This week’s Smart DevOps roundup features new platforms and APIs for developers to create apps and services for the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as a new trend that’s shifting the focus for IoT developers.

Logitech Harmony API available to developers

Harmony, Logitech International S.A.’s line of smart remotes and other peripherals for home automation, has made the Harmony API available to developers interested in creating solutions for its platform. Partners already using the Harmony API include IFTTT, SmartThings, and Myo and others such as Nest LAbs Inc., Honeywell International Inc., and Sonos Inc. have products compatible with Harmony, giving developers access to roughly 270,000 devices, not to mention being able to utilize smart features such as voice control.

“By opening our platform to developers, we’re giving developers the ability to create complete smart home experiences that include the living room,” Mark Spates, head of the smart home platform for Logitech Harmony, said. He also says entertainment “will be a main driver for mass adoption of smart home products”, which seems to be the true aim of this API.

The IoTivity of things

Intel and its partners at the Open Internet Consortium launched the initial release of IoTivity, a framework which aims to provide the standard for machine-to-machine communications. This interoperability will allow billions of connected devices in the future to be able to freely exchange information with each other, as well as possibly solving software and hardware compatibility issues. A remaining obstacle for IoTivity, however, is convincing manufacturers to adopt this new framework and abandon existing standards.

IoTivity is hosted by The Linux Foundation which makes it interesting as this is not the first IoT open platform hosted by the foundation. AllSeen Alliance, also hosted by The Linux Foundation, debuted in 2013 and have big name companies such as Qualcomm Inc., LG Electronics Inc., HTC Corp, and others. Question now is, will these organizations come together to to create a truly unified and open platform for the standardization of IoT?

IoT developers creating apps for the industrial market

A new report from Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. revealed a trend amongst IoT Internet developers, finding that 84 percent are building projects that include industrial sensors, health monitors and smart buildings, while 16 percent are targeting consumers devices. The survey, which was conducted in partnership with Dimensional Research, also revealed that 49 percent of IoT developers expect their implementations to generate an impact on businesses by the end of 2015.

“These survey results confirm that IoT is crossing over from consumer gadgets to business productivity and customer engagement,” Michael Swindell, SVP of Products at Embarcadero, said.

“In the consumer space, individuals connect to IoT typically through a single personal mobile device, with the IoT experience encircling the user. However with business solutions IoT includes users and encircles the business and enterprise assets.”

BlackBerry’s IoT platform

This year may be the year of BlackBerry Ltd.’s comeback. At CES 2015, the company announced the BlackBerry IoT platform which combines “QNX embedded software with BlackBerry’s secure network infrastructure and device lifecycle management.” The platform will provide a message bus with instantaneous data indexing and storage that can validate “every action, message and piece of data.”

BlackBerry may be well positioned to offer an IoT platform, given that the company already has infrastructure in place that will be able to keep up with the high demand of connectivity required by the growing number of connected devices.

photo credit: Dancing Lemur via photopin cc