

Spark Labs Raises $4.9M to Help Engineers Make Their Devices Smart - jwcooper
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/08/spark-io-raises-4-9-million-to-help-engineers-make-their-devices-smart/

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100k
Congrats to the Spark team. Sad to see the Twin Cities lose another IoT
startup, but I hope this positions them in the best possible way for success.
Welcome to San Francisco!

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middleca
A lot of us are staying in the Twin Cities, and we're hiring!
([https://www.spark.io/jobs](https://www.spark.io/jobs)), we're looking for
great engineers, and we support remote work as well. :)

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vicngtor
Well deserved. Their chip is practically the only chip that works and can be
easily integrated into arduino boards.

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bravo22
They don't make a chip. They use a CC3000 from TI -- which costs about $10 --
and provide a thing wrapper around TI's own provided driver.

You can take the same CC3000 from TI -- around $11 in low volume -- put it on
your board and write your software with their driver.

They basically make a good dev board but for anyone wanting to make anything
in a volume beyond 1K they'd use the TI module directly. You don't put a dev
board in an end product.

I fail to see how their business is going to scale beyond this.

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hashmymustache
They recognize that it's more for prototyping and wouldn't be used at a
production level:

"We use industry-standard components — chosen to be powerful, inexpensive, and
widely available — that can be designed directly onto your own circuit board,
bringing your Bill of Materials down for volume production."

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bravo22
Right, I agree. That is what I gathered before but the article and their new
splash page makes it seem like they want to supply this to large device makers
(i.e. anyone not building things out of their basement) and I don't see how
this could work.

They can't make money on the hardware, because TI makes the chip and provides
the reference design and drivers for free. Spark boards are all OSHW anyways.
You'd spend the extra week and integrate the TI part into your device anyways.

Their cloud stack is open source, and is basically a transport. As the device
maker you'd still have to write the cloud app that gathers data from different
points and sends commands to the end unit.

Beyond the dev kits I'm having a hard time seeing the revenue stream and/or
value proposition.

What am I missing? Maybe guys from Spark want to chime in?

If I use Spark to prototype, is there a product they are offering me that I
would need to pay for at scale?

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middleca
Hi bravo22,

    
    
      I'm from Spark, and I can try to answer! :) 
    

With more than 20,000 units in the field, the Spark community is the largest
consumer of the CC3000 module, so you get the benefits of driver testing and
patches, and great community support. Large businesses could certainly use the
open source modules and run with them, but if you're a large business you
generally want to pay for support and licensing. Next for us is building a
suite of fleet management tools and controls that larger companies want that
also benefit hobbyists.

If you're a business or a maker, using the Spark Cloud saves you from having
to worry about building your own protocol, dealing with socket programming,
spinning up servers, as well as worrying about encryption on microcontrollers,
or wearing a pager. Having the source code available means you can keep your
private things private by not going over the internet, as well as building
things we haven't thought of yet.

Thanks!

David

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bravo22
Thank David. Thanks so much for answering!

Couple of questions: \- Are you always sticking w/ CC3000 or are there other
WiFi modules you intend to support?

My main question, might have gone unnoticed in my long post... Is there a
service of yours that I need to pay for to get these features, or do I get the
benefits you outlined above by running your firmware and deploying your open
source cloud code on my system?

Do you have plans to go closed source in the future?

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zsupalla
Zach here, also from Spark. We're definitely working on next-gen hardware now,
haven't selected a final chipset yet.

Our hosted cloud is somewhat different from the open source version, and the
differences will grow over time. As an open source company, the question
always comes to "how do we make money?" Our open source thesis is to give away
basic technology and sell advanced technology. Right now the biggest
differences between our hosted cloud and the open source version is
scalability; our system is designed to scale horizontally whereas the open
source one is a single instance (although it could, of course, be modified).
We are still deciding which features that are still in development will be
open sourced, and which won't. We've learned from other for-profit open source
companies (like MongoDB, for instance), that even after being on the market
for years they're still trying to figure out which features to give away and
which to sell.

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bravo22
Thanks for answering Zach! Your answer certainly helps make it more clear.

To use your feature rich cloud, would one have to use your spark core board or
one can roll own CC3000 based board + your open source firmware but pay you
and have it talk to your closed cloud for scale? When is your plan to announce
pricing for this feature rich cloud?

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jenesaisdiq
You've got it- you can build your own board using our reference design and pay
us a minor fee to use our lovely cloud. Pricing isn't public yet, but we can
discuss it privately if you have a need. Thanks!

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lisper
Sounds a lot like [http://electricimp.com](http://electricimp.com)

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jasonlaramburu
It's more expensive than imp but has a smoother wifi pairing process.

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jenesaisdiq
And a lot cheaper than Imp at scale- <$15 per device in hardware at scale.

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tricky
Do these guys have any patents on their tech?

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bravo22
Their product is open source: board design, firmware, and cloud software. The
WiFi module is CC3000 from TI.

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tricky
my next project is going to be in this area and you seem like a good person to
know. get in touch with me if you want. email address in my profile.

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middleca
We have a really awesome community that can help too! -
[https://community.spark.io/](https://community.spark.io/)

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fiatmoney
Can we stop naming things Spark already? There are

\- these guys

\- [http://www.sparkjava.com](http://www.sparkjava.com)

\- [http://spark.apache.org](http://spark.apache.org)

Even worse, they're all high-quality projects. I can process data from my
Spark devices on my Spark cluster and serve the results via Spark.

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follower
Even more so in this area with [http://SparkFun.com/](http://SparkFun.com/)
who had to deal with issues arising from having a name with "spark" in it:
[https://www.sparkfun.com/news/300](https://www.sparkfun.com/news/300)

