Filled with Love - the IoT Kind of Love

— by Jane Ren

Yesterday I received the best present I’ve ever got since we started Atomiton three years ago. And it was a surprise gift.

It was (good for us!) not millions of dollars from a venture capitalist.

A guy named Ajit visited in the morning. He travelled from Pune, India, 30 hours on the plane. When he got into our office, he opened his suitcase. 

There was his laptop and he launched a browser, and clicked on a link. The following video started playing:

T-Q-L, our IoT application platform for software engineers, has a life now in those young hearts. And watching it filled mine with love. 

I’ve seen many PR videos with endorsing customers. This is not one of them. We had no idea these young engineers were making the movie (and obviously having fun) while they should be coding! The surprise touched me. 

TQL has been endorsed by enterprise customers. For example, Cisco has OEM’ed it as a core part of its IoT strategy, rolling it out in its Smart Cities deployments worldwide. I never had time to write a blog about it. (Not that we don’t love our customers and partners – but that is a more cerebral kind of love.) 

We could have contacted a developer in Silicon Valley, maybe one of those cool ones who now live in San Francisco and commute only on buses and bikes, hire a professional studio, and make an appealing yet laid-back video. That would not have been as lovely as this.

When a few young engineers like these take their story to introduce IoT to the rest of the world, it says as much about themselves and their country as it does about TQL.

Two months ago, GS Lab, the software service company where these kids work, contacted us about the TQL IoT training and sent us a few names. So we started giving a weekly tutorial over Webex, where these kids would be completely silent all the way through, muting their lines, and only asking one most standard question at the very end of each session. Within a few weeks, they introduced their first IoT app to the world.

I have been to India only once, about two years ago. As a native from their neighboring China, I never claim to know much about that other populous country. But increasingly, sitting here in California, I am feeling the country is excited with energy. Not only is it excited about manufacturing, about innovation, and about startups, it is excited about IoT specifically. Entrepreneurs, students, and engineers like them, are already seeing a future for themselves, one which they have taken immediate steps to define.

It is bliss to play a role in their pursuit of this future.

The girl who started the show, her name is Neha, I don’t know much about her other than that she works on the TQL queries. But I learned something from her definition of IoT, as she says about everyday things “connected to each other, and ultimately connected to us, human beings”. I don’t know if any analysts have been able to put it better.

Then Swapnil picks up with “the new rule for the world” and wonders on behalf of all the developers, what IoT means for them. Nilesh stands up in front of the whiteboard, explaining an architecture diagram for IoT. Digvijay is the guy displaying all the wires and boxes. I still don’t understand why he chooses to install the servo motor inside such a rundown cardboard box – is this the new makers’ fashion? Radheshyam is the mysterious guy shooting the video.

It doesn’t matter that their app only has 3 things and 5 devices. They are set up for the big game of enterprise IoT. In fact, their colleagues at GS Lab have been the core delivery team for some recent smart city projects.

When we opened our TQL IoT course, we receive applications from all over the world. They are from Brazil, from Argentina, from Japan, from India, from South Korea… places where young people are determined to make their own futures with their minds and with new technology.

It is this type of love that filled my heart when I watch the video. I call it the “IoT kind of love”. It is the love for learning, the love for doing something no one has done before, the love for sharing, and the love for connecting – not just connecting things, but connecting with the rest of the world.