Building IoT Hardware to Leverage Multiple Radio Networks with Blues Inc

In this episode of 'What to Expect When You're Connecting,' host Ryan Carlson interviews Brandon Satrom, Senior Vice President of Product and Experience at Blues Inc. They delve into the challenges and innovations in IoT connectivity, discussing Blues Inc.'s unique approach to creating flexible and efficient solutions for connecting products. The conversation covers topics like blended networking, the importance of developer-focused communities, and the significant advantages of modular hardware design. Recorded at Soracom Discovery 2024 in Tokyo, Brandon shares insightful reactions to the event and explains how Blues Inc. is simplifying IoT deployment for engineers and product builders.

00:00 PODCAST: Interview with Blues Inc
00:27 Introduction to Today's Topic
00:39 First Impressions of Soracom Discovery 2024
02:24 Understanding Blues Inc.'s Unique Approach
05:00 Challenges in IoT and Connectivity Solutions
05:48 The Concept of One-Way and Two-Way Door Decisions
09:58 Blues Inc.'s Hardware and Firmware Innovations
17:21 Blended Networks: Cellular and Satellite Integration
18:01 The Future of Satellite Connectivity
32:07 Advice for Newcomers in IoT
37:03 Closing Thoughts and Developer Community
37:49 What is Soracom to You?

Transcript

Nikki: 0:01

Welcome to what to expect when you're connecting a podcast for IOT professionals and the IOT curious who find themselves responsible for growing, executing, or educating others about the challenges with connecting products and services to the internet. You'll learn from industry experts who understand those challenges deeply and what they've done to overcome that. Now for your host, Ryan Carlson.

Ryan C: 0:27

Today on what to expect when you're connecting. We're here with Brandon Satrum from Blues Inc. and you're the Senior Vice President of both product and experience, which is all one thing.

Brandon: 0:38

All one thing, yeah.

Ryan C: 0:39

And, before we get into the topic of today, which is Blues Inc. and, blended networking and all this cool stuff, we're at Soracom, Discovery 2024 What have been your just initial, reactions to being here?

Brandon: 0:55

It's been fun. not only is it my first time in Tokyo, my first time at an IOT event that really. so developer focused, so experience focused, and I really loved seeing it. it's been really amazing to see the kind of community that Soracom has built over the years, the kind of developers and engineers and product builders that show up to learn, to see what's happening in this space. and it's actually, it's been really fun. It's been fascinating in spite of the language barrier, like I had to do live translation during keynote and things like that, but it was actually just neat to see what Soracom has built and the kind of just. Audience and excitement around this event.

Ryan C: 1:31

What I like it about it being so developer focused is that I don't speak Japanese, but the enthusiasm, the occasional word, it's universally used, but getting to see the architectural drawings, like up on the screen, I think I get exactly what they're talking about, right? When they say generative AI, I know what that is, too. So it's been fascinating to see, And the coolest part is, you look at connectivity and making things simple for

Brandon: 1:59

people.

Ryan C: 2:00

You draw in an ecosystem of other people that also want to leverage what you're building. you know, a product is successful when other people want to bring it in and not repeat what you're doing or copy it. But leverage the expertise of a company that has built their own ecosystem. And it's that one plus one equals 11 moment, right? when it comes to differentiating one hardware company from another in IOT, I've always found that to be difficult because it all sounds the same, Oh, we're in IOT. But when it comes to describing Blues[Inc.], I've heard it being called a hardware focused services company. So what does that mean and how does does that description create differentiation for Blues?

