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Curation is Creation

WIZnet — Fri, 12 May 2017 10:45:21 +0000

It is often said that imitation is the mother of creation. Copycat marketing grows the market, Shanzhai culture leads innovation. Imitation in the digital age is made by curation. That is to say, curation is creation.

By 2025, six billion people all over the world will use the Internet. Everyone will be able to access any and all information. Everyone can use e-commerce and also enjoy the opportunity to get the best online education anywhere in the world. The problem is too excessive content, the flood of information. We have to select what market needs. We need a filtering tool. Crowdsourcing and curation take the role.

Excessive content in the digital age is being filtered by social curation, which is driven by the crowd. In process, a community which leads collective intelligence by crowdsourcing is formed. This community should be equipped with a curation platform to filter the content. If an algorithm is created on this platform, it becomes an intellectual property and further a business model. The pioneers of the digital curation platform are Google and Facebook.

With the use of smart phone and the proliferation of social media, content curation services are growing rapidly. They collect and curate relevant content according to the subjectivity or viewpoint of individuals, and provide users with the content that is related to or preferred by. Flipboard, which shares news, and Pinterest, which shares photos, become notable unicorn companies. Edtech, which aims personalized learning, has content curation service at its core.

It is now the era of startups. Democratization of entrepreneurship is taking place. The Maker Movement, resulted from the open source revolution, is exponentially spreading. This is because crowdsourcing is possible in open source communities based on the open prototyping platforms: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ARM mbed, etc. Ideas and designs are shared with reusable software and library, which are optimized through repeated reuse and then become the de facto standard.

Half of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions originate in startups now. All IoT solution platforms, such as Intel’s Edison and Samsung’s Artic, which newly enter into the IoT market, make it a priority to be compatible with Arduino, the origin of open source electronics platform. Because Intel and Samsung do not have their own community and ecosystem, and because they are reliant on reusable software and library that are commonly used in Arduino community.

The open source community is now evolving into a makerspace. Online makerspace should have a curation platform, where reusable software and library serve as the API for Platform as a Service. Those enable maker to develop new prototype more easily and quickly by remixing existing prototypes with his own idea. It is then that curation becomes creation.

Cybermakerspace.com, opened by WIZnet, is an online makerspace – for makers, by makers. WIZnet Museum exhibits over 2,000 UCC’s (User Created Content) and 100 new UCC’s every month. For these users, WIZnet holds IoT design contest at cybermakerspace.com from May to September, 2017. “Curation is Creation” is the title of the contest.

– YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io

This column contributed to “ET news” in Korea on May. 12, 2017

WIZnet to Hold IoT Design Contest “Curation is Creation”

WIZnet — Mon, 08 May 2017 22:58:11 +0000

WIZnet, a member of the ARM® mbed™ Partnership, will hold an Internet of Things (IoT) design contest titled “Curation is Creation” at cybermakerspace.com. IoT solutions for the contest must be designed on the ARM mbed Enabled™ WIZwiki-W7500 platform.

WIZnet has been building Cyber Maker Space, unique in its kind as an IoT User Created Content (UCC) platform. Cyber Maker Space is a library of reusable software that makes developing and prototyping IoT devices easy and fast. This is all made possible with WIZnet Museum at its foundation, which exhibits more than 2,000 UCCs and adds 100 new ones every month.

The contest will be held from May to August 2017, with 16 prizes totaling $15,000. WIZnet expects more than 1,500 makers, including at least 500 members of WIZnet Museum, to participate in the contest.

“The open source community is now evolving into an online makerspace. We hope this Design Contest at cybermakerspace.com will celebrate the collaboration and engagement with developers in the ARM mbed community.” says YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet.

“With over 10 million IoT connected products coming to market in the next 12 months using ARM mbed, developers need strong tools to bring their ideas into production with time-to-market advantage,” said Michael Horne, deputy general manager and vice president of marketing and sales, IoT Business, ARM. “WIZnet’s initiative offers timely support for strong open source collaboration based on ARM mbed Enabled interoperable platforms to over 250,000+ developers, innovative startups and developers shaping IoT.”

Participants are encouraged to submit their creation early, as entries are revisable until the final deadline. This is in order to celebrate collaboration and engagement, which we consider core values of open source. We urge all participants to leverage the power of the community, give each other feedback, and help one another create the best version of their work.

