Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the differentiator? Comparable to the Apple iWatch, would it not make sense for your customer to build an app on iWatch? What is the case for using your technology?

Jim Xiao: It’s really down to control. Apple is known for having it’s wall guarded and keeping its user data to themselves. This provides a lot of challenges if you want to relay back to the FDA all the data. You’re able to pinpoint the dataset without having to use paper and pencil.

The challenge with Apple’s devices is since Apple has built a controlled consumer-oriented experience, they’re not thinking about building the best patient experience. When you talk to a pharma company, they’re looking for solutions around remote patient management of these clinical trials using devices they can control. They don’t want to use Apple’s iOS.

They want to have their own operating system that will be supported for five plus years and can be certified in various countries. The supply chain is designed not to switch devices every year but to make it so that they can collect data in a reliable and stable manner. At the same time, be able to go to the driver level and collect some of that data.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that you do all of manufacturing and logistics of the distribution of these devices as well.

Jim Xiao: Yes. It all boils down to what Apple has done really well. They’ve been able to marry hardware and software together. Even though they may not have the best hardware or the best software separately, it’s the marriage of the two that makes it so powerful. For us, we want to democratize that. We want to democratize Apple’s playbook and provide that end-to-end solution starting with the supply chain.

Instead of providing a consumer mass production supply chain, we’re giving enterprises the ability to own their own elastic supply chain and be able to call that via an API so that they don’t have to create a massive hardware supply chain team. That’s the logistics piece. When you think about the two together, having enough hardware and enough RAM and ROM is like the S3 when it comes to AWS.

When you think about the logistics services, that’s the EC2. What we’re doing with logistics is enabling the customer to send one piece of compute out on the field or all the way up to 100,000 plus. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about data. One of the IoT points that comes up in our discussion is that a lot of the internet connected devices throw out a lot of data. In the use case that you talked about, these are not necessarily big data use cases. Do you also have customers who are doing big data?

Jim Xiao: Collecting data is really important whether for Medicare reimbursements or being able to make sure your doctor has the latest and greatest info on you. For example, a number of devices are used as a hub in the homes of our elderly grandparents for data collection on behalf of their hospital systems. When the pandemic happened, it made it hard for folks to go to the hospital for elective surgeries or for non-COVID symptoms.

What our technology enabled was to act as the hub and connect with a number of different accessories like blood pressure cups and smart pill dispensers. What we’ve learned is that some of these folks are sourcing their accessories from Amazon and cobble solutions together. There’re a number of things we’re doing and thinking about. How do we provide a product suite for remote patient management that makes it really easy where everyone can look and say, “That’s the set of tools that I need to buy.”

Sramana Mitra: There are discrete functional equipment. The smart bill dispense, for example, has to be designed specifically. What is your take on that?

Jim Xiao: Our approach to hardware is a little bit different. We think of it as pretty much a Lego strategy. If you build the different components for low-power, medium-power, and high-power performance, you can build an ecosystem of various devices really quickly. All you’re doing is changing the design which is just the plastic wrapper around.

If we build a large set of Lego pieces for customers, they can go to market so much faster than if they were to build it themselves. If you were to build a smart hardware company today, you would have to design from scratch while we’re already saving you 70% to 80% of that time. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason
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