Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is not unusual. First time entrepreneurs start with very vague ideas with what they’re going to do. When I started my first company, I was a graduate student at MIT and I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t have a good idea about what I was going to do. Can you talk us through the process of how you navigated your way? Once you started, what happened? What did you do? How did you get your bearing?

Alicia Asin: We started thinking about doing projects in wireless sensor networks.

Sramana Mitra: These would be custom projects? You would do contract software development?

Alicia Asin: Yes. We thought about being a solutions provider. From the very beginning, we had a very clear vision that we wanted to be a global company. We thought that, from a scalability point of view, being a solutions provider and working project >>>

Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 1)

Spain, as you know, is in a terrible economic mess. Entrepreneurs like Alicia are vital to the country’s economic future. She has built a steady, cutting edge technology company with 60+ people from Zaragoza. Impressive!

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your beginning. Where were you born? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Alicia Asin: I was born in Zaragoza, Spain. I went to the University of Zaragoza. This is where I met David Gascon my co-founder. We founded Libelium. We’ve been always tied to the same location. In fact, starting a new business gave us the motivation of staying in our city. It was like a rebel act of saying, “It has to be possible to be high tech in a city like ours.”

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where would you point entrepreneurs to look for new problems to solve a new startup to build now?

Eldad Farkash: If you’re coming from a scientific background, I would say focus either on deep learning or NPI. These would be the two major topics I would focus on if you’re a scientific kind of startup. If you’re trying to solve a problem by combining a stack together, I would try to start from the lower level. I would start looking around and see what hardware and what data sources are not existing yet and how do we tap into those data sources and make something meaningful out of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is one area that I think still has some openings. Some of this is very large opportunities but a lot of it is also small to mid-scale opportunities of these vertical solutions that take advantage of the more mature infrastructure layer underneath. But then, you need a serious amount of domain knowledge on top to be able to actually do meaningful things with that infrastructure. Are you in agreement with that statement?

Eldad Farkash: Yes, I do agree with that. I think there is a lot of potential for innovation on how to simplify those huge projects. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary go-to-market strategy is an OEM strategy?

Coby Sella: Yes. Our goal is to deploy as many clients as possible. Our footprint in the industry today is about a quarter of a billion devices using Sansa technology, whether it is Sansa providing platform security capabilities or Sansa delivering embedded software within the trusted environment. We already have a very nice base on which we deploy our clients. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In that case, the software that you are delivering goes as embedded systems?

Coby Sella: Sansa’s solution actually requires implementation of clients. These clients will be embedded within the SOC. We are relying on the SOC’s platform security. This could be a piece of software in a secure environment. For the sake of fast adoption, we’re actually starting with software on existing devices. The counterpart of that would be >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 3)

Coby Sella: Alternatively, if the management company changes within a certain set of years, this mechanism will be applicable and replace the entity with another one. The solution itself has the flexibility to rely on these devices and to delegate the provisioning technology from one entity to the next one up the chain, which is a relatively innovative concept.

Sramana Mitra: What about on the facilities side? What specifically is happening? We just recently did a story on an energy sensor and energy management and optimization IoT company. I know that space is very active. What kind of adoption are you seeing there?

Coby Sella: One interesting adoption that we see is in the use case of connectivity chip sets. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What part of that map are you playing in?

Coby Sella: The most important part that Sansa is contributing to is the challenges around provisioning of secrets and assets into devices. Being the industry veterans for the last 15 years, we’ve been injecting assets and provisioning secrets across a wide range of devices for quite a while. We think that this challenge is not addressed in a holistic enough manner. It’s certainly not in the use case of diversified IoT scenery and certainly not in a way that will be service-oriented. That’s really the essence of our innovative technology. On top of it, we can create applications and layers of functionality. This infrastructure, by itself, is what we’ve singled out as the most important technology that needs to >>>