At the O’Reilly Fluent conference this week, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick were joined by Brady Forrest, Head of Accelerator, PCH International, formerly in the O’Reilly team for six years, presently involved in the hardware field of development where, he says, he’s bringing start-ups up to scale by “creating the next generation hardware”.

As Forrest points out, wearable computers are all the rage right now, only moments before Jake Spurlock showed up for his Cube interview wearing Google Glass, and, whether we like it or not, reality is becoming more like a SciFi story by the minute. There is the hot concept right now that, in the future everything will be connected and our mobile phone will act as a personal server.

This concept is what has drawn Forrest to the hardware development in the first place, and he believes that AWS was a game changer, but there hasn’t been a AWS moment yet, as far as the hardware market is concerned. He tinkers with the idea of a service that might enable companies to build certain programs, even without the knowledge of how to scale.

Innovating the hardware world

While everyone seems focused on software, Forrest is trying to identify the innovations in the hardware development world. Virtualization, Flash and Cloud are taking the limelight at the moment, but Edge is multidimensional. Asked about his stance on the intelligent Edge, Brady Forrest explained that he’s trying to explore the concept and the performance which will allow non-internet companies to become connected. We’re talking components that will basically allow any device to be hooked online. Some of these steps are already being taken, but the process is not yet that simple for non-geeks. In time it will become much simpler, and the whole process more accessible.

A good example for this topic is NEST, a learning thermostat developed by Tony Fadell, which is sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled and programmable, not to mention simple to use.

Another start-up mentioned by Forrest was Berg, the creators of Little Printer (see a video here). The user’s smartphone is setting up subscriptions, while Little Printer is gathering them and printing them as a miniature newspapers. You can also use it to send messages to your friends and family.

As for the craziest things seen recently, Forrest vouches for Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as the perfect place to discover the coolest ideas. He wants to encourage people to develop new hardware, as the world is not limited to Google and Apple.

Pushing the limits

At this year’s Fluent showcase, where Forrest is one of the judges, there are about 10 new start-ups present, all of which have less than $2 million in funding, are under 2 years old, have created a product and, above everything else, are pushing the limits and coming up with something new. The judges will pick the one with the best use case for the community.

• Focus on the product, not the actual production

Is there a DevOps model equivallent for hardware? Not yet, says Forrester, but there are certain services that are getting there. There is Project Pinocchio where one can upload designs, Shapeways which allows anyone to create a physical store, and Corky, for people who have ideas but are not interested in setting up a company. These, along with PCH, will allow the teams to focus on the product, not on the actual production.

Today Forrest notices that Fluent is Javascript focused, but that it is obviously not the only language developed for the web. His vision of the future is web-focused and language agnostic, and his prediction for the next five years is that everything will be connected on a node-based app.