The Internet of Things might be the next major world changing space in terms of connectivity and mobility, but in its current state there aren’t many consumer applications that can help familiarize the general public with the major benefits that M2M can bring to everyday life. Connected cars and wearable tech are almost accessible to the average end user, but the concept of IoT is alien to the majority of people.
Pixie is a new solution that might change that. Billed as going “beyond the Internet of Things”, Pixie introduces a Location of Things network. The developers behind Pixie describe this innovation as an essential identity aspect to the machine to machine network – IoT connects everything to the Internet, but LoT allows those things to be identified and located by a user.
Users attach Pixie Points, connected gadgets, to items that they would like to keep track of, create a profile on the Pixie app and then have their own local network of things. At any given moment a user can see the location of an object that’s been added to their personal Pixie ecosystem. The concept is best described through an introductory video on the product’s website, and it immediately seems more attractive (from an everyday practical use perspective) than, say a connected smoke detector.
We have explored the ideas that location is a key element in next generation mobile identity here at Mobile ID World before, and Pixie seems to be a highly accessible illustration of this concept, albeit optimized for physical objects (though, ostensibly one could attach a Pixie Point to one’s child and identify him with Location of Things).
If Pixie catches on it has the potential to popularize the Internet of Things in a way similar to how Apple’s Touch ID brought fingerprint biometrics to the mainstream.
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