CES 2013 was held last month and a recurring theme was “connectivity” (aka Smart Home, Smart Grid, HomeConnect, etc...) - spanning connected product categories such as ultra-high definition TVs, hot new smartphones, sleek appliances and other retakes on everyday household products. The revolution of connectivity that has been promised for many years is finally being realized.

The Dr Micro RX blog over at Renesas has several great posts on Cloud Connectivity using Exosite.

This summer we have been working with Synapse Wireless and Arrow Electronics to bring M2M kits to the market that are a great starting point for developers and product companies that have a need for local wireless devices (2.4 GHz or 900 MHz) communicating through a gateway to a cloud data/device platform and have a web UI attached to it. (Yes, that's a mouthful.) We've always found the Synapse RF engines and SNAP operating system / application framework to be really useful and easy to pick-up, so we were excited to do this combined effort and take some of our work on the RF Engines and E10 gateway and get it out there for developers.

A good friend of Exosite, John Breitenbach of Renesas Electronics Corp, recently wrote a great article that is published in Circuit Cellar, the July 2012 Issue.

We ended the Arrow M2M roadshow at the end of March and just realized we completely forgot to post about it.  The roadshow was very successful and we met a lot of engineers and organizations looking to enable their products using different M2M technologies (cellular, local wireless, ethernet, wifi, the cloud, data and device platforms, etc).  We also had a great time with the other companies at the roadshow.

One of the lasts shows was here in Minneapolis, which turned out to be a great event and there was easily a few hundred people in attendance.  We look forward to participating in the future.

Our one and only Erik Rorvick found himself on the Peggy Smedley Show this week on the subject of making M2M solutions simpler, talking about ways to make accessing and analyzing data as easy as possible.  Erik, our Business Developer Manager, had a great chat with Peggy on her radio show, which is known for being the voice of M2M and Connected Devices.  The show is a weekly radio show (12:00 pm CT Tuesdays) that helps listeners not only understand connected devices but also how to make these devices a part of their everyday lives.

Redpine’s ultra-low-power 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity on Renesas MCUs coupled with cloudbased services from Exosite form easy-to-deploy M2M solutions.

Boston, MA, Feb 27, 2012 – Redpine Signals, Inc., a leading developer of ultra-low-power, high-performance multi-standard wireless chipsets and modules, and Exosite, a provider of cloud-connectivity solutions for embedded applications, today announced a cloud-connected solution enabled on Renesas RX62N and RX63N microcontrollers. Showcased exclusively at the Arrow Electronics M2M Seminar Series, the partnership solution demonstrates Wi-Fi enabled, cloud-based M2M applications on several Renesas development kits .

Today's consumers have the expectation of always-on connectivity & access to data – now the embedded market is embarking on a quest for similar connectivity.  Exosite has teamed with Renesas to enable Renesas products with our cloud-based data platform, embedded API libraries and web dashboards.

Exosite and Renesas will present their solution at  Arrow Electronics M2M Seminar Series and demonstrate how to use the "cloud" as a peripheral for embedded products.

We are excited to be participating in Arrowfest 2011 this year at our local Minneapolis branch. If you are in the Minneapolis area, please feel free to stop down and visit. There is always great food and drinks besides getting to chat with so many companies in one place. The best thing, it's in a tent!

Exosite's XMPP chat interface is incredibly easy to work with. In fact, if you know how to chat with someone using an instant messenger app, then you can start chatting with your real time data! We have an XMPP bot (the JID address is commander@m2.exosite.com) that can receive and respond to chat messages.

Exosite recently presented on Open Source Hardware at Minnebar - Minnesota's top (un)conference destination.

Most Engineers love to tinker - every so often someone at Exosite will put together some kind of office "efficiency" system that makes use of our Data Platform and Web Dashboards for remote monitoring and/or maintenance. Fun stuff - like office electricity power draw, coffee status, plant soil moisture, etc.... Depending on the engineer, they will use their favorite open source hardware device (e.g. Arduino, mbed, Fluid) to grab the data and put in online. The speed with which these open source hardware systems can be extended and deployed as part of a connected system really makes them fun to prototype with.

A classic issue for people who work at an office is finding out when fresh coffee is brewing.  Do you make a pass by the kitchen area every 20 minutes?  Maybe wait for the aroma?  Take matters into your own hands and fire up a pot? Of course, another common problem is finding what appears to be the remains of a previously brewed pot and debating in your mind on how old it could be and whether or not it is in within the drinkable window.  (What's your rule? 2 hours? 2 days?)

Part of the Exosite team attended CloudCamp Twin Cities last week. For those not familiar with CloudCamp, it is “an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” During an unconference, all the panels and breakout sessions are generated on the fly and led by the attendees. Why were we there? The Exosite team wanted to check out what local people were saying about cloud technologies.

We are excited to make public that Exosite has partnered with Arrow Electronics (NYSE:ARW) to provide Arrow customers access to our cloud-based data platform technologies.