Brandon: 2:47

I think the big thing for us is what we're not saying in that phrase, which is that we're an IOT platform. We're big believers that do everything IOT platforms are a trend of the past. And I think this concept of trying to build these all encompassing products end to end that did everything one person could need or one company could need created a system that was very average at everything, and it never truly did what a Individual customer needed when it came time to deploy, when it came time to scale. And so what we decided to do instead was focus on the piece that we could solve better than anybody, or at least we felt like we could solve better than anybody. And then find partners and opportunities. This I've used this phrase before, rising tides, lift all boats. it starts with our CEO down to every individual at the company. We believe that we're better together in the space that even if you can look at two products and say, they do some of the same things here, but they're differentiated here. There's still an opportunity for those companies to work together for those products to function together To help an end customer who doesn't really care about a lot of those pieces of overlap To build something that meets their need that solves their problem And so by not taking that platform centric approach and focusing on connectivity That led to this concept of a piece of hardware plus a cloud service that does one thing We think quite well, which is the Note Card, our core product, which is a system on module that is meant to de complexify wireless connectivity. Starting with cellular, but across multiple radio access technologies, but then also a cloud service on the other end. That's not trying to be a platform. It's not about data visualization. It's not trying to do analytics, but is meant to be an intermediary pump or a pipeline into your ultimate cloud of choice. Cause every customer we've ever encountered already has an AWS or an Azure or Google compute, or they're working with a data cake or Ubi dots. And we just want to facilitate secure transport of that data without being the repository. That's our story. For that data, but that's really it. It starts with connectivity and ends with us just getting that data to where you want it to go. And we think that's, what's unique and different about us.

Ryan C: 4:44

So you were talking about this idea that people want to choose, like you want to have some options and it's not about the one size fits all play, right? We do everything okay. And we don't specialize in anything in particular. So what I find fascinating is how it was about 20 years before I even came to Soracom. I've built and deployed almost 18 different products that have effectively made it out into the market, saw it go full life cycle. And it's a really fascinating, life cycle, but it does come down to, making decisions about vendors, about, features, your technology stack. And each one of these seems like it's, a buzzer or a shocker. That's going to like. You just made a bad decision, right? You can call it technical debt or anything, all those other lines. But I've heard you describe the decisions that we make an IOT as a series of one way doors and two way doors. So maybe you could open up that a little bit and tell me about.

Brandon: 5:47

Yeah. So when I said that before, what I mean by that is a one way door decision is a decision that you make. That is very hard to undo you go through that door and this happens It's a term that actually comes from just software engineering this concept that when you make this decision, it's very hard to unwind It's not that it's impossible But you have stacked up all of your expenses around unwinding that undoing it, you know Walking around the building to get back in something along those lines to continue the analogy Whereas a two way door is a decision that you can reverse It's easily reversible. And in the case of IOT, what I see is very common in one way door decisions is around wireless radio access technologies because the ecosystem is so specialized. It's very different to choose wifi for your backhaul versus ethernet versus cellular or versus LoRa and LoRa WAN. And so we've created this ecosystem where we've created this idea for engineers where you have to choose how you're going to be connected right at the beginning. because you have to have all of the downstream expertise around sourcing a modem, understanding exactly how that, that device communicates with the cloud service and what its payload is, what its transport layer looks like. And there's all of these downstream things that when you choose cellular are different than when you choose LoRa. And so we have built this reputation in the IOT that anyone that wants to connect something that you've got to do all that up front. But choosing a wireless technology and starting with a modem, starting from bare bones. is a one way door decision because you go down that path of connecting with cellular, you can't just decide tomorrow. Now I'm going to be, this is going to be a LoRa based product. And so that not only creates your, it hampers your ability to switch, but it also makes it that much harder for you to build a product that can work in a LoRa or LoRa WAN ecosystem when that's the better choice, like in an agricultural setting or that can work over satellite when you're in a blue ocean sort of scenario. And so we're really big believers that what we can do as, as product builders, as vendors in the IOT space is actually enable those types of things to be two way door decisions by creating simple and smart abstractions around some of those kinds of things. It starts for us. A lot of it's about radio access technologies, but there's a lot of other cases in the space that are pretty similar.

Ryan C: 7:55

It's the more I hear about blues, it reminds me a lot of, Some of the design philosophies or technical decisions that even Soracom is trying to address that idea of It's not just about cellular. It's you know Wireless infrastructure changes. Absolutely, right? You talk you call it a fully harmonized wireless ecosystem, right?

