Interested in connecting with Nick? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Eseye: Eseye empowers businesses to embrace IoT without limits. We help them to visualize the impossible and bring those solutions to life through innovative IoT cellular connectivity solutions that enable our customers to drive up business value, deploy differentiated experiences and disrupt their markets.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(0:53) Intro to Nick Earle

(1:46) Intro to Eseye

(4:22) Eseye’s Applications

(9:00) How does IoT drive business disruption?

(14:34) What are the biggest challenges to IoT adoption?

(18:31) Key Findings From Eseye’s IoT Predictions Report

Transcript:

- [Ken] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT For All podcast on the IoT For All Media Network. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon, one of the co-creators of IoT For All. Now, before we jump into this episode, please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or join our newsletter at iotforall.com/newsletter to catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out. Before we get started, does your business waste hours searching for assets like equipment or vehicles and pay full-time employees just to manually enter location and status data? You can get real time location and status updates for assets indoors and outdoors at the lowest cost possible with leverages end to end IoT solutions. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com, that's iotchangeseverything.com. So, without further ado please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All podcasts. Welcome Nick to the IoT For All show. Thanks for here this week.

- [Nick] Great to be here Ryan.

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's great to have you.

- [Ryan] Let's start off by having you just introduce yourself to our audience so they can get more information on who they're listening to.

- [Nick] Sure. My name is Nick Earle, and I'm the CEO of an IoT company called Eseye.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. So how did you get involved with Eseye, I guess, talk about your backstory a little bit more to have some experience history there.

- [Nick] Yeah. I've been CEO for three years, but about six seven years ago, when I was working for Cisco I was actually running the cloud program globally for Cisco, and this was presented just as an investment opportunity, they were pretty early stage. And I put some money in and they kept on doing well, I kept on putting a little bit more money in and one thing led to another and then I joined the board and then I thought, this is a pretty cool companies doing some good stuff. And when you start saying that you're halfway through the door, and I ended been the CEO. So I've been CEO for three years.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Well, that's awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about Eseye, what you all do, the role you all play in IoT, just to kinda give our audience some context there.

- [Nick] Yeah. So we're a UK based company, probably hear from the accent, but we're, got 2000 customers, and we solve two particular problems in IoT. And to explain those, you gotta kinda look at the state of the IoT market right now. When I was in Cisco, just going back to that, in 2011, we predicted that we're gonna be 50 billion things connected by 2020, and when we got to 2020, we realized we only got to 11 billion. And so that's a hell of a miss. It turns out that it's classic Pareto 80/20, and classic Geoffrey Moore crossing the chasm scenario. In other words, the 20% of the companies that own the 80% of the products, the big guys, haven't actually plunged in yet. And so, although there's lots of experimentation there, you don't really have big companies doing big global rollout. So what Eseye does is it basically uses an agnostic SIM, so it's not tied to any mobile network operator, MNO. And it uses a cloud based platform, which is connected to 14 operators worldwide, where they give us their, what are called IMSI, so in case any listeners don't know, an IMSI is the International Mobile Subscriber Identity. It's the unique code that lets you localize traffic, not roam, localize onto a network. So basically we have a network switch in the cloud, technically that's called the SM-SR, but the networks switches in the cloud, and we have an agnostic SIM. So you embed the SIM in the device and we then switch your device depending on where it is in the world, and we localize the connection onto operators around the world and we access all of their roaming agreements. Put all that together and what you basically get is ubiquitous 99% connectivity globally for every square foot of landmass in the world. And that means that big companies can create global products that connect automatically wherever they are. So that's what we do.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, to your point a second ago, which we'll get into more in a little while around the projection of the number of devices you're gonna have versus where we actually are. I mean, one of the reasons we started IoT For All was to help increase the understanding of what IoT is and then hopefully then drive up adoption. So I think companies like yours who are making connectivity more accessible, provide the opportunity for more potential Applications to actually be realized. And if you could expand potentially on some of those Applications, kinda, the big areas you all focus on or some real life examples to help our audience understand.

