protocols simultaneously. SSDP and Zeroconf are available to both discover other devices and broadcast KinomaJS authored services on the local network. HTTP, HTTPS, WebSockets, MQTT, and CoAP clients and servers are available to communicate data between Kinoma Create, other devices, and the cloud.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s User Interface Software and Technology Symposium selected Kinoma Create as the development platform for its prestigious 2014 Student Innovation Contest. More than 30 student teams used Kinoma Create to build projects that included a hands-free gesture and voice recognition-based recipe organizer, a location-based reminder system for the home, and assistive technology that tells visually impaired users if appliances are on. According to Hoddie, a number of the projects were whimsical, such as the mop with a screen on it to ensure full cleaning, but the whimsicality is what drives imagination and innovation. A more serious project was to enable the vision-impaired to more easily move about the home.

To help the entrepreneur/maker there is a forum/community. Should a project truly scale toward enterprise-levels, then Marvell will get the company in touch with FAEs and sales force. As Hoddie noted, by working via a Marvell kit, should an idea take off, they will have the support of a major semiconductor company.

I remarked to Peter that I was impressed that such a large company such as Marvell would encourage internal entrepreneurship. According to Peter, this is because the company is still run by its original founders, and they retain that startup spirit.

Our technology editor can’t wait to get his hands on a Kinoma Create! Think Christmas, Ron.

Drawing of Peter Hoddie courtesy of Marvell

© 2014 IoT Perspectives

Oracle
28 May 2015 - by Maxine Bingham, Editor-in-Chief

Oracle Communications’ IoT is behind the scenes more than you can imagine, according to Andrea Canessa, director, Solutions Marketing, Oracle Communications (he currently leads the Oracle offerings for M2M/IoT).  In fact, they plan to launch an IoT Cloud Service, formerly, Oracle’s IoT Enablement platform, which will provide the building blocks for IoT/M2M (machine-to-machine) applications, such as:

•    Processing of data
•    Event processing
•    Middleware
•    Security
•    Big data/analytics, and
•    Some rights and device management

Oracle is behind Nike’s wearables, San Francisco’s smart parking and Los Angeles’ smart city.
Oracle has partnered with Qualcomm to provide logic for “Internet of Everything” embedded Java IoT applications. While Canessa notes this is a niche market, it is an important one. For example, this chip/logic combination is behind smart meters in South America. While not a majority of devices use Java, it’s a growing market and offers open vs. closed solutions. It is also easy for designers to find Java resources.Oracle’s business and operations management helps companies with the new business models being created thanks to enterprise IoT. Jasper Networks, Telefon Italica and GM OnStar use Oracle’s Tekelec solutions to handle huge amount of data traffic, traffic on the network, software upgrades, different kinds of payment models and network security.  

Canessa used connected car as a case study based on Oracle’s partnership with Minacs. A lot of connected car companies have partners for Netflix or Pandora or other services. These orders and billings need to be processed by the car company and can be quite complex. There will be customer management, partner management, offer management, revenue management and business and operational management. There can be split billing scenarios, as well as having to accommodate non credit card payments as needed in China, it has to be pre-paid. There are a lot of requirements for these businesses that you don’t see, noted Canessa. Most likely, your smart car has Oracle in it, says Canessa.

Oracle has an energy client in Europe that uses Oracle’s business and operations management as it has been able to provide a quad-play: smart meters, then, Internet, VoIP and TV over IP. Next, they can add more smart home services, such as consoles for overall smart home communications management
Oracle also found that their customers wanted complete solutions that they could brand. Thus, Oracle developed a while label solution that a communications provider, for example, can offer their customers (this is behind Cisco, Verizon telematics, SF Park, and Jasper Networks, to name a few). This was developed with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). TCS and Oracle joined forces to create a hosted offering of managed IoT services. This is designed to enable service providers to be in control of the IoT value chain by quickly delivering to the market services with lower entry costs and risk, via a comprehensive managed solution that can be rapidly branded, delivered and supported.

Oracle has launched eight of these white label services, four in telematics (fleet management, usage-based insurance, next generation smart car, and car sharing/ride sharing), and four others for connected building (commercial or residential for energy, power management, video surveillance and asset management). Analytics is included with these services.

Canessa said that that the process of developing such a white label solution takes about 100 days to deploy. They feel that this takes away the complexity that stops enterprises from entering the IoT space.

Photo of Andrea Canessa Courtesy of Oracle

© 2015 IoT Perspectives