Brandon: 8:18

Right,

Ryan C: 8:19

you know this idea of you're not punished for picking the right technology for the appropriate use case Absolutely. Like agriculture and Loro An, and you've got cellular for all of that middle ground and then the super, super remote places. And sometimes devices actually have to transition between these different groups, right? Or it might be a ecosystem of devices. And as an OEM, knowing that there's certification, there's compliance, there's all of the, All the regulatory stuff that goes around switching carriers. Worrying about the whole firmware, recompiling and having to decide are we using the right firmware stack, right? I think that gets really challenging, right? It does. So One of the things that I know we at Soracom look at is we know that cellular may not be You know, there's a gonna be a 6g a 7g and maybe it's not cellular anymore,

Brandon: 9:11

right

Ryan C: 9:11

or you're gonna be Having other infrastructures out there, but you still need your data to go from the device To someplace else and it's not just about a dumb pipe It's about having ownership and control over that pipe of data. And that's why it Absolutely loves soracom is that they can see the data going where it goes route it where it needs to go Talk to me about the engineers that are making hardware level decisions What is it that they really? like about the note System, you know the hardware stack that you've developed for them like What are you, what pain are you saving for them?

Brandon: 9:49

I think the biggest one it does. And it's a great question. It starts not just the hardware level, the design level, but the engineering, the firmware engineering level as well. So I'll address both of those separately. At the hardware level, the big thing is just the complexity of sourcing the modem, right? Let's just assume cellular is what we're talking about here. But when you're deciding to build a connected product around cellular, a modem is absolutely a must. There has to be a modem on the device. And when you're making that choice, you're deciding between. Is it a QuickTel modem, a Tellit modem, a Murata modem, a Ublox modem, what have you, right? And by making that decision, you're actually creating downstream impacts on firmware engineering and beyond. But even that decision itself, it's very difficult to decide you're going to go with QuickTel, and then two days later decide you're going to go with Tellit instead. There is some compatibility on the hardware level. Some companies like Sony work on pin compatibility with QuickTel modems and things like that. But there are a lot of cases where you're not pin compatible. You're starting, you're scrapping the board, you're starting over again. And if there is something culturally or geopolitically that creates a situation about, needing to switch between those, you're sunk at that point. And so for a hardware engineer, you're making a bet that can turn out to be risky by making that choice and having to go all the way down to the modem level. The notecard at the hardware level is designed to create an abstraction on top of a modem, right? So we have versions of the notecard that are on tellit modems and versions that are on quicktel modems and ostensibly could be on any Other modem manufacturer as well, but they're all on the same m. 2 edge connector Yeah, they all speak the same language to the actual modem itself And that's the piece that goes into the firmware side because again when you're sourcing a modem quicktel tellit What have you? You're not only dealing with a very unique set of AT commands, there's a generic set of AT commands that every modem will speak, but every modem manufacturer has their own subset for how you control the subsystems on the modem, maybe the power supply, or maybe how you actually connect it to a specific cell network or something along those lines. Those things will be unique. And not only that, but there are AT commands that might differ from an NB IoT QuickTel modem to an LTE Cat 1 QuickTel modem, and you have to understand those. By creating a set of abstractions around that modem, what we have done is enabled engineers to never have to write another AT command to actually do anything that you need to do in a cellular ecosystem. So instead, the notecard actually speaks 100 percent JSON. So you talk to the note card with JSON, the note card gives you JSON responses back. When it talks to our cloud service, NoteHub, it sends JSON messages to the NoteHub cloud service as well. And what that means is that we have one single API that controls how you actually address the modem. That API is 100 percent compatible between a QuickTel modem and a Tellit modem, maybe some other future modem that we might have, because the modem itself is really a commodity. The value that we wrap around it is the ability to not have to write AT commands the ability to actually Control that device and get it online But that becomes even more important when you start introducing other radio access technologies because we have note cards that are cellular We have a wi fi note card. We have LoRa note card We have note cards that have both wi fi and cellular in them. Every single one of those uses the exact same json api So now as a product builder you can actually deploy a solution that's on sale you build one product You can deploy a solution that's on cellular in one environment. But if LoRa is a better choice somewhere else, you can have the exact same product and you swap in an entirely new note card, which is again on an M dot two connector. So it's not a new board spin. And that can work seamlessly, same firmware, no recompilation. And that's really what we mean when we talk about wireless harmonization is that, and back to the two way, one way door decision thing, Those are all now two way door decisions because if I decide or if I prototype on wi fi knowing i'm going to cellular I'm not giving anything up i'm able to do that quicker on my bench But then deploy that same product in the field.

