LBB OpenSensors: Harnessing Open Data and IoT

Little British Battler, OpenSensors, is only 18 months old but is home to some impressive UK engineering talent. The small development team has built a scalable real-time messaging engine to process millions of messages a second from any internet-connected device. OpenSensors aims to help its customers create IoT products by providing them with the component parts - such as real-time data access, security, storage, data analytics and machine learning. Customers can either take this as a hosted service or use it behind their own firewall.

One example of the work OpenSensors does is gathering real-time and historical environmental data (e.g. on water quality, weather conditions and pollution) from thousands of community projects. This can then be streamed into an application or data visualisation tool to help understand patterns and make predictions. “Connected buildings” is another area, whereby lights can be turned off or heating turned down intelligently; or understanding occupancy rates and how people actually use buildings. Indeed, we can see there could be many applications for the platform the team has created.

OpenSensors was incubated by the Open Data Institute, which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt. In the current year, one of the key aims is to get good reference customers in place; the company is also exploring the possibility of Venture Capital funding.

We’re only just scratching the surface in terms of what IoT technologies and data can help organisations and cities achieve. Firms like OpenSensors are forging the way and helping us to understand the art of the possible. If anything, the challenge for those looking to make money from IoT is picking out the best opportunities and devising the most effective commercial approaches.

We’ll have more on OpenSensors in our Little British Battlers report, out soon.

Posted by Kate Hanaghan at '08:53' - Tagged: lbb   OpenData