- [Nick] Yeah, I'll pick, one of the great things about being in the IT industry is, you got tons of really cool case studies. So lemme like pick two or three which I just think are pretty interesting. I'm gonna start off with a spice company in... We have customers all over the world in 170 countries, but this one's from South Africa. It's a family owned spice company called Freddy Hirsch. They're just importing spices from the Indian Ocean and selling spices for like 60 years. And they certainly had this, aha, which said, what are these spices being used for? Let's actually focus on what people use them for as opposed to just selling the spice. And it turns out that vegetarian sausages are actually a huge market which is, wow, who knew. So what they then did is said, "How could we actually capture that market?" So they decided to get into the sausage machine business, and they copied the model that Hewlett Packard use for connected ink. And this is just stories just blew me away when I went and saw them in South Africa. So they basically selling butchers machines, sausage machines to butchers in the U.S. and around the world. And the butchers machine basically consents with their Freddy Hirsch spices are in the hopper, and they use a basically IoT to reorder the spices, like HP with your ink. And they changed the chemical constituents of the casing, the cellulose casing of the sausage so it reacts very well with their spices. So you put all that together and basically they have completely disintermediated the supply chain of all the distributors, the two tier distribution and whatever. And they're actually enabling perfect vegetarian sausages which consume their spices. So there's a bunch of things in there. There's the IoT sensing the spices and back holding their data and whatever. But also there's the real benefit of IoT which is a completely disruptive business model and disintermediating the supply chain. So there's number one. I'll use number two which is coffee machines. One of our customers is Costa Coffee, they actually got bought by Coca-Cola they're just entering the U.S. market, but they're in about 20 countries around the world. They've created a vending machine, one square meter vending machine, which has 90 senses in it. We actually do device design as well, and we help design it. But this delivers an incredibly personalized experience. You register with the machine, you scan with your phone to get the QR code, to get your loyalty points at which point the machine personalizes itself around you. So they call it the barista without a beard. And it gives a much more personalized experience than somebody writing your name on a cup with a sharpie. And they put the machines, not in their shops but in other people's shops at convenience stores, gas stations, whatever. So here they are, they're selling coffee which has been great during lockdown. They're personalizing the experience and they're capturing all the data. And it's the same machine that goes in every store worldwide, it's the same product SKU. And then I'll finish with a third one which along those lines, let's take Bosch Robotic lawnmowers, and they got tens of thousands. So they put our SIM on the board, they been embedded ISIM on the board. They sell to like 60 countries, they sell through retailers. And typically you've no idea who's buying your product. Customer turns it on, and because we have ubiquitous global connectivity, no problems with roaming restrictions, no problems with permanent roaming always connects, 'cause there's always a network somewhere. Your big operator might not have a roaming agreement with it but we don't care 'cause we're completely agnostic, and they bring in interoperability. We're switching the Over-the-Air, so Bosch now get a 100% connectivity. The data just appears in the cloud, the device is secured. So Bosch is saving a huge amount of money on their manufacturing, one SKU, supply chain, simplified distribution. Don't have to get the consumer to faff around with a SIM card or anything like that. So basically I can give you lots more examples, but the common theme is ubiquitous connectivity, no lock-in, interoperability, which is the inhibitor to mass adoption, and creating an experience around the end user as opposed to the next person in the supply chain. And I think that's one of the big things that IoT is enabling.

- [Ryan] I totally agree with you completely. You mentioned something while you're walking through those Applications about the disruptive nature of IoT from a business sense. And I'd love if you could just, at a high level kinda talk to our audience about how IoT can drive innovation and business disruption in general.

