Health Warning During this post we may try and sign you up to some pretty cool new tech and it might be too convincing for you to say no. Just saying.**
Not a day goes by when the tech press and media fire off warnings about the dangers of IOT in your home or in your business. The hazards of someone else hacking into your network to control your IP cameras; to watch your children through the baby-cam; to control your home heating or even to check how much food you have left in your “smart” fridge. These commentators are all too quick to point out the issues but there doesn’t seem to be a wealth of options out there if you are an IOT enthusiast who also values your own privacy and security be that in your home or in your office. If that sounds like you then take a seat and have a look at what we have been busily working on in our Zovolt labs for the last two years.
The timing and context of this release is very important so it’s worth taking a moment of your time now to explain. Over four years ago our CTO Tibor was a very active member of various IOT / WC3 forums discussing the virtues of decentralised technology solutions above (or at the very least in parallel) to the mainstay of centralised, server-based networks.
It was very hard to convey this message and oftentimes it landed on deaf ears aside from a few of the younger members of the community who got it and understood. And yet nothing has changed even now. Scan forward four years and we have announcements from tech giants including Apple & Google in their efforts to combat Covid-19 (a GLOBAL pandemic as we are all too aware now) that, actually, decentralised is the way forward when it comes to creating so-called “contact tracing” applications on smartphones. Who’d have thought it? Why now? Because they are starting to understand that we as individuals value our privacy, our peace of mind that just because our phones and devices are capable of picking up and reporting our every move and our locations, we do not want that personal data in the hands of third parties we cannot trust. This is a huge conceptual shift in a few years and just proves once again that Streembit and the new wave of P2P IOT technology can have massive positive impact for all of us. We want connectivity but we want it on our terms and on the basis that we can truly control who sees our data and who can access our homes and private spaces. Step forward Streembit.
You can see from previous Blogs that we developed what we perceive to be the first true P2P (there will be a separate blog on this based on the proliferation of the terms “P2P” being used for tools such as Zoom or Zipcall) communications solution in the world to focus on machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communications - called Streembit.
This means we can securely send communications without the need for a centralised, server-based solution where third parties or sneaky elements (you know who you are…) can look at or manipulate the data you are sending. We won’t go over that same ground here again as you can read the white paper and previous content. What is exciting is that we have now developed the hardware to run alongside and make use of Streembit in IOT contexts.
Our focus here is not on making mass consumer-grade commercial IOT solutions (not yet anyway) but to provide something to techies, developers and IOT enthusiasts to begin using and developing their own secure IOT solutions. Our Streembit IOT Gateway “Developer Kit” comes with Zigbee sensors and the Raspberry Pi expansion board so there is everything you need to be able to start setting up using our documentation and running your own P2P system. Our hope is that we will develop a community of early adopters and developers who can start to see the potential of P2P IOT and provide genuine alternatives to the centralised IOT solutions we are seeing proliferate in homes and industry.
Streembit P2P IOT
Check out the team behind Streembit Zovolt Ltd If you are interested in being one of the “Early Birds” then drop us a note on (info@zovolt.com) and we will make sure you are top of the list when we release.