How do smart products get made? Turning everyday objects, fromcoffee machines to bikes, office furnishings to luggage and anything else you can think of, into smart objects is an advantage most industries can no longer ignore.
Using the Internet of Things (IoT) to build “smart” qualities into a product helps a company infuse more value into it, thus offering its customers more value. It’s a priceless thing to be able to give customers, particularly while operating in a landscape where new product releases are happening more rapidly than ever before.
But, the process of transforming traditional products into smart ones is a major challenge for manufacturers of any industry, with furniture and other office products being no exception. This challenge can be attributed mostly to lack of tools and knowledge, as well as the expense involved.
Enter Seebo, a development platform for smart products. Seebo provides companies who want to enter the smart product market a full suite of tools to do so:
>IoT Creator: a visualized product planning adapted to IoT. “Transform your ideas into impactful product concepts. Ideate, design, model and unlock hardware and sensor solutions. Reveal hardware prices in real-time.”
>Developer Center: “Everything you need to accelerate time to market – SDKs, Dev Kits, connectivity, APIs, virtualization, app & firmware code libraries and out-of-the-box integration.”
>Marketplace: 360˚ coverage for your IoT needs. “Complete skills and resources through our
ecosystem and marketplace, partner with third parties and source leading IoT providers offered by the Seebo platform.”
Seebo purports to reduce development costs, cut time to market and simplify IoT development.
Through one platform, Seebo helps companies “orchestrate smart product planning-development-integration to elevate product and speed time to market.”
“The world is changing,” notes the Seebo website. “We give manufacturers the competitive edge to transform business models and boost ROI through smart products. We offer manufacturers an integrated hub for product planning, development and integration adapted to overcome the unique challenges of building smart products.
“Seebo is the IoT development platform that makes it easy to develop smart, connected products. The SaaS platform empowers everyone from small startups to enterprise customers, experts or not, to get smart products to market quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. Seebo simplifies the complex process of going smart by offering a set of innovation and functional design tools, a smart hardware engine, forecasting tools, cloud and app integration, IoT simulation and a third-party marketplace.”
About a month ago, Seebo and IBM announced a partnership to bring together the Seebo platform and IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT).
“The complexity of developing smart products – including parallel software, firmware and hardware design, alongside new design and production considerations – often deters manufacturers from pursuing innovation through IoT,” read a press announcement introducing the partnership. “The addition of IBM’s Watson IoT Platform alongside Seebo’s SaaS platform helps to address these obstacles. The collaboration gives manufacturers access to tools to help build smart products quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively as well as out-of-the-box connection with the cloud.”
“The combination of hardware and app simulators, alongside the Cloud integration, empowers developers to build and test software independent of hardware, reducing the resources needed during smart product development.”
The partnership signals a deeper integration of industries coming together to explore new technologies and new ways of making products.