Agenda

Opening Remarks 

MAIN STAGE

Come join us bright and early, to get a sneak preview of the conference, learn more about the PD Excellence Awards ceremony at 8am with Ioterra CEO, Daniel Price and C(S -“Storytelling”)O, Danny deLaveaga!

Developing AudioMoth

Andy is one of the founders of Open Acoustic Devices; a UK-based company that designs, supports and deploys open-source acoustic hardware and software for their user community, as well as their own environmental and wildlife monitoring projects.

Their main product is AudioMoth: a low-cost acoustic monitoring device used for conservation. More than 30,000 AudioMoths are now being used by conservation scientists around the world. Join the session to discover how Open Acoustic devices developed and scaled it.

Debugging a Modern IoT Product

Most IoT products are still debugged using traditional embedded systems tools (think GDB + UART). However, IoT products are orders of magnitude more complex than what those tools were intended for (MCUs with kB of flash and hundreds of bytes of RAM). In this session we’ll imagine what modern IoT debugging should look like.

From Maker to global IoT Entrepreneur

Join Agustin, CEO and Co-founder of Ubidots, to learn 10 things he wishes he knew before scaling his startup to 100,000 users and thousands of clients in over 80 countries. Ubidots is a low-code development platform empowering IoT engineers and entrepreneurs to rapidly launch IoT Applications without having to write code.

Just enough product development — Using progress checkpoints to gate investment relative to risk

The History of Crowdfunding

Notable campaigns throughout crowdfunding’s brief history and what they have to teach the modern campaigner.

Picking Your Battles: Common Technical Tradeoffs in IoT

When designing IoT architectures, it sometimes feels like you can never have your cake and eat it too. Keeping your fleet firmware up to date can require costly bandwidth. Bespoke components don’t necessarily benefit from economies of scale for cost nor validation. The flexibility of portability always incurs power tradeoffs.

Dwelo is a smart apartment platform which powers over 50,000 apartments, controlling over half a million devices  in over 100 cities in the US. We’ll take a look at some of these common technical tradeoffs and how Dwelo has solved for them.

From Seed to Series A

Join Raychel Espiritu for a 20 min talk w/ 10 mins Q&A to learn what it takes to make it from Seed to Series A funding. She’ll share learnings from the SoCal Venture Pipeline program, a compelling solution that enables great SoCal startups to achieve success through strategic matchmaking to Series A investors. Learn about key metrics, key financials, and what’s necessary in an investor ready pitch deck.

Expectations and best practices for venture-backed connected hardware startups.

I’ll be talking about how a VC firm evaluates potential investments and supports healthy first-generation product development in early-stage startups.

Unleashing the Craft

The ups and downs of scaling customer success: It’s all in the data!

It’s easy to say there are a lot of ups and downs when trying to scale anything; a team, a company, a process. At Dwelo we have implemented a few concepts, that may seem simple, but carry a lot of weight throughout our day-to-day processes. I’ll be walking you through a few of these concepts and how they have attributed to the growth and success of Dwelo.

Crossing the Chasm from Prototype to Production:  Scaling IoT Projects

I’ll cover the concept of building a sample (small) fleet of IoT devices, then how to effectively grow and scale the fleet.

IoT Disruption in Industrial Cleaning: Who Knew?

StoneAge Inc. is the world’s leading manufacturer of high-pressure waterblast tools and automated solutions for industrial cleaning applications. Until recently, the waterblast tool industry wasn’t exactly the first industry you would imagine when thinking about IoT and smart devices. Kerry will discuss the journey StoneAge has taken into IoT and automation as well as how these technologies have positioned StoneAge for the future.

How To Launch A Six Figure Product Without Spending Money On Ads

Stories from startups that successfully raised on crowdfunding platforms zooming in on methodologies that worked.

Validation and Crowdfunding – How to build a product people love

Bird Buddy raised over $8m on crowdfunding platforms for their smart bird feeder. Learn how the team leveraged early leads and backers to validate their ideas and build a successful campaign.

Challenges of Creating New Product Categories

Creating a brand new product category can be exciting. You’re operating in blue ocean with potentially massive market opportunity and little to no competition. However, a major challenge when creating a novel product is customer education. Educating your customers on the benefits of this brave new world that your product enables is not only challenging (there’s always a lot of inertia in continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done), but it ties up valuable resources, and detracts from your main mission of getting to product-market-fit. In this session Akbar Dhanaliwala, CEO of Lager Data, a cutting edge platform for enabling remote development and automated testing for IoT devices, will talk through the lessons he learned from dealing with customer education while simultaneously launching a product.

Maintaining Transparency Across Distributed Hardware Teams

The power of the internet has allowed hardware startups to very quickly put together distributed teams of specialized skills and services without much capital investment. While this allows for an incredible amount of flexibility, it comes with an overhead cost to maintain data transparency across the remote teams. Compounded with the prevalent desktop based hardware product data management tools, it’s too easy to lose track of who is working on what, and which version of a CAD or BOM file is the latest. The risk of sending the wrong files to production is real.

Michael will discuss how the industry is changing and product data management tools are becoming more dynamic to account for the new normal of distributed hardware teams.

It’s not that we don’t believe you… tough lessons learned on the front line of IoT

Join the Ubidots Front Line Dream Team Cristina Botero, Head of Partnerships, and David Sepulveda, Head of Customer Success, as they discuss the difficulties and learnings captured from dealing with thousands of real and not-so-real IoT deployments.

Close your VC round with strategic momentum

Lessons learned from 6 high growth hardware startup financings. The session will dive into the product and marketing moves which built investor traction and secured capital. Q&A to follow.

Traditional vs. Agile Hardware Development

When it comes to making IoT device prototypes, we generally think in a protoboard with a development board, a couple of attached sensors, and a bunch of cables going from one side to the other. Additionally, headaches arise when it is time to perform tests in the real environment, as this is where the actual failures appear. With WisBlock, a new concept for agile hardware development, you can now rapidly create prototypes in a secure and scalable way avoiding the necessity of reworking the solution deployed.

During this session, you will go all over the different layers required in the deployment of an IoT solution, Device & Connectivity, Application Management, Analytics, and Visualization. After this workshop, you will be capable of developing an end IoT solution for any industry over LoRaWAN using the WisBlock, Helium, and Ubidots.

My journey from prototype to product

Join for a review of the challenges I faced launching my first 2 products and aspects that I learned the hard way must be covered when going from prototypes to scalable products.

Open Mic – Pitch to Ioterra Members, Partners, and Investors

Open mic for startups and attendees that would like pitch anything to Ioterra members, partner companies, and/or seed funds.  5 session openings, 5 min max pitches, first come first serve.  Email [email protected] to claim a position in the lineup.

Speaker and Sponsor Job Announcements 

All PDC speaker and sponsor companies that have job opportunities are welcome to come onto the main stage and give a quick description of their company and open positions.  3 mins max per employer, round robin style.

Closing Remarks + Awards Ceremony Announcement

Special Announcement.