Ryan C: 13:34

So i'm going to put my Operations hat on from previous lives being at companies where we were responsible for building the devices Stocking and warehousing the devices getting them out to the channel and seeing that they got out Into the world of the appropriate place with the appropriate carrier with all of this, right?

Brandon: 13:51

Yeah,

Ryan C: 13:51

so I know that there are some people that just like they look at pennies per megabyte is the only metric that matters There's also the bomb cost. What is the cost of that piece of electronics? Yes, but what I'm hearing you say with my operations hat on I'm thinking about all of the units that I need to order in advance Half from the contract manufacturer and then keep on hand, right? So I think about the cellular based IOT devices we made for like motor vibration monitoring and having to store three separate SKUs of the exact same piece of hardware, but one of them had one carrier, one of them had another carrier and one of them had a global carry, but it only worked overseas. So we had to triple the amount of. Stock that we had just because of a simple connectivity decision. But what I'm hearing you say is that you can create, engineer and design the core elements of your, whatever it might be, your device that you're going to be deploying. Let's say it's some sort of just remote condition monitoring core product. And as customers order, we just add the appropriate module

Brandon: 15:05

Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And not only that, you can not only add the appropriate module, and again, that can be narrow band, it can be wide band, it can be U. S., EMEA based, global, what have you. And all that can be more of a deployment time decision than a ordering and stocking and inventory time decision. Absolutely.

Ryan C: 15:21

Not only that. Stocking multiple

Brandon: 15:22

modules is a lot less expensive than having the core product itself. Absolutely. Absolutely. And not only that, but our, the cellular note card also, there are a few of our newer variants that have multiple SIMs as well as external SIM support. So you can load multiple SIM profiles and even have support for if it's a deployment area that. Mainline support is not there and you need to get, Soracom SIM for instance, to get coverage in an area where our mainline doesn't have, you have the option to do that again in the core product. And then it's just popping in a plastic SIM.

Ryan C: 15:51

I keep thinking about things like Wi Fi, LoRaWAN, cellular satellite is the big one, right? So The amount of technical debt that a company would from their support and product, or product support and field service teams is fairly high when it comes to making changes. So if I'm supporting three separate products, one of them is LoRaWAN, one of them is Wi Fi, one of them cellular, and maybe we're thinking about developing and deploying the satellite, I have to make changes to four different code bases. Potentially of four different licensing or certification processes because they might be using different modems. They might be using different electronics, at the time when we designed it. So there's a little bit of, yeah, I don't know, art that's, from a business perspective, like I'm seeing the pictures a little bit bigger if I, as the operations or the field services team. Can reduce the amount of impact the early hardware decisions has on my future ability to support and service my hardware. Yeah. it's fun to think about these things. So the first time, like I've looked at blues, we've had a previous conversation and it's still only now we're like, Oh, wait, eight years ago, I'm thinking of a situation, which that would have been amazing. Absolutely. Let's transition to talking about this idea of blended networks with cellular and satellite knowing that NTN, the near terrestrial networking, where you get to use the same radio, the same antenna, for both satellite and for cellular, for those vehicles that might be moving across oil fields or in or out of mining operations. from your perspective as someone who's going to be enabling this to happen, what has been the response from your partner networks or within the ecosystem? is there a vibe that people are having knowing that this, the 3G PP version 17? Absolutely.

Brandon: 18:00

yeah. tell me about this. I have seen, I've seen more excitement around NTN satellite in general, than I think I've seen over a lot of things over the course of the last several years. And I think a lot of it is because what we're going to see in the next three to five years in the satellite market is the cost per kilobyte to actually send a payload to send a packet over the, over a satellite network to come down precipitously the state of the art today. Great company is an Iridium device and to buy an Iridium module and to incorporate into an IOT system. It's a 300 module plus a 50 activation P plus 31 per month that you pay to Iridium, whether that device ever sends a packet over the satellite, over their Iridium constellation or not. Great technology. There are Leo constellation is there to literally have blue ocean coverage across the entire globe. It's expensive for a reason, but one of the reasons is that because there's just, hasn't been a ton of competition in that space. And so as it becomes cheaper to actually fire, a kilo of payload up into space, it becomes cheaper to actually transmit, to transmit a kilobyte of data over those networks as well. And There's great examples of this. Skylo is a partner of ours and a partner of Soracom's as well.