From September to October 2017, it is an open voting period. As this is a contest for fostering the open source community, we want to enable the participants voting power.

Please refer to CiC (Curation is Creation), the online magazine of Cyber Maker Space, for detailed contest guidelines and register at www.cybermakerspace.com to participate.

About WIZnet

WIZnet (www.wiznet.io) develops unique Internet Offload Processor (IOP), a TCP/IP hardware implementation which is fast, safe and reliable to perform data transfer by fully offloading processing of the entire TCP/IP stack without host CPU intervention. IOP has been adopted in the Arduino Ethernet Shield and Arduino Leonardo Platform and has been recognized as the de facto standard for Ethernet connectivity.

Contact:

Jake Lee, COO of WIZnet Technology

Call: +1-408-320-4969

Email: jakelee@wiznet.io

Elektor magazine publicize WIZnet IoT design contest “Curation is Creation”.

WIZnet — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 08:27:03 +0000

Elektor magazine(elektormagazine.com) publicize WIZnet IoT design contest “Curation is Creation”.

The below is direct URL for this attractive contest article.
https://www.elektormagazine.com/news/wiznet-to-hold-iot-design-contest-curation-is-creation

Please come right now, and enjoy this cybermakerspace festival.

This is a good opportunity to conquer the surprising 4th Industrial Revolution.

It is the Era of Makers

WIZnet — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 08:14:48 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of attending Maker Fair in Rome. The number of pavillions, which only totaled three last year, grew to as many as 23 this year. Separate pavillions, ranging from 3D Printing, Human Body & Health, Fashion & Wearable, Home Automation, Energy & Water, to City & Mobility & Security, displayed almost 1,000 creations developed by DIY makers. It was quite a surprise, not only the scale, but also the variety of content such as drone contest. How did the fair evolve so fast in just one year? Especially, in Italy of all places, which is not known to be a manufacturing powerhouse.

The reason I had participated in Maker Fair in Rome, rather than in London or Paris, is because WIZnet’s Internet processor is embedded in Arduino’s Ethernet Shield and Leonardo Platform. Italy is where Arduino, the origin of the open source hardware platform, was created.

In the era of Internet of Things startups is beginning in earnest. In just China last year, 3.65 million startups were created; that’s 10,000 startups every day. It’s not an exaggeration to say this is a Big Bang of sorts. Gartner predicted that by 2017, half of IoT solutions will originate in startups that are less than three years old.

Last June, U.S. President Obama held a Maker Fair at the White House. He focused on the importance of STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. He thoroughly emphasized that schools should have makerspaces to educate STEM. As a result, makerspaces are emerging spontaneously all over the country. With the advancement of 3D printers, the U.S. is dreaming of revitalizing the manufacturing industry, which has long been dependent on outsourcing to Asia.

WIZnet has sponsored and participated in Korea’s Maker Fair for the past three years. Yet only about 100 creations were displayed at the fair held at Gwacheon National Science Museum last month. What are we missing? What do we need in order to kickstart an IoT startup revolution in Korea? First and foremost, we need to create a community ecosystem based on the open source platform. Leveraging open innovation communities is essential for developing new products, of better quality, at a lower cost, and faster.

Gartner predicts that, by 2017, more than half of consumer goods manufacturers will receive 75% of their consumer innovation and R&D capabilities from crowdsourced solutions; the essence of open source hardware lies in content.

The content of the IoT device platform are various application software libraries. Open innovation communities should be able to share libraries that are compatible with Arduino, the de facto standard, and support ARM mbed, and also provide web-based development environments.

By 2020, only five years from now, as many as 50 billion IoT devices are expected to connect to the Internet. IoT devices should be interfaced with servers and services alike, especially local service providers in each country. Local companies can then benefit as server and device manufacturers. As a result of this synergy, the domestic market will effectively take shape.

However, at the moment, emerging countries and also even developed countries are struggling to thoroughly establish their own IoT industry ecosystem. The reason why India, a software powerhouse, is trying to raise hardware manufacturing can be found here. We all should thoroughly prepare for the era of makers.

YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io
This column contributed to ‘ET Times’ in Korea on Dec. 9, 2015

Innovation Derived from Crowdsourcing

WIZnet — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 06:16:49 +0000

How will I create a disruptive innovation for my company? Gartner, an information technology (IT) research and advisory company of the US, predicts that by 2017, more than half of consumer goods manufacturers will receive 75% of their consumer innovation and R&D capabilities from crowdsourced solutions. With that said, if a company relies only on internal innovation at this point, it could be evaluated as already dead. Or it will die, soon. If you want to maintain market competitiveness, you must utilize the ‘crowd’.

The era of digital business is said to begin in 2020, in which more than 7 billion people, businesses, and at least 30 billion devices will connect to the Internet to communicate, trade, and negotiate mutually. As the era of Internet of Things (IoT), in which all things are inter-connected, matures, more and more information will become accessible. Gartner predicts that, by 2017, 80% of consumers will collect, track and barter their personal data for cost savings, convenience, and customization.

Consumer participation rises to the top of the list as the most valuable asset in such an era of digital business. Business models will be achieved through crowdsourcing and marketing models through contests.

Crowdfunding, which has attracted a lot of attention recently, is a type of crowdsourcing. Contests are being used as a marketing tool for new products to enter the market. A great example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. In just 15 years, Wikipedia collapsed the Encyclopedia Britannica of nearly 250 years of history. Wikipedia contains more than 40 times more knowledge than Britannica. It embodies the incredible power of collective intelligence.

Freelancer.com, which lends quantum mechanic experts by the hour; Tongal, which helps produce novel TV commercials at one-hundredth of the normal price; ReCAPTCHA, which distinguishes between bot and person and digitizes books; Duolingo, which teaches people new languages and translates the web at the same time, are the leading crowdsourcing platforms for the emerging markets of billions.

Recently, Microsoft held an IoT solution design contest in collaboration with Arduino at Hackster.io, a DIY makers community, in order to launch Windows 10 and Azure, a cloud computing platform, to the IoT market. More than 1,500 ideas were submitted in just two months, and more than 150 projects were completed in another period of two months.

WIZnet’s Maker Space Museum collection also surpassed 1,500 UCC(User Created Content) in just a year and a half. These are all IoT device prototypes developed using WIZnet’s Internet processor chip. Software and hardware as well as development processes are all open and sharable. UCC are mostly collected from open hardware communities such as Hackster and Instructables, and also from crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

More than 100 new UCC for various applications are being collected each month. More than 10,000 UCC will be accumulated in five years. It is considered that the curation business to categorize and distribute content will be important by that time; Users will participate in it and their participation will form a fandom, composed of loyal customers. Brands will be made by spreading word of mouth into open source communities. You may only see it as a faraway dream, but it is not a dream. The power of crowdsourcing is powerful and you should make good use of it.

YB Lee, President of WIZnet
yblee@wiznet.io
This column contributed to ‘ET Times’ in Korea on June 29, 2016

WIZwiki-W7500 – ARM mbed Enabled!

WIZnet — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:04:38 +0000

WIZnet’s WIZwiki-W7500 has officially become mbed- enabled after signing with ARM on June 1^st and being introduced online at the ARM^® mbed^™ Developer website (https://developer.mbed.org/).

WIZnet designed W7500, a Cortex-M0 chip with TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine), to penetrate further into the IoT market in 2015. WIZnet expects to play a more active role in the open-hardware community with the mbed^™-enabled WIZwiki-W7500 board.

The ARM^® mbed^™ IoT Device Platform simplifies and speeds up the creation and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) products. The platform is built around open standards and will bring Internet protocols, security, standards-based manageability and application data into one integrated solution optimized for energy and cost-constrained devices. It is supported by the established and expanding mbed hardware and software ecosystem that will provide common building blocks for IoT devices and services. This platform will accelerate the growth of the IoT by enabling innovators to focus on value-add features and differentiation.

W7500 MCU Launched!

WIZnet — Fri, 01 May 2015 04:50:45 +0000

WIZnet releases the world’s first IOP (Internet Offload Processor) W7500 chip that embeds the ARM Cortex-M0 and Hardwired TCP/IP stack targeting the IoT market.

W7500 & its test board, ‘WIZWiki-W7500’ are designed to be ARM mbed- enabled and Arduino compatible.