- [Nick] Yeah. Part of my past, actually, at one point I was based over in the U.S. in Silicon Valley during the Dotcom. and I worked for Hewlett Packard running the internet program over there in California, but we were looking at the first wave of the internet. And at first it came out as a bunch of technologies, it was HTML, meta-tagging, it was web pages. And then suddenly realized, no, that's not what it is, it actually is a disruptive enablers. You can buy your own airline ticket, book your own hotel room, buy a book online. And then suddenly all these companies grew up that we've never even imagined, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber. My belief is that what we're seeing now is the same thing. Right now IoT is all about the technologies, eUICC, the RAT type in the modem, the hyperscale message protocols to go to the hyperscale cloud provider. But actually what's emerging is an even bigger business model disruption. I mean, the case studies that I showed, people are bypassing multiple steps of a value chain. They're going direct to the end user. And you think about, Alexa in your home or the ring doorbell, by the way one of our customers is Amazon, we do Amazon lockers worldwide. But these are totally new business models that are not only disruptive to the competition, but they are enabling a totally new, previously unmet experience for the user, like the ring doorbell or Alexa or the lawn mower that just automatically connects the coffee machine that reconfigures around you. And they are doing what I think a lot of people miss in IoT, which is they're moving the business justification for the project, what we call the business outcome, not from selling a product that's just got smart features, my products cooler than your product, 'cause I've got smart features. No, no, no. The business outcome, the ROI is now backend business process optimization. So instead of having 30 SKUs, I've got one, and then that just flows through everything, and then your warranty process. You save millions on your warranty process 'cause he can do pushup dates of firmware and you can tell what's wrong with it. Like the Tesla model, you know what's wrong with it, so you can do a pushup date like your iPhone. You don't have to have as many repair shops. So my belief is that the first wave of innovation we were really just data mining one parameter of human behavior, which is search on digital products. I search you a website, Google tracked me or whatever tracked me, and they offered me new services based on my behavior, my personalized behavior based on my search, I was me interacting with something digital.

- Right.

- [Nick] What's now happening is the ability to do that but on consumers interacting with things physical. And there are many, many times more physical things in the world than there are digital things in the world. And let's just use the number of a 100 right now, which is a huge understatement, but just us it just to see the math. So if you can access a 100 times more data around people's interaction with a coffee machine, an Evie charger, a lawnmower, a medical device, or whatever it is, and you can data mine that, and you can then create incredible disruptions because you can go direct to the end user, like a medical device that senses all your bodily signs that the device can pick up. This intermediates the standard doctor's practice, go straight to the Mayo clinic, gets the information and then tells you what's wrong with you before you feel sick. These are radical business model disruptions that are, we can only dream of, and they're going to be enabled by everything that's physical that has power, having an IP address, being able to create data that can be mined. So there's gonna be a whole, just like we never thought in 1997 about Uber or Netflix or whatever, Airbnb, I would contend now in 2021, there's a bunch of big intermediaries aggregators, if you like, that are being formed right now to provide services that in a few years we'll be household names that we don't know yet, because we're still dealing with traditional business models, particularly for B2B. And the first wave is around B2C, but when you do B2B2C, a business to a business to a consumer, and you disintermediate that you create a new experience. And so you have a new set of winners and you have a new set of losers. And so the disruption is not just bigger, it's applying to physical things and it's based on at least a hundred times more data than we were in wave one.

- [Ryan] I totally agree with you. I wanted to ask. So as we think about IoT adoption in general this disruption that IoT causes, which can be a fear of some people, especially when it comes to new technologies and integrating them with like legacy systems, and just the general way of business. I wanted to see what your thoughts were on kind of the biggest challenges that kind of hinder IoT adoption that, I know you kind of alluded to some stuff earlier, but just talking about the growth of businesses, the maturing of the IoT market, just the general perception of what IoT is, like it's not as easy as just putting a SIM into a device. So what are your thoughts on like the biggest maybe two challenges that you notice in the market that kind of hinder adoption?

