The IoT Inc. podcast has an interesting interview with David Knight, the founder and CTO/CEO of Terbine. Terbine describes itself as:
the first commercial-grade system for curating sensor data on a global scale. Terbine is designed to act as the trusted sensor data exchange for and between sectors, including both commercial and governmental entities. Terbine is a highly sophisticated cloud-based system that makes possible fast, frictionless distribution of IoT data, and covers the core issues involved with monetization, regulation and licensing. And Terbine can be white-labeled by large companies to enable private data marketplaces.
The company is still in beta and testing its offering with publicly available data sets before it rolls out any commercial services. David Knight lists some of the key challenges his company faces and which will be common to other IoT data exchanges:
- sourcing unique data sets;
- cleaning the data;
- applying metadata to it in a uniform way;
- persuading third parties to share their data on the exchange;
- building in safeguards to restrict what can be done with the data by Terbine users;
He notes that while it is difficult to persuade many companies of the benefits of sharing their data, or “crown jewels” as he puts it, most of them seem fairly happy with the idea of using Blockchain technology to validate transactions on Terbine. Overall, it seems like the company are really ironing out a range of very complex issues before going live. Vibrant, commercially successful data exchanges like Terbine will be essential for the IoT to have the impact many are predicting. Whether the market will naturally go to several mega corporations such as Amazon and eBay in the consumer ecommerce space or if it will support a number of smaller exchanges remains to be seen. Network effects will play an important part, buyers will follow sellers and vice versa, but it is possible to imagine a network of exchanges using common APIs and metadata to provide seamless services to end-users.