Mozilla Looks to Internet of Things as New Frontier

Mozilla has announced that the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the next big opportunity for its open source software platform. "The Internet of Things is changing the world around us, with new use cases, experiences and technologies emerging every day," wrote officials in a post. "As we continue to experiment in this space, we wanted to take a moment to share more details around our approach, process and current projects we’re testing."

Mozilla's Senior Vice President for Connected Devices, Ari Jaaski, announced that the open source firm wants to "develop, test and evaluate" four IoT software projects. They include Project Link, Project Sensor Web, Project Smart Home and Project Vaani.

They are described as follows:

 Project Link: Your personal user agent that understands your preferences for how you want to interact with the world of devices in your home, and automate your connected world for you. All of this still done conveniently and securely, but completely under your control.

Project Sensor Web: The easiest path from sensors to open data for contributors to collaboratively build a detailed understanding of their living environments. We are launching a pilot project to build a crowdsourced pm2.5 sensor network.

Project Smart Home: A middle ground between “in a box” solutions like Apple Homekit and DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Combining modular, affordable hardware with easy-to-use rules, Smart Home empowers people to solve unique everyday problems in new and creative ways.

Project Vaani: An IoT enabler package to developers, device makers and users who want to add a voice interface to their devices in a flexible and customizable way. We will prototype interactions at home in near term, and in future, showcase the ability to access services from the open Web.

 Mozilla is, of course, turning its focus from Firefox OS-based mobile phones and browsing to new frontiers. The Internet of Things may represent a big opportunity for the company, since many of the best projects in the IoT space are open source.

"We are focused on a gated innovation process that includes time to brainstorm solutions to real life problems and evaluate the market opportunity for these ideas," Jaaski said. "Additionally, we are aligning ourselves with users when it comes to simplicity, ease-of-use and engaging experiences, while ensuring everything is built with the Mozilla values of openness, transparency, privacy and user control at the core."