An interview with Usman Haque, founder of Pachube.com, an online platform for realtime data.
What is Pachube? What were the events and thought processes that led to its creation?
Pachube is a generalized data brokerage for a wide range of entities: from sensors to actuators, mobile devices to buildings, physical environments like forests to virtual environments like Second Life. Its technical focus, however, is very narrow: it enables these disparate entities to store, share and relay their realtime environmental datastreams and corresponding metadata and promotes interoperability between the societies of devices, buildings, etc. The Pachube system provides high-resolution storage and high-volume resilience of this data and the backend is built for robust scalability.
Do you see the space for similar platforms tending towards one dominating player (a la Google), or with various (or perhaps a lot) of different players?
There will necessarily have to be multiple players because it will be difficult (and, frankly, wrong) for a single player to have control of the disparate entities that form the Internet of Things. Alliances such as IPSO should help ensure that multiple players are part of the conversation.
What would a business or organization changed by Pachube look like? What would a world changed by Pachube look like?
In the coming age of extreme connectivity what will be important is not who you are, but what you are connected to. For the devices we use and the buildings we occupy in a wirelessly and ubiquitously networked world this will be even more vital: they will all need to communicate with each other and share information. Realtime interoperability between various types of entity will be essential. The world will become a vast ‘eco-system’ of conversant devices, buildings and virtual environments. Connected Environments Ltd (Pachube.com’s parent company) will focus on exploiting these emerging trends and on delivering products and services that are intended to serve as the industry standard in this new and exciting area where technology, telecommunications and architecture are beginning to collide.
What’s next for Pachube?
There are a number of major advances coming for Pachube in the next few months. We’ve demonstrated (a) that we can provide a scalable, robust platform; (b) that there’s a huge market for it – we get dozens of invitation requests every day; and (c) that online storage and sharing of sensor and environmental data can be a valuable resource. Now we’re going to be actively refining our business model so that we can serve the small and medium scale enterprises, designers, makers and product manufacturers whose products and devices are going to make up the Internet of Things. We’ll be rolling out much more sophisticated data analysis queries, introducing ‘groups’ and improving the Pachube.apps repository. We’ll also be introducing a new general data-logging Pachube iPhone app!
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