10 Days. 10 Stories. Part 7–2016
A tale of premature scaling, bold ambitions and a radical pivot. The shock was brutal. All of the sudden there were no more oil & gas projects, our original clients scaled back activity and our core business just disappeared overnight. So we had to find a way, any road was better than no path at all.
In fact, we had been so busy evangelizing IoT and stepping outside the box that we neglected to plan ahead and fill our sales pipeline. The whole IoT thing in 2015 was incredibly immature, everyone was learning and investing in new ideas. So were we, and it was so enjoyable that the mundane core business took a back seat.
After wrapping up the last oil & gas cybersecurity professional services engagement in January we worked with a Grenoble-based startup to deploy a custom IoT solution at ski station in the heart of the French Alps. Talk about a change of scenery!
The solution required a local 868Mhz ISM band network and gateway for cloud API integrations. We used our 8GATE product which was installed in the cable car control room. It provided wireless coverage around the site to collect data from snow sensors made by our startup client.
Our client had built an interesting sensor application for measuring the height of snow. The core product used the SigFox network which was still being deployed across France and there was no coverage in some remote mountain locations. Hence the need for a private ISM band network.
fieldcloud became a member of the Minalogic digital technologies cluster. It was very cool to become part of a broader ecosystem. We met some interesting people during a Minalogic session and was invited to speak at an Italian cybersecurity event called Grappa Hat in March 2016. That was one hell of an opportunity. So we got creative as you can see from the summary below!
TITLE: Fredo, you broke my HART
ABSTRACT: A story of moral turpitude and vagina dentata in the petroleum
industry. From honeytraps to honeypots, giving head to get the wellhead.
Pwned by a filthy vector in the dark underbelly of offshore life.
Next port of call was London to talk IoT with our good friends from Galaxy1. We installed demo sensors and gateway kit in their offices, including a temperature sensor application on the SigFox network. This was used as our control point for checking SigFox coverage in the UK.
Positioning fieldcloud products in London helped us to get referred and sign up a new telecom operator client later in the year. More on that below.
April 2016 saw the second edition of SIdO the French IoT trade show in Lyon. We went all in, teamed up with the Minalogic ecosystem and built a multi-network demonstrator showcasing SigFox, LoRaWAN, GSM GPRS, ZigBee & WiFi connectivity using our modular, pluggable AirBoard.
Just after SIdO we received our bulk order of 500 AirBoards. Just in the nick of time as we had already sold the first 100 to France’s first public LoRaWAN operator to include with their developer kits. It was cool to be part of this early phase of discovery across the industry.
Our partner Cogent Computer Systems Inc launched a new product line of Raspberry PI add-on boards and we obtained some early prototypes of their cell modem hat. Which came in useful for our next project.
We helped a startup in Lyon deploy a proof of concept for sharing private parking lots. Our client needed to urgently demonstrate their end to end application to secure investment funding and we stepped in to build an edge gateway solution based on a customized 8GATE with cellular connectivity and relays for driving the parking boom gates. We also leveraged the fieldcloud service network (which was originally built for oil & gas secure data logistics) and extended the capabilities with additional API integrations.
To further extend the AirBoard’s capabilities and keeping with our vision of modular, pluggable IoT devices we designed and built our own extension boards for RS232, sensor interfaces and power supply.
Of course retrocomputing is one of our passions here at fieldcloud and we created a server emulation that ran on an AirBoard allowing users to tweet from a vintage Minitel terminal for the Grenoble computer museum Aconit.
We also improved our Sinclair ZX Spectrum Twitter ‘client’!
Another fieldcloud extension board for the AirBoard was our PR-1 programmer/debugger board which allows developers to sandwich the wireless module and AirBoard to deploy code and debug embedded applications with dual serial ports.
Alex Aguila joined the fieldcloud team during the summer of 2016. We been awarded a bid from an academic institution in Grenoble to build experimental IoT kits and educational content for business & management students (i.e. technology for non-technical roles). Alex brought both mechanical engineering and educational workshop content development skills.
We instituted Friday Hack or FrHack Days at fieldcloud, for building new prototypes and experimenting with ideas. It help us get up to speed with how best to combine mechanical, electronics and software together.
As part of the programme to develop IoT kits we launched a new brand called ELIOT (Experimental Internet of Things) which was intended to differentiate this new product line from the traditional fieldcloud systems integration business.
These new ELIOT kits attracted a fair amount of attention and we signed a new telecom operator client. We designed customized kits and a package of workshops for business unit line management and presales functions to build awareness and understanding of IoT devices and networks.
October 2016 was the second edition of IoT Planet in Grenoble. fieldcloud teamed up with our academic institution client to run IoT demos.
Immediately after IoT Planet it was all systems go for finishing assembly on the 15 IoT kits and 2 programming stations to ship to London for our client!
The following week it was showtime and we ran the first round of IoT workshops for senior staff from marketing, finance, product management, sales and solution engineering functions.
We finished 2016 on a high note and there were great moments. Revenue was up. But, cracks were starting to show. Could we sustain and build momentum? Find out what happened in our next story.
10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.