- [Nick] Yes, that's a great question. And you know there's challenges because, like we said, we predicted 50 billion and we got 11. So, that's one of the biggest misses in the history of IT, so what went wrong? 80% of our customers who say we have 2000, 80% of those came to us because they had a previously failed IoT project. So we do get to find out what went wrong. There are two main reasons, the most common reasons for things that went wrong. The first one is the connectivity's patchy. Like you said, well, surely it's just a device, it's just a piece of electronic, I put a SIM card in. That's how my phone works, why is an IoT device different? Well, it's completely different because it's not shrink wrap like an iPhone or an Android device. Every IT device is custom like the coffee machine, the Evie charger. And so, it's got different sensors in it, and people don't know, enterprises don't know how to build hardware, design hardware, we thought those days were behind them. I mean, it wasn't that what cloud was supposed to do, hardware, that's what Andreessen said. It turns out in IoT that no hardware is really hard. So, number one reason is that people, the device fails and they don't know how to design the device. And so one of the reasons why we're an unusual IoT company that we do hardware device design because the device, the firmware, the settings, how you optimize the battery, how you do the census, it's really difficult. And people wanna sell coffee, they don't wanna design hardware. So number one inhibitor was, people underestimated how hard the device is and how difficult it is. The second thing is they just thought that by putting a SIM in, as we said, you just switch it on and it connects all around the world. And then you say, well, in the U.S. you can roam on to Verizon. But Verizon doesn't have a 100% coverage in the US, and secondly, Verizon have reciprocal roaming agreements with other vendors, but once you're over that agreement, they kick you off. In fact, if you go to Brazil, you can't roam, you have to localize. And in Turkey, we're just doing a rollout of a US customer into Turkey right now. And if you're on Turkcell for more than three months you're out, you just get kicked off, because it's a, what's called a permanent roaming area. So you think, Oh God, not only do I want ubiquitous connectivity but now I to worry about whether I'm gonna get kicked off because the dispute between carriers. I have to worry about whether there's a cell phone signal where I am now, where my device will be tomorrow, and it could be just down the street but we all know there's black spots. And then thirdly, I have to worry about regulators and the regulatory environment. So the second biggest inhibitor is the lack of fundamental interoperability and standards. And the moment, IT industry has proven, the moment you enable interoperability, you hit the inflection point of adoption. And I believe that's what's happening now with IoT.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. So one thing I wanted to kinda bridge this conversation into was around the IoT predictions report that you all did. I'm not exactly sure what the exact date was when it's launch, but it sounded...

- [Nick] We launched it in early January and we wrote in December.

- [Ryan] Okay. But it's very relevant to this conversation. I wanted to ask a couple of different questions and start out with just generally summarizing up the report. What were the biggest trends you kinda pulled from that report that you did? And I guess before you get into that, how was the report conducted?