Ryan C: 19:08

Indeed.

Brandon: 19:08

And so earlier this year we actually announced a satellite addition to our Notecard ecosystem called Starnote. And it provides effectively today Cellular plus Wi Fi plus satellite failover with Wi Fi maybe being the primary then failing over to satellite and What we have seen from customers that have used iridium in the past have used global star that have used other providers out there Is that this is a welcome change because it's something that they're not paying for And you're not paying a monthly minimum just to keep that connection warm in case you need it. And I think that's what the satellite market is needed. The 3GPP release 17 stuff that gave us, this concept of NTN satellite was a really fantastic first step because yes, like you said, it not only gives us a simpler connectivity module, same LTE antennas, same bands. It's all, it all works flawlessly. But as more and more companies start launching constellations or using The spectrum from other constellations. I think we'll start seeing it become a lot cheaper to use satellite. And frankly, today's cellular is the only globally harmonized, wireless communication technology satellite. I think we'll be that in five years as well. And I think it'll be cost competitive in a lot of ways, which is really exciting.

Ryan C: 20:17

I see two trends happening with satellite as well, because right now it's just been availability. The cost is so oppressive. The hardware is so expensive, getting into low cost. Scenarios like agriculture or some of the, pipeline leak detection where you need many devices which the cost becomes prohibitive. Absolutely So here's the trend that I guess i'm predicting but there's some there's already some early writing on the wall The first one is that the price will come down just due to general competition supply and demand More people getting more satellites up in space. But the second thing is what we're seeing in the It's the pressure on why satellite is needed is that we're seeing more and more. Iot smart devices like pipeline leak detection, right? Cellular infrastructure is put in place around humans and civilization, not grizzlies and moose and elk, right? They don't need, they don't need the coverage, but those devices are operating in one and two bars maximum.

Brandon: 21:18

So

Ryan C: 21:19

in a conversation with Andrew Jarman, he's the chief technology officer of Toku systems, they develop. One of these devices it's out in the oil fields there in some of the remote most remote areas And he said one of the most fascinating things he says I am that the most valuable engineer that I have right now Are former DOS programmers? Because they know how to count bytes Right when every kilobyte is costing you almost the same as it would cost you for a megabyte over cellular The need to be more efficient in how these devices that are getting smaller and smaller that have smaller Processors right in order to bring the bomb cost down. We don't need the biggest Processor possible, right? This isn't the video game industry where we all need to build a new PC every two to three years because IOT is getting smaller. The data needs to be smaller. And so as satellite. Increases its adoption. I think we're going to be seeing a renaissance In the developers that know how to code Efficiently, but I think we're also going to be seeing products like blues and the Soracoms and these are companies that are more than just We're offering you some silicon with some processors,

Brandon: 22:34

right? We're

Ryan C: 22:34

offering you a dumb pipe to the internet, right? it's it's solving real problems.

Brandon: 22:40

I agree. and not only that, but it's also helping giving engineers more help to contextualize how to solve those problems based on what they're connected to, because you're absolutely right. the reality that we see is that it only 10 percent of the earth is covered by terrestrial networks today. And in the case of cellular, that actually gets worse. the more we move up band, right? 5G, 6G, these networks aren't being densified. So the reality is you actually have even less connectivity at the margins. Then you had at 2g, 3g, 4g, et cetera. And so what we're seeing is not only that preponderance of more use cases that can only be solved with satellite being cheaper and now actually affordable. Now, realistic. This is an area where LoRa and LoRa WAN succeeded to a certain extent, but the challenge with LoRa WAN has always been the presence of a physical gateway, the expense associated with it, but also where to put it, how to manage them, monitor them, et cetera. It's still a great solution to solve a lot of problems, but even LoRaWAN tends to be more concentrated in urban areas. Same as cellular, same as right you see today. But with satellite, what we're going to see is I think you're absolutely right. not only the more availability, lower costs, but also engineers that need to be smarter about how they actually respect the payload sizes and the data that they're sending. But much like everything else, We exist to solve complexity. Like our CEO said years ago, complexity kills. Our entire business is built around this concept of making hard things simple for engineers. And one of those hard things in satellite Is going to be when I fail over, cause that's what we still see today. Satellite, I think is still not a primary backhaul for most use cases.

