Connected Devices Weekly Update/2017-01-12

Community

• Developer Board Announcement via Twitter

• Board schematics on Github
• SensorWeb blog

Planning

• This week has been spent in planning activities. Meetings held with product management, UX, marketing, legal, hardware teams to plan Q1 work, with the emphasis on the beta service and developer offering targeted for March 1st, and EVT targeted for April 1st. Also discussed hardware beta.
• User stories based on planning discussions are being written and will be reviewed with team and prioritized.
• UX design revisions for beta service are being made.
• Looking to source data to pre-populate air quality data for beta service.
• Q1 marketing plan is being being drafted.
• Hardware deliverables are being received on schedule. Preparing new MSA with hardware vendor and purchase order for tooling.
• Presenting a deep dive into SensorWeb objectives to Jim Cook next week.

Engineering

• User stories are being prioritized for the upcoming sprints.
• Sprint planning for sprint ending Jan. 27th is scheduled for Jan. 17th

• Wrapping up the work
• Blog post coming up next week

• Platform Work Week going on
  • Reviewed 2017 Platform OKR
  • Broke down OKR into use cases and scope
    • 2017 Q1 planning for tasks, milestones and goals
    • A secure communication spike
    • A gateway reference implementation spike to showcase interop
  • Meeting Lighthouse, SensorWeb teams

Planning Tasks

• Gate 1 review tomorrow Jan 13th (Deck and Product Visuals)
• Engineering tasks have been broken down and estimated to create the execution timeline until Gate 2
• Creating Marketing plan, Project Plan, costs and resource estimations

UX/Research Tasks

• Reaching out to street artists, publishers, street art fans to provide feedback about the User Experience and also to understand the way to gather the right type of content
• 19 artists who have expressed an interest in Magnet. Stats on response rate - 24%.

Engineering Tasks

• Development work have been split in 6 Sprints (from January 9th to March 31st). For this phase we would use another client called "journey"
• Sprint 10 (January 9th - January 20th) has already been started this week
  • Backend: Static API to serve jsons for the list view and each story view, Dockerization for dev/test/prod environment
  • Client/Frontend: Bootstrap new react-native app, API and development of some React Components (Magnetometer implementation for arrow direction and Location Services)

• A decision was made by the Connected Devices leadership team to merge Project HomeWeb into Mozilla IoT platform work
• The consumer-facing home monitoring product part of HomeWeb has been "moved to the backlog"
• Members of the Project HomeWeb team will now be working on a Web of Things gateway implementation as part of our 2017 platform plan

Engineering

• Punam Dahiya and Sam Foster have joined the team.

Planning

• PRD features were reviewed with the team and prioritized. PRD updated with feedback.
• Marketing plan reviewed this week.
  • Discussed using TestFlight within the next couple weeks to allow installation and testing of the mobile apps on iOS (iPhone 5s and 6+).
  • Discussed marketing channels and ways in which to reach out to target users.
• Legal review to be held at the end of the week
• Drafted Lighthouse Information Architecture diagram. Will continue working on it to reflect storage, camera idle/sleep mode, etc.

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READ-ONLY

• Amazon Alexa at CES
  • Voice control is coming to smart home devices and appliances in a big way, judging from the many such product introductions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Alexa clearly dominated CES, and it has quite a head start over the other two big contenders. Google Home launched just last fall, two years after the Echo, and Apple HomeKit adoption has been slow because of the extremely involved approval process. “Amazon is taking a very aggressive early lead,” says Tuong Nguyen, principal research analyst with Gartner. “I feel there’s still a lot of opportunity for competition, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be an either-or situation.”
  • Among appliance makers at CES, LG, Whirlpool, GE, and Samsung all showed off products that take orders from Alexa. Samsung introduced a robot vacuum that you can start by issuing a command to an Echo. The forthcoming LG Smart InstaView Door-in-Door refrigerator will have a disembodied Alexa built right in, so you can ask it to pull up recipes on the touchscreen or order food directly from—you guessed it—Amazon Fresh.
  • As for Whirlpool, all of its connected appliances in 2017 will also integrate Alexa voice control, including fridges, ranges, microwaves, washers, and dryers. (Nobody’s figured out yet what to ask a dishwasher to do.) GE announced a suite of appliances last fall that can be controlled by Alexa-equipped devices.
• FTC files to protect consumers’ security in the Internet of Things. On January 5, 2017, the FTC filed a complaint against computer networking equipment manufacturer, D-Link Corporation, alleging that the company failed to take reasonable steps to secure routers and Internet-protocol cameras from “widely known and reasonably foreseeable risks of unauthorized access,” leaving consumers vulnerable to data privacy and security risks. The D-Link case is the FTC’s third case in the Internet of Things (IOT) space.
• Verizon announced a partnership with Qualcomm to introduce ThingSpace-ready modules for deployment using the chip designer’s CAT-M1 LTE Modem, according to a press release from Qualcomm. Further, Verizon is making a development kit available to the public that will help with the easy creation of various IoT solutions using its ThingSpace platform. This is a strong move for both companies, and it speaks to the increasing importance of IoT platforms like ThingSpace as the IoT proliferates.
• The Federal Trade Commission announced that it is challenging the public to create an innovative tool that will help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities in the software of IoT home devices. The agency is offering a cash prize of up to $25,000 for the best technical solution. The FTC is asking IoT Home Inspector Challenge contestants to develop a tool that would address security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software in IoT devices. An ideal tool might be a physical device that the consumer can add to his or her home network that would check and install updates for other IoT devices on that home network, or it might be an app or cloud-based service, or a dashboard or other user interface. Contestants also have the option of adding features such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.