- [Nick] Yeah, so, well, the way it was conducted is we talked to our customers, things like, what are they doing? What problems are they trying to solve? We talked to the analysts, talked to the market, and then frankly, we sat down and noodled and thought, I think this is likely what's gonna happen. I mean, we're a 14 year old company, so we know it's not our first rodeo. But in regard to the report which is the number one piece of collateral that's available on our website, which if I can do the shameless plug is eseye.com E-S-E-Y-E.com, you'll see the IoT predictions report. There are 10 of them in there, clearly we don't have time to go through 10, I'll pick two. One of the things that we predicted was this issue that we've already talked about is that there will be, in the same way as you can mine data from interaction, with digital things, you can mine data from the interaction with physical things, and that's going to create a whole new area of marketing, and it's gonna create his own issues of course, like with privacy and, you're searching for a product and you don't realize that you're the product, your data is being mined. But the fact is that there's this whole explosion of data that's going to be available and it's gonna be mined. And that is actually going to be the enabler of the disruptive business models. So if you wanna find the disruptive business models, go for the data. The second prediction is actually not about, well there is the interoperability. The moment you have a ubiquitous interoperability, you hit the inflection point. So it's happening right now. But the third one I'll pick out is, kind of where is it going, 'cause it's a prediction report. And so today we think all of this is cool but if you actually look at all the components of IoT are following Moore's law, which means that they're on an exponential trend, not a linear one. And people always miss underestimate the effect of an exponential trend. Our brains are not wired to understand exponential trends, so we always underestimate. So if you think about the cost of an IoT device, people spend 20 or $30. You can buy some cheap ones for maybe $18, a tracker, but whatever whole IoT device could be $5. And what if it could be printed, not manufactured, because the Moore's applies to multiple areas. So you can print a battery, you can print a sensor, you can print circuit. So you can't print a modem right now, but the modems are coming down in price, and they're getting smaller and smaller. When you get to around $5, you can put a tracker on a food, a box of chilled food. And then when you get down to say 50 cents, you can put a device that really, that wafer, which will communicate on a chocolate bar or a piece of clothing or whatever. Now, why is this really radical and transformative other than from a technology perspective? Because 30% of the world's food is thrown away, because you have got a non-optimized supply chain. And it's a huge issue there's problems at the production side, which IoT can help with things like sensors in the soil for specific watering. But there's also problems at the consumer side. We have too much food, it goes off you throw it away. And it's like distributing the vaccine, all the supply chain problems we're talking about right now, that Pfizer 1 has to be to a certain degree temperature, and it's really difficult, and you end up wasting billions of dollars. But the moment you can actually get the costs down and actually get something that can be temporary. Ideally compostable, we're not there yet. By the way, but if it could be compostable, it would really take off. You can then start tracking everything. Now, the other side to this coin is, I don't know whether I'm comfortable with that because there's always two sides to this. But technically it's possible. It's just like the digital camera, it was possible, each year it got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper on an exponential curve until eventually killed Kodak. Now what's gonna happen is these sensors are gonna get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. We already have a customer, Ryan, who is the world's second largest paper company called Essity, that produces an IoT enabled diaper. Now I'd have to explain to your listeners, it's not what you think. It's the adult incontinence market, it's for care homes and it does urine analysis to give a prediction of early onset of urinary tract infections. So, yeah, your mom's in a care home, she got dementia. She wears a adult incontinence diaper, but this wafer, very thin wafer which uses Bluetooth to her aggregation device in the home, which back logs the data in the cloud it says, this lady has got early on... Her mechanical constituents or the urine is changing, she could be developing, but she doesn't know it yet. By the way, she's got dementia, so even if she did know it she probably wouldn't tell the care home staff. But, she looks like she's developing it, so let's treat her. Because people typically they don't die in care homes, they die in hospitals. And the reason they go to hospitals is often they fall over or they fall out of bed because they have an infection. It's actually number one reason for them going to hospital, and unfortunately you get worse. You catch things in hospital as well as get well. So we're already starting to see these micro wafers inserted in products, in this case, between the pieces of paper in a diaper which are actually transforming the experience of everyday objects. I always say, if you can have an IoT enabled diaper I don't think there's anything you can't IoT enabled. But the magic was the business idea. What if I could help patients live longer by actually putting a wafer inside a diaper. And the longer a patient lives the more fees they pay to the care home. So it's a business model as well.

- [Ryan] Yeah, I think the more people understand what is possible with IoT, and not concerning themselves too much with the technology aspects or getting scared away from because of all the different technology they feel like they need to understand in order to adopt IoT, and understand that adoption is easier than they think. I feel like that is a very powerful thing for companies to understand. And we take it upon ourselves to work to help promote companies in the IoT space who are making adoption easier and better for companies so that we can hopefully reach our real projections and not keep falling short. So I think it's important for people out there listening to understand that you don't need to... you don't need to have a knowledge or extensive knowledge about all the different components of an IoT solution. You need to find a trusted company who either has built for your industry, understands your industry well enough or can adapt to their solution offering to your industry to solve a particular problem. And oftentimes if you come with a particular problem, the company is smart enough to understand that the IoT technologies that are available well enough to build something that fits to your solution, so you could focus more on that bigger problem which is saving in this case, saving people's lives or having them live longer, for instance. So that business case is where I think companies that do not work in the IoT space need to focus their effort and energy on and rely on companies like Eseye and others to help them understand, or help understand the problem and then adapt the different IoT technologies to fit in to their ROI at the end of the day.

- Totally agree.

- [Ryan] And it's something that I think people just don't fully realize is out there at times, like..

- [Nick] Totally agree. In fact, we rebranded our whole company because we actually were a, when I first joined we just talked about the technology and this the like...

- That the biggest thing.

- [Nick] Yeah. And we looked at everybody else's website and they just talked about, my technology is better than his technology, it was Julie engineers . And then we had the aha, which says, you know what, people need to be a guide, they need to be guided. Because what you're talking about, people called imagineering. Forget the technology, forget the technology. Grab a pen, draw me a picture on the wall in the whiteboard. Draw me a picture of what you'd like to do. What would be cool? What would be a brand new? I mean, some companies like Apple, it just