Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that this is something that is in pilot.

Tom Bianculli: It’s not in commercial deployment, but two of the top five freight carriers in the world are trailing it.

Sramana Mitra: Any other use case that you want to present?

Tom Bianculli: There’s one in the healthcare space that I can talk about. It might be worth mentioning about the strategy. We are focused on instrumenting devices and getting data back. Think about this as Smart labels, Smart tags, Smart bracelets. This is similar to the quantified movement in the health wristband space, like what Nike did a while back. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to see a real case study with proper metrics about these customer use cases. We try not to report stories that are foo foo. What I’m looking for is the impact. For one thing, is this a pilot in one store at Macy’s or is this something that is being deployed across multiple stores? Is this something that is actually showing real uplift in sales?

Tom Bianculli: There’s an impact for sure.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’re seeing a trend of retailers adopting certain IoT capabilities to alert their floor sales staff to go talk to potential purchasers while lingering in shelves. Is there any other use case that you want to highlight where you’re seeing such behavioural change using IoT capabilities? >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few customer use cases that are significant and are exhibiting interesting trends through your work with these customers?

Tom Bianculli: Retail, I mentioned, is a significant part of our business. There’s no secret about what’s going on there with regard to e-commerce competition and the desire to create online analytics for the offline world. We want to enable them to get the same insights that an online retailer has like what products I’m looking at, what products I’m hovering over, and what have I removed from my basket.

The brick-and-mortar companies have no visibility into that data. They don’t necessarily know who is in their store. If you put something in your physical shopping cart, the >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 1)

Further view into the use cases and trends in various verticals pertaining to IoT. This interviews looks at retail, transportation, and healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Zebra.

Tom Bianculli: I oversee the technology office here at Zebra Technologies. My team incubates new opportunities that are adjacent to the existing portfolio in the company. I’m acting as an internal startup. >>>

Connected Medical Devices from France: Visiomed CEO Olivier Hua (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about from the point of view of building this company. You said the company started in 2009?

Olivier Hua: The company started in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, the product was the thermometer?

Olivier Hua: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How long did the company function in that one product mode and what revenue levels did it reach? >>>

Connected Medical Devices from France: Visiomed CEO Olivier Hua (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? Are these sold as consumer devices? Are they sold as devices to doctor’s offices? How is the go-to market strategy structured?

Olivier Hua: Initially, our products were sold through pharmacies.

Sramana Mitra: A thermometer being sold through a pharmacy makes sense, but you’re talking about ECGs and stuff. That’s not a pharmacy product, right?

Olivier Hua: We had been selling essentially direct to consumers so far. For some of the products, we go to physicians and doctors who prescribe our medical devices. We can talk about the ECG for instance. It’s a mobile ECG. It’s a very small device. It’s something that can be carried by anybody. Typically it’s for >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John Horn, CEO of Ingenu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a bit, what do you see as trends in your industry and how does that throw light on emerging challenges and open problems that you would encourage new entrepreneurs to look into with the expertise in your general area?

John Horn: We know that there will be hundreds of billions and ultimately trillions of devices in this Internet of Things world. That is a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs to create new solutions. I know solutions that have changed entire industries but will only deploy a few thousand devices. However, those few thousand devices will completely change an industry forever. Entrepreneurs don’t need to build a company to support millions or billions of devices to have a viable company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: John Horn, CEO of Ingenu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about your customer base. What customers are you serving and how?

John Horn: In the past, our technology was used primarily to build private networks. Our customer base at that point were utilities, municipalities, and oil & gas companies. These were industries that were looking for an alternative technology and they built RPMA networks. Our focus now is on building large nationwide public networks, somewhat like cellular but with RPMA technology.

We are building a network in the United States for which we will be targeting the same customers as a cellular company would. Throughout the rest of the world, we are licensing other companies to build those networks to support the IoT vertical technologies out there. Our customers outside the United States are our licensees who are building networks. Our customers inside the United States will be the actual solution providers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few customer use cases and help us understand what’s happening. >>>