Now, You can receive a free sample of ‘WIZWiki-W7500’ at the WIZnetian.com.

Startup Time for the Internet of Things

WIZnet — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 08:15:00 +0000

Last month at the ARM TechCon 2013 conference ARM announced their plans to drive the Internet of Things forward. ARM is the processor design company for mobile devices like smart phones and tablets, where they dominate with more than 90% market share. With forecasts that the IoT will host 10s of billions of devices, ARM’s interest in extending their mobile leadership to the IoT market is clear.
Replicating their historically successful mobile strategy, ARM will create an ecosystem of standard IoT technology that enables their partners/customers to quickly design and deliver low-cost IoT devices. The initiative is based on mbed (www.mbed.org), ARM’s platform for fast prototype development. The emphasis on speed-to-market fits with the Gartner Group’s prediction quoted in the announcement: “Our research says that by 2018, 50% of the internet of things solutions will be provided by startups which are less than 3 years old.”
This prediction foresees an IoT populated with yet unknown devices and services from yet to be crowd-sourced and kickstarted startups. It may sound farfetched, but consider the way standard mobile platforms fueled explosive growth in the smartphone and tablet ‘App’ business, and yes, much of it at the hands of startups. It could happen again with IoT.
But, why “startups less than 3 years old”? And how?
Until now embedded technology for the Internet of Things has been mainly applied as an enterprise solution. But consumer applications are growing and will likely exceed those of enterprises within the next few years.
The key, as reflected in the ARM announcement, is a simple and rapid prototyping environment accessible to all that leverages the existing Internet and smartphone/tablet infrastructure. Anyone who has innovative idea, even those who aren’t technical experts, can develop prototypes easily based on standard and open IoT hardware and service platforms. This lowers the barriers to entry for startups.
There are also startup-friendly changes occurring with manufacturing itself, such as 3D printers, which are heralded as the third industrial revolution. Ditto for business formation and operation where crowd funding and online sales channels give startups a chance, bringing entrepreneurial democracy to all.
So what do semiconductor vendors need to do support the emergence and capitalize on the growth of IoT?
First, make it easy for developers to utilize your technology in their solution. Provide reference designs, low-cost evaluation boards and useful software development kits covering a wide range of usage scenarios. Give developers the support they need to quickly develop prototypes and then launch into mass production on a moments notice.
Second, create online forums and communities that encourage sharing of knowledge and open-source software. Plan to support major open source platforms (such as mbed) to insure that your technology is available to the broadest possible user base.
Finally, when assessing a particular opportunity related to the Internet of Things, examine the viability of the service or app first, notably how well it integrates with other IoT devices and services.
Many IoT solutions will originate in innovative startups. Actively search them out and nurture them. Working together both sides will be able to achieve success that neither could alone.

YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io
Nov. 19, 2013

New Hardware Ecology

WIZnet — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:33:14 +0000

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (“Forget the Web, Start-Ups Get Real”, Aug. 18, 2012), Silicon Valley USA is seeing a new wave of hardware startups. It tells of a resurgence of garage shops fueled by investment from top-tier venture capitalists. Compared to the typical here-today (and gone tomorrow?) social media startup flying on a wing and a web page, the investors appreciate that hardware is a ‘real’ business.
Entrepreneurship has been re-energized by the advancing technology and economics of manufacturing. For instance, ‘3D printers’ have slashed the cost of homebrew prototype production to a tiny fraction of what it was back in the ‘machine shop’ days. This is magic! With a successful prototype in hand, entrepreneurs can outsource mass production and sell to their customers online, no need for factories and warehouses.
The new manufacturing paradigm will fuel the growth of niche products. Traditionally, markets have been dominated by a few large manufacturers and ‘hit’ products like PCs, TVs, cellphones, etc. Now, long-tail economics promise to turn the 80/20 rule on its head as specialized products proliferate.
Large established manufacturers aren’t in position to sell and support a huge variety of low-volume products. Rather, it’s passionate Do-It-Yourself ‘Prosumers’ that are driving growth. Now they can craft a prototype, get some cash (VC, crowdsourcing), farm out production and sell online. What the new class of entrepreneurs bring to the party is their ideas, and now they have the tools to bring them to life. The second industrial revolution was about ‘mass-production’, the new one will be about‘individualized production’.
Mainstream markets are already showing signs of niche-ification. Witness the fact there are hundreds of thousands of iPad Apps. Going forward, it’s said that 100 billion smart electronic devices will populate the ‘Internet of Things’. Yes, many billions of those will be ‘hit’ products from established manufacturers, but many billions won’t be, representing opportunity for thousands of new-age startups
So how does an electronics component company like WIZnet get in on the action? The historic model, targeting the largest ‘major accounts’ or a few ‘key markets’, won’t work. Instead, a way must be found to reach and influence thousands of individual entrepreneurs, and it’s not sending a sales engineer to pitch each of them.
Instead, the best way to get designed into thousands of products is to get into the tens of products that many small developers rely on. For instance, the Arduino (www.arduino.cc) is a low-cost open source single-board computer widely utilized by the DIY crowd to give intelligence to their products. By sharing our technology (ex: software library) we’ve encouraged adoption by the Arduino community as the best way to reach and support thousands of designers.
Electronic products will become much more diverse and the rate of change will accelerate both threats to the traditional Fortune 500 way of doing business. But the new industrial revolution also represents a huge opportunity for companies that can find a way to get on the bandwagon. That is our challenge!

YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io
(on Sep. 20, 2012)

Evolving IT Ecosystem seen at Maker Faire

WIZnet — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 06:10:30 +0000

Last week I went to New York in my role as representative to the Open Hardware Summit (www.openhardwaresummit.org) of which WIZnet is a co-sponsor. While there I dropped by the Maker Faire held at the Hall of Science in Queens New York. With support from the leading online and retail suppliers for electronic components such as Digikey and Radio Shack, the Maker Faire is the place to be for DIY (‘Do It Yourself’) and UCA (‘User-Created Application’) ‘Prosumers’. In contrast to a traditional ‘grown-up’ electronics exhibition, it seemed nearly every other booth was filled with youngsters showing off their homebrew gadgets.
The ‘roll your own’ approach has been fueled by the emergence of open-source easy to use platforms. By now many of you are familiar with one notable example, the Arduino SBC (‘Single-Board Computer’). Based on an Atmel 8-bit MCU, and little else in the way of ICs, the Arduino SBC itself will hardly excite the hardware experts. Rather Arduino’s popularity derives from two factors.
First is a focus on ease of use that eschews the needless complexity of industrial strength hardware and software technology. One need go no further than the 12-year old boy I saw demonstrating his Arduino-based home automation system to see the benefits. With Arduino, you don’t have to be a professional ‘engineer’ or ‘programmer’ to bring the power of technology to bear.
But the concept of a simple hardware solution isn’t new. What truly sets Arduino apart is an open-source design paradigm that in turn has fueled a grassroots movement, a ‘big tent’ ecosystem of enthusiasts, suppliers and add-ons (stack-on boards called ‘Arduino Shields’) sparking a global wildfire of collaboration and community. Even market dominant MCU suppliers like Microchip and Texas Instruments are paying attention, introducing their own flavors of ‘Arduino Compatible’ SBCs.
The IT industry is moving into the age of an ‘Internet of Things’ that brings the Internet into the mix with hardware and software. A new network-based computing and control paradigm has the ‘cloud’ at its center. To succeed in this new era, companies must recognize that the future is ‘trivergence’ between hardware, software and the Internet. Thus we find Microsoft at the Maker Faire touting their open-source ‘.NET Gadgeteer’ platform.
The Internet itself is the ultimate open-source platform. Combination of the Internet with open-source hardware and software is a matter of establishing simple and robust Internet connectivity. At WIZnet we are successfully working with partners such as Arduino and Microchip to establish our easy-to-use Internet offload technology as the ‘glue’ that brings together the pieces of the ‘trivergence’ puzzle.
Korean IT industry leaders such as Samsung Electronics are creating system semiconductors (MPU and MCU) and devices (smart phone, tablet) at the heart of the ‘Internet of Things’. The opportunity exists to establish an open hardware and software platform that, like Arduino, leverages the unique potential for success that only a grassroots collaborative ecosystem can offer.

YB Lee, CEO of WIZnet, yblee@wiznet.io
(on Oct. 10, 2011)