Prodea Blog

Our experience with helping trusted brands has taught us that successful connected products spend as much time in the validation and testing phase as they do in the design phase.   In this age of instant online customer reviews, you cannot afford “one star reviews” due to short cuts in quality assurance. This recent Breakthrough Innovation Report from Nielsen doesn’t specifically speak to the areas of connected products, but still offers sound advice about product design and launch that is relevant to any market, including IoT. There is no second chance for a first impression, so we must make sure […]

Would you like to meet with Arrayent’s European accounts team during IFA?  We would be happy to setup a meeting.  Please send your requests to Fabien.Jeanneret at Arrayent dot com.

Beware if your smart fridge requires this low tech accessory [True story, slightly anonymized]  A friend recently bought a top of the line “smart” refrigerator that has an 8-inch touchscreen as the interface to the various “apps” (a family calendar, weather report, etc) that come with the fridge.  The touchscreen also serves as the interface for the water and ice dispenser. The first time I went to get a glass of ice water, I pushed the nice looking icon for crushed ice and when I put my glass under the dispenser a stream of water came out.   I then pushed […]

GTVHacker recently showed the world how they were able to gain root access to the Nest thermostat via the device’s Firmware Upgrade functionality.  With root access someone with bad intentions could do all sorts of nasty things with the device like sniff home network traffic, monitor whether the user is home, or crank up the temperature.  Arrayent advises its customers to  keep their things as things” (not turn all of them into computers) by using the simplest and lowest cost chipsets in their products to reduce security vulnerabilities — why run an entire Linux OS on your thermostat, refrigerator, lightbulbs, […]

Watch the NBC Press:Here interview where Arrayent’s CEO tells the panel how connected products can safely inter-operate with multiple Apps and multiple Ecosystems (Apple, Google, etc).  Since connected products may not all be designed to connect in the same way, they should be connected to a flexible, secure, scalable cloud that will allow for the aggregation and inter-operation of multiple apps, users, products as the Internet of Things grows over time.  Shane also explains the best ways to keep the IoT safe, secure, and reliable is to keep the devices as simple as possible (reduces number of potential vulnerabilities) and […]

“The products that are IoT-enabled need to be things and not computers.  You don’t want your fridge to be a computer; you want it to be a fridge.  You don’t want an interface on the device, just the app on your smartphone to control it. Consumers have picked their user interface. They believe using their phone is easy. Keeping objects incredibly simple and having agents in the cloud doing the heavy lifting is critical in designing IoT products,” said Arrayent CEO, Shane Dyer recently on Sanjeev Sardana’s technology blog on Forbes.com. Link to article:  Is There An App For That? How The […]

Gartner, Inc. the well respected information technology research and advisory company has just published a research brief “Cool Vendors in the Internet of Things, 2014.”  Cool Vendors are described by Gartner as those having innovative and impactful technology. Co-Author Jim Tully, VP Distinguished Analyst, observes that Arrayent’s “cloud-based approach allows hardware costs to be minimized and supports easy installation by consumers. Basing the function in the cloud

As we’ve said before, successful products are victories of verification. But even when things go wrong, the Internet of Things provides solutions that are dramatically better than the alternatives available for non-connected products.