Ryan C: 24:12

No, especially the latency. What like five to 10 seconds. Absolutely. And

Brandon: 24:17

so if your primary is wifi, your secondary is cellular primary cellular, and either way you're falling over to satellite, you should not be sinking the exact same data over satellite that you were thinking over wifi or cellular. So now you're having to deal with it. You have to be contextually aware. And so what we actually do in our APIs, the same JSON based APIs that make it easier to work across modems, across radio access technologies, also are designed to make it easier to be smart about only synchronize this information over satellite. You can sync everything over Wi Fi, everything over cellular, but when you're on satellite, I only want you sending this very essential piece of information, the heartbeat. The once a day where you might be once every hour or every 15 minutes on a different radio access technology. So at the point of failover, the device needs to be smart enough to make those decisions. And we want to enable developers to do that so they don't have that first moment when they send that first packet. And they're like, Oh, I sent over 20k. Oh no, that's terrible. That's fine over cellular, We make it easier to have those sort of sensible defaults.

Ryan C: 25:18

What you're describing reminds me of the energy saver mode on my phone. Absolutely. You drop below 20%. It's okay, cool. Because the radio is the most power. Like it takes the most of the power next to your screen. Yeah.

Brandon: 25:32

Yeah.

Ryan C: 25:32

And that's actually really cool. Except instead of a power saving mode, it's data saving mode. Absolutely.

Brandon: 25:37

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And along those lines, the note card is actually built in that same power saving mindset as well. It's actually a low power by default. In the case of cellular device, which is another thing that we see, right? If you, we, we think that it is possible in this world to actually have solar or battery powered devices on cellular on satellite that can actually, because again, the more remote you are. The harder it is to power and the more expensive it is to change out a battery. And so you have to have, again, all of those sort of things, all of those decisions or things you think about, for when you're designing the device. And wouldn't it be great if you had modules that helped you make that a little bit easier? For sure. I know

Ryan C: 26:16

the idea that we can save entire engineering cycles because Engineering to use cellular, like power savings isn't necessarily the default mode. For a lot of these, we actually have to make changes to a design specification and maybe dumb things down. So it seems like you're making a whole lot of sacrifices, but what I'm hearing you say is. It is just like you can have mobile first website strategies You're doing low power savings first design principle from your hardware perspective. Absolutely

Brandon: 26:51

Yeah, so what we built our product our ceo ray ozzy after he left microsoft in 2011. He was the former Chief scientist and chief technology officer at Microsoft after Bill Gates had retired. And when he left, he actually got involved with a group out in Japan after 3. 11, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, that was actually, that was built around this idea of open data for citizen scientists. There was not a lot of information about radiation levels after the Fukushima meltdown, in 2011. And so a group came together. They actually invited Ray out to be a part of it. And they built a set of radiation monitoring devices. to actually help monitor the area. And the reason why Ray got into cellular and ultimately created blues was because, LoRa, because wifi wasn't an option in the exclusion zone, LoRa and LoRa WAN weren't an option because there wasn't the infrastructure. And so he chose cellular because it was the only globally harmonized wireless radio access technology. The problem was that in 2004 2005 low power cellular It's not possible, right?

Ryan C: 27:55

2G, 3G. Yeah, exactly.

