We are delighted to have Carlos de otto Morera, CEO of Thinking Things at Telefonica join the panel next week. Carlos is an economist educated in the United Kingdom. He has 15 years of international experience including entrepreneurial experience in mobile, hardware and Internet startups. He created the largest online music platform in Spain from 2008 till 2012. He is deeply passionate about his job designing and manufacturing connected products. Carlos is joined by execs from BMW, Intel, and Worldsensing and we will be exploring the opportunities in the “Internet of Things†world.
We caught up with Carlos to get a preview of our upcoming Mobile Breakfast Series event in London on June 17th.
Why did you and Telefónica start Thinking Things? Is it about simplification or are there more benefits to the modular approach?
Telefónica R&D created the Physical Internet Lab to design specific solutions using connected hardware. After a few projects for different customers, the Lab realized that we were always tackling the same problems: sensoring or measuring, communications and intelligence (SW) for many different types of problems. Thinking Things was created so all those cases could be solved through a seamless solution that allows you to measure, collect and act on the information. It has been designed in a way that allows anyone unfamiliar with hardware to create specific solutions to specific problems thanks to connected hardware. This modular approach allows one to create objects with different functionalities by simply buying new modules with different sensors on top of the basic modules.
What are couple of examples of how it is being used today?
Thinking Things is being used currently by one of the largest Medical Analysis companies in Europe. This company carries a large number of fridges from one lab to another (around the continent). It is very important for them to ensure the quality of samples contained. Thanks to Thinking Things they can track temperature around the clock of all fridges and samples around Europe.
We are working together with large logistics companies to help them track expensive items being deliver around the world. Sometimes these items, especially expensive ones get stolen. Thinking Things can be inside these packages and inform whenever these packages have been open, so central systems are aware in real time of any wrong doing.
How can developers be involved in using the Thinking Things toolkit?
Thinking Things has been designed for all those app and web developers and digital product designers that need and want to build new connected products and services. We provide them with an easy to use, plug and play solution where, by buying our connected hardware are able to build such products and services. Thinking Things comes with battery, different types of sensors and a connections device together with cloud services so by just using our API, you can build any software specific solutions on top.
Our back-end software allows you to access your data, as well as allows you to create rules and ways to interact with the devices.
What are you doing on the software-side of things and with data?
Thinking Things is a hardware project within Telefónica. But it’s a connected product so we developed our own front-end and back-end software platform to satisfy the needs of Thinking Things users and developers. On the front-end side of things, we provide users with all necessary functionality so you can use Thinking Things right away. In any case we are aware of the fact that developers want to build their specific solutions therefore we provide an open API so they can freely create on top of the framework.
Data as of today will be used by owners of end products and their end customers for whatever purpose those products are created. We foresee though that considering that a large variety of products can be built, data generated may be of interest to third parties allowing both Telefónica and developers to exploit it commercially.
Venue: Telefonica, 20 Air Street, London, W1B 5AN London, UK
When: June 17th. Breakfast and Registration: 8-9am, Panel Discussion: 9-10:30am, Networking: 10:30-11:30am
Internet of Things: Exploring the next big thing in mobile
Prof. Mischa Dohler, King’s College, London and Cofounder, Worldsensing
Dominik Fromm, GM – Mobility Services, BMW
Carlos de otto Morera, CEO, Thinking Things, Telefonica
Raine Bergstrom, VP and GM, Intel
Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting (moderator)
Look forward to seeing you next week.