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I worked at an ultimately unsuccessful IoT startup a few years ago. Our first product was a wireless leak detector with remote notifications, it was definitely

I worked at an ultimately unsuccessful IoT startup a few years ago. Our first product was a wireless leak detector with remote notifications, it was definitely better than the what the market currently had on offer but it only "worked" if its base-station could contact a service via the internet. On the software side of the project had a lot of time to think about the long term future while the hardware team was working through manufacturability and so on. Watching other hardware+service companies go under I realized there's a need for some sort of "continued service insurance" in this industry. I'm imagining some company that, for a fee, would take delivery of service software images and guarantee its continued operation for the reasonable life of the hardware (say 5 to 10 years) if the company folds. No improvements/bug fixes/etc., just a guarantee that whatever sort of phoning-home the hardware was doing before could continue after. With no new sales, so no growth to worry about, seems like it should be pretty easy to predict the total cost to run the thing for the promised duration on a cloud service like AWS.

sah2ed 6y ago
> No improvements/bug fixes/etc., just a guarantee that whatever sort of phoning-home the hardware was doing before could continue after. With no new sales, so no growth to worry about, seems like it should be pretty easy to predict the total cost to run the thing for the promised duration on a cloud service like AWS. For devices that are air-gapped the idea may be workable, but not in the form you’ve outlined for internet-connected devices. What happens when a major vulnerability is discovered? Who is liable when a vulnerable device gets exploited in a well-orchestrated breach? Such a company would eventually be confronted with the reality of lawsuits.
- femto113 6y ago
  I reason this differently in a couple ways: 1) most IoT devices/base stations (though not all) do not expose an interface to the internet, they simply make outbound calls across the internet to some service to report stats, send messages, get commands, etc. (In the case of Automatic I believe the "thing" relied on the user's phone to act as the basestation) 2) any device that does expose an interface to the internet will still be exposed even if the central service shuts down. Now if someone actually manages to hack the service itself and use it for malicious purposes (like sending bad commands to the things) that would probably fall on the operator, but securing such services is a problem they could probably get really good at solving.

sah2ed 6y ago

> No improvements/bug fixes/etc., just a guarantee that whatever sort of phoning-home the hardware was doing before could continue after. With no new sales, so no growth to worry about, seems like it should be pretty easy to predict the total cost to run the thing for the promised duration on a cloud service like AWS. For devices that are air-gapped the idea may be workable, but not in the form you’ve outlined for internet-connected devices. What happens when a major vulnerability is discovered? Who is liable when a vulnerable device gets exploited in a well-orchestrated breach? Such a company would eventually be confronted with the reality of lawsuits.

femto113 6y ago
I reason this differently in a couple ways: 1) most IoT devices/base stations (though not all) do not expose an interface to the internet, they simply make outbound calls across the internet to some service to report stats, send messages, get commands, etc. (In the case of Automatic I believe the "thing" relied on the user's phone to act as the basestation) 2) any device that does expose an interface to the internet will still be exposed even if the central service shuts down. Now if someone actually manages to hack the service itself and use it for malicious purposes (like sending bad commands to the things) that would probably fall on the operator, but securing such services is a problem they could probably get really good at solving.