Brandon: 27:57

A huge

Ryan C: 27:58

power drive. Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon: 28:00

And but he had to, they had to create devices that you could drop in the exclusion zone and you could only visit it once a year. So it had to live for a year on a battery, maybe a little bit of, a little bit of juice from solar. And so we started this business with the idea of trying to make low power cellular possible. And so chose a chip from STMicroelectronics that's low power by default. The product is designed to be very aggressive with managing the modem. This is actually another one of the things that we believe is a benefit of blues because we have a microcontroller on there that manages the modem because we have this JSON based API. The note card is very aggressive about powering down the modem when necessary. It's not always on by default, right? Because if you're not talking to the network, there's no point for the modem being on, but the modem is the biggest power draw in almost any connected solution, saving maybe LoRa and LoRa WAN, which tends to be very low power by default, but wifi cellular satellite, those are, there's a very high powered modems a lot of times. And so having something that starts low power and you can be continuously connected, you can be mains powered. But that's not the default. The default needs to be something that sips power and they can run on AA batteries or run on a lipo if it needs to, or can fail over on a lithium ion capacitor. And yes, it can be mains powered if it needs to be, but to be low powered by default, opens up a whole lot more use cases in the cellular that five, 10 years ago were very difficult and required a lot of engineering in order to get right.

Ryan C: 29:24

when is it in a conversation if you're in a room of cross-functional individuals. you got a whole team there from working on a product who's leaning in on the conversation and why?

Brandon: 29:37

The people that are leaning in a lot of times are engineers that have been down this road before and failed and they saw the promise of what we call the iot. they saw the opportunity, but they did a face plant and not because they're not great engineers, but because of all of the difficulty all the landmines and paper cuts and roadblocks that we have put along the way. And when they see us, when they meet us, much like I know when they meet folks from Soracom, they see, okay, this is something I can do. We actually had an early customer that told us he had spent two years trying to actually build a connected solution and had this terrible experience. He did a POC with us in two weeks and his first response was I can finally build this product, right? That's what we get. That's the sort of response we get is people that have felt the pain and now they see okay This is possible and that's really exciting for us to hear

Ryan C: 30:29

I think that's always an interesting way. And I hate the idea of are you a customer persona? you're an ideal customer profile. But if we were talking ICPs, I think the most interesting people to work with are those that have touched the stove, felt that it was hot and, I can really understand that it's not as simple as everyone wants to make you think it is. There are a series of interdependent decisions that need to be made. But the technology for building the Internet of Things has evolved to a place where we now have an ecosystem of hardware, software, connectivity, and development tools that allows people to have Two way door decisions, right? Where we can undo things halfway through a process. We can iterate a project or a product to meet a different need, whether it's a different radio access network, it's different changes in security requirements, or even more importantly, reacting to regulatory change. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brandon: 31:30

Yeah.

Ryan C: 31:31

I am, I'm thrilled to know that blues is making its way into this market and is offering harmonized wireless ecosystem of hardware products. Because as individuals that sit within the process, no one wants to buy a Blues(inc.). They're not there to buy a Soracom. They're not there to buy an IOT, right? It's to solve people problems through some sort of automation that might be connecting to the internet, using data to solve problems, right? so we're the boring part in the middle, absolutely. But a very necessary part in that middle. Absolutely. So what is the one bit of advice that you have for people that may be thinking they've not touched the stove yet? They're new to connecting their products. Do you have any wisdom that you would pass on? Is there just one lesson that maybe you've learned or blues has learned like there'll be dragons.

Brandon: 32:26

Yeah.

Ryan C: 32:26

Just go with caution.

Brandon: 32:28

Yeah. You said it yourself a little bit. it is not as easy as it seems, right? this idea of taking data from point a and getting it to the cloud. What I like to say is blues exist to solve the messy middle piece of connectivity, and it truly is a mess. And Soracom does a lot of that as well. It is very difficult to go from point A to point B when you have no help, when you're deciding to do it all yourself, right? I think a lot of us in this space, what we tend to see most often is the competition is not Each other. It's not other IOT platforms or other IOT vendors. It's doing nothing. It's the people that do nothing. It's the, as the, as I've heard Ben Thompson say, it's competing with non consumption. It's the people that say, I don't need you guys. I'll just do it myself. I'll buy the modem. I'll buy the SIM. I'll do everything else and I'll just handle it. It'll be fine. It'll take me two weeks. And to feel like you have solved that problem on your bench with all of the parts and that's good enough for scale. I would caution anyone who thinks that to just take a closer look, to talk to someone that's actually built it. I think, and that's probably what it comes down to. I, what I would caution anyone going down, this journey would be is find someone that's further along than maybe has gotten to the end and ask them what they wish they had done differently. Because I think what you'll find most of the time is they'll say, I wish I had, I wish I had realized that I didn't need to go it alone. And I think that's really where I've seen a lot,

