THEIR things or OUR things? - Customer-centric & privacy-respecting “indie” IoT

Imagine Google disables your account because your teenage son uploaded some copyrighted movies. Are you sure that when you feel cold later that day, you’ll still be able to turn up your Nest thermostat?

Imagine the company from which you bought your lights or door locks or window shades goes out of business and their cloud goes down. Does that mean you need to remodel your house?

Imagine you like to connect a Thing from company A to a Thing from company B, but they just sued each other over something. Do you really think that will work?

In this talk, we’ll first look at every IoT company's favorite strategy — lock their customers into their cloud — and the consequences this has for you and me. (Hint: they are not good.) Then, I’ll outline an alternate “indie IoT” architecture which doesn’t spy, doesn’t lock-in, and delivers more business opportunities and more customer value. It’s my goal with this talk to give you some ideas how the world could be better than mainstream thinking has it, and it’s my hope that you join the cause in making it so.

About Johannes Ernst:

Johannes Ernst is the founder/CEO of Indie Computing Corp., which was founded specifically to give control over our online lives back to the individual. It develops UBOS (pronounced You-Boss), a Linux distribution optimized to keep personal data at home and run web applications on hardware owned and controlled by the customer instead of on somebody else’s cloud.

Originally an electrical engineer, over the years he has worked on the entire IoT stack from electronics to software, including embedded real-time software, development tools, a graph database, digital identity technologies and cloud services. He has also closed deals, raised venture capital, cooked coffee and started a few industry groups. The World Economic Forum picked him as a "Technology Pioneer”.