The Internet, as it turns out, cannot be contained. From our lowly beginnings on dial-up modems, we moved from wired, to wireless, to mobile, and now, we’re inching our way towards another huge leap forward: the Internet of Things (IoT). Cars, thermostats, pedometers, watches, dog collars — more and more everyday objects are being designed with internet connectivity in mind, giving them (and us) the ability to do more, learn more, and stay better connected.
The thing is, developing in the IoT space is tricky, because the companies making these products really have to do everything: hardware, software, firmware, networking, manufacturing logistics, scaling. For some products, like fitness trackers, customer analytics is the core product, and for many of them, it’s the primary route to understanding customer behavior — did the customer successfully pair the device with their computer? Did they download any apps? Or did they get stuck somewhere and give up? But developing and managing an analytics backend is a completely different skill set than everything else they do, and it’s yet another thing likely to go wrong when their crowdsourcing campaign goes viral and they get a huge bump in scale.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Keen IO is now partnering with Electric Imp to help make it easier for IoT developers to get the analytics they need. If you haven’t heard of Electric Imp, you should go check them out immediately, but here’s the gist: Electric Imp is a cloud service and hardware solution that makes it easy to transform the things you build into Internet-connected devices. Imp is great for everyone from at-home Makers and tinkerers, to IoT startups like Lockitron and Hiku, to commercial customers like Budweiser and GE.
Keen IO gives IoT developers a data warehouse, data store, and database for analytics — in effect becoming your hardware team’s new BFF. Freed from worrying about the maintenance and scaling of your backend analytics infrastructure, you can keep focused on your device, firmware, manufacturing, and app development. In other words, “We do the hard stuff, so you can do the fun stuff.”
Now, you can create nifty dashboards via Keen IO for your Electric Imp time series or event data in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is paste Electric Imp’s Keen IO SDK code into the agent window on the Electric Imp IDE, and you can post data to Keen IO with a single line of code. Then, head over to Keen IO’s github repository, grab our dashboard starter kit, and start generating internal or customer analytics right away. Plus, as the cherry on top, you can send up to 50,000 events/month with a free Keen IO account!
To track one engineer’s journey in marrying Electric Imp and Keen IO, check out this blog post from the always creative, energized, and insightful Jim Reich. (Full disclosure: Jim is also married to me.) In just a few hours, Jim built an Electric-Imp-based step tracker device for his elliptical trainer, with a real-time dashboard and no backend other than Keen IO and the Imp Cloud.
This is only the beginning, though! The magic of Electric Imp is that people can build just about anything and connect it to the Internet. And the magic of Keen IO is that you can track anything from just about anything you’ve built. This combination of invention and information is going to change the way products are made, what they can do, and what we learn about them, and we are so excited to be a part of the ride.
To learn more about Keen IO and Electric Imp, and the possibilities they present together, feel free to contact me at caroline_at_keen_dot_io.