Ryan C: 33:48

I find the one thing that I try and now that my, my eyes are open, is don't save connectivity for the end. Oh God, I've got an open slim slot, now I need to fill it. Yeah, Ooh. at that point you're just buying a buying, a plan that gives you access to some tower and that's it.

Brandon: 34:08

Right.

Ryan C: 34:09

And there's no, you lose a lot of the evolutions that have been made in cloud native, cellular networks and all of these tools that makes life easier for developers and I would say the same thing is in that design process, understanding which problems do you uniquely need to be solving now. And has someone else created a two way door that eliminates a lock in? Absolutely.

Brandon: 34:33

Yeah.

Ryan C: 34:34

building your own and doing everything yourself. Version three sounds like a great time to do that. Once you've got all of your motions through and you've actually learned enough from what do we need, but I'd say version two is if you're using a note from blues, you're probably going to play around with some different. Radio access networks and go. Absolutely. What if we made a LoRaWAN version of this? Absolutely. Added satellite.

Brandon: 35:00

So what could we do now with this at our disposal? What could we do now? what new opportunities could this create for us? Because that's really where we believe. the reason we all exist to help connect things is because we believe that everything that should be connected eventually will be. We want to speed that along. And the reason why those things can be connected is because they can unlock insights. They can give us intelligence. And they can allow our physical things to speak to us in a way that has not been possible before. And we just want to facilitate connectivity, just getting out of the way, just being ambient in many cases. That it's just something that is an afterthought because it's solved the problem. Not because it's not an afterthought because you saved it for last, but an afterthought because it's just easy. It's just something that we can pick and trust and rely on

Ryan C: 35:44

and

Brandon: 35:44

know that it works.

Ryan C: 35:45

Back in 2017. Everyone was saying, now we got all of this data. What do we do with it? It's almost too much for us to process. Data scientists were overwhelmed with the amount and volume of these data lakes and data lake houses and data warehouses. And now we're at the advent of a generative AI where we can ask questions of large, massive data sets, right? let's set aside writing emails for you and doing deep fakes and all of this stuff. we're seeing value. So at the discovery, we saw a HVAC manufacturer that was showing a 48 percent savings on power, like reducing the power consumption by 48%. And they also had 28 percent increase in the comfortability of residents of HVAC units that are using the power of generative AI to learn the patterns and to make a micro adjustments to just. Consuming,

Brandon: 36:44

right?

Ryan C: 36:44

So we know that heating and cooling buildings is oftentimes one of the most expensive things that you can do. So I love this idea of technology, really making a change in how humans get to live more responsibly, sustainably, and make the world a better place. Absolutely. Yeah. Brandon, this is fantastic. Thank you for coming and sharing the story of blues. I think there's a lot more that we'll be hearing from you and the rest of the team as we. Build some bridges and I'm going to recommend that people check out the developer kit that we're going to be releasing jointly. And, and people can try Soracom with blues and swap out your different radio networks and one of our joint friends over at Skylo. So you can get hooked up, get a plan and get rocking and rolling and use your favorite Soracom services. Switch things around and enjoy blended networks right out of the gate. So thank you for your time.

Brandon: 37:41

Thank you, Ryan.

37:43

This has been another episode of What to Expect When You're Connecting. Until next time.

Ryan C: 37:49

What is Soracom to you? Soracom to me is proof that developer centric communities still drive progress in this space. That's what we try to do at Blues. In a lot of cases, because we were fans of Soracom before we started building this company, we've done the same thing. And we really believe that developers drive a lot of these things. Developers are the reason IoT projects stall. Developers are the reason that IoT projects succeed. And so we want to be in that team of folks that just make this easier for developers. And that's what I love. That's what I think of when I think of Soracom.