IOT
People are connecting more and more devices to the internet. In the early days, they focus on building the devices and getting themworking and, after that, they start to scale" “Energy is a big vertical for us,”
success with another Cambridge IoT company, smart home systems provider Alert Me. He sold this to British Gas in 2015 and it now forms part of the Hive connected home system. Of his latest venture, he says: “People are connecting more and more devices to the internet. In the early days, they focus on building the devices and getting them working and, after that, they start to scale – it’s almost always the goal of these IoT projects to put thousands of devices out there. When you do that, you confront a completely different challenge. You’ve got all this stuff out there in the world and it doesn’t always work, and that’s where Device Pilot comes in.” Device Pilot’s system provides what the company calls ‘service monitoring’. Users can view the status of their devices and are alerted if a piece of equipment in the field isn’t functioning correctly, so they can take steps to remedy this. This saves them money and helps them provide a good service to customers. The company works across a number of sectors, and has enjoyed particular success in the field of energy.
Pilgrim says. “It makes sense because the use case for IoT is almost always efficiency, trying to reduce your bills or trying to reduce energy, carbon footprint or the amount of vehicle miles you’re wasting driving around servicing things that don’t need servicing. So, in energy, the connection between improving efficiency and saving money is obvious, because energy is money.” Expanding the IoT Uses of connected devices are myriad, and Cambridge start-up Camnexus is developing low-power sensor networks to help what its founder Jessica Ocampos describes as “key productive sectors”, such as farming or water utilities. A chemical engineer by background, Jessica founded the company after completing her PhD at Cambridge University. Drawing on her experience from working in industry, she identified a problem with installing and adopting new technologies. “I worked for some big multinational
businesses, and always wanted to use engineering solutions to
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