Mason Makes the Creation of Smart Devices Accessible to Enterprises and Startups Across Healthcare, Government, Retail and Hospitality, Paving the Way for an Explosion of Modern Hardware-based Solutions.
Mason, innovator of the only fully managed infrastructure for developing and delivering dedicated smart devices, today announced its vision for the Era of Democratized IoT Innovation, where smart device development and delivery is accessible to all.
Mason envisions a world where software deployment and physical device procurement, provisioning and shipment can become one seamless experience that empowers innovators at enterprises and startups to bring their ideas to life faster and more easily. By abstracting the complexity required to bring to market dedicated smart devices, Mason enables the creation of transformative solutions across industries including healthcare, government, retail and hospitality that will reshape human experiences, and ultimately, benefit humanity in every aspect of life.
“Democratization has been a major trend in technology over the past decade, with examples such as 3D printing, app development, graphic design, smartphones and home security. However, the hardware industry is notoriously difficult to break into—requiring massive upfront capital expenditures,” said Nancy Xiao, Mason CEO.
“Mason’s mission is to transfer the power of hardware innovation into the hands of people and companies who previously didn’t have the skills or resources to bring their ideas to life. With Mason, entrepreneurs and builders can now solve age-old and emerging problems and introduce new levels of competition that rival the established hardware providers in the industry. Now scrappy, agile startups can take on industry giants while also empowering established enterprises to modernize.”
When building product-centered hardware, there’s a huge gap in the tooling needed to deploy and maintain the software for that product. On average, it takes several months to get hardware to market, if at all. In fact, 75% of all IoT projects fail. Speed is paramount for responding to healthcare priorities like the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth and other innovations. Additionally, consumer hardware isn’t built with enterprises in mind. It’s difficult to find enterprise hardware that is flexible, meets the needs of various use cases and enables agile development practices, while providing full control and data-based insights needed to develop great customer experiences and innovate.
Jim Xiao, Mason founder and president, observes that:
“Successfully bringing a smart product to market and managing the mobile infrastructure to support a fleet of connected smart devices is exceedingly hard. With so many barriers to entry, most people don’t even attempt it even if they have a great idea.”
The connected smart device market has traditionally been fragmented—it requires a sophisticated and costly combination of custom enterprise hardware, a fully-customizable enterprise-scale operating system, the application software itself and a mechanism to oversee product lifecycle and service delivery (i.e., the logistics of connectivity, provisioning, kitting and shipping the product to the consumer).
Unlike software, hardware can’t be recompiled to deploy a new version; in order to purposefully design a device for an exact enterprise use case, it needs to be rebuilt from the core circuit board on up. Moreover, existing consumer devices only offer limited control over features and capabilities; connecting, supporting and protecting devices in the field at scale is impossible without specialized talent, which is hard to find and expensive.
“What enables a comprehensive smart device ecosystem today is the availability of more commoditized hardware, omnipresent 5G coverage and low-code application development—ushering in new levels of ‘consumable’ AI and ML innovation that will benefit both end users and businesses,” said Jim Xiao. “These current trends will make it feasible for innovators to create the next generation of smart devices that will reshape human experiences and lead to a better standard of living around the world.”
Mason is at the Forefront of the Dedicated Smart Device Revolution in the Enterprise
The Era of Democratized IoT Innovation comes to life with the Mason Smart Device Platform. The only one-stop-shop for hardware, OS and logistics, Mason eliminates the complexity and specialized capabilities required to create and bring to market dedicated devices.
“Creating modern hardware-based solutions to improve the human experience has never been easier,” continued Nancy Xiao.
“We’ve defined a new way for innovators to develop and bring to market hardware that can serve a diverse set of end users. With Mason, innovators can develop custom smart products with unparalleled speed and resource efficiency.”
Entrepreneurs and enterprises can now leverage the Mason A4100, the world’s first customizable smartwatch form factor for enterprise-class connected smart devices, unveiled in a separate announcement today. It enables wrist-worn smart devices optimized for the enterprise—and customizable for a wide variety of use cases—to be brought to market quickly without large upfront capital expenditures.
“When it comes to smart device development and delivery, our focus has not been on reinventing the wheel, but creating chariots that will help win the race,” concludes Jim Xiao.
