We are delighted to announce that we are seeking a limited number of participants to take part in the commercial pilot of our smart building platform, including:

• Krellian Hub — A first of its kind commercial IoT hub which can bridge a range of different building management systems to the Web of Things.
• Krellian Cloud — Real-time data analytics for buildings to model how they’re being used and help identify potential optimisations.

Our platform is built for professionals who need actionable insights and unified control over commercial real estate.

We are particularly encouraging facilities managers at medium-sized, office-based businesses in the UK to join our pilot and secure early adopter pricing. Early adopter businesses will also be invited to work with us on a consultancy basis to customise the platform to their own particular needs.

You can read more about our product launch at krellian.com and if you are interested in taking part in our commercial pilot please fill out this form and we will be in touch to have a chat.

Announcing Krellian Commercial Pilot was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are delighted to share that Krellian has been selected to participate in the international Sage Impact Entrepreneurship Programme by Village Capital.

Krellian helps facilities managers of commercial buildings to meet their net zero targets whilst saving money, by optimising space utilisation and reducing energy consumption using smart building technology.

Krellian Hub is a first of its kind commercial smart building hub which consolidates multi-vendor building management systems into a single standardised interface using the Web of Things. Data from the hub can then be streamed in real time to the Krellian Cloud service, which creates a digital twin of a building to model how it is being used and help identify potential optimisations.

After initially validating our business idea through the Ignite Pre-accelerator, we have built our smart building solution with the help of £75k in Innovate UK grants and a strategic partnership with Canonical.

Krellian has now been selected from over 200 applicants to join the first European cohort of the international Sage Impact Entrepreneurship Programme. Through this programme Krellian will receive tailored mentoring, support, training and a $10k milestone grant before going on to compete in a peer selected process for a further $50k in grant capital at the Program Summit in Atlanta, GA, US.

The programme is a part of a three year initiative sponsored by the Sage Foundation to support 165 entrepreneurs across the UK, France, Southern Europe and the US who are making a positive environmental, social, and economic impact.

Please see our press release for more details.

Krellian Selected for International Impact Accelerator was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Krellian Cloud provides real-time data analytics for buildings, to model how they’re being used and identify potential optimisations.

This early stage preview is being opened up to a small audience of early adopters ahead of a public beta release. If you would like to be added to the waiting list to participate in the private alpha, you can register on our website today.

Announcing Krellian Cloud Private Alpha was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi, I’m Ben Francis, founder of WebThings.

It’s been a while since WebThings flew the nest from Mozilla, so I wanted to provide a brief update on what’s coming next, but more importantly to encourage you to have your say via our community survey.

WebThings Gateway 1.1

Contributors are busy working on a 1.1 release of WebThings Gateway. So far we expect this to include:

• A new “groups” feature which enables you to add devices to groups
• A more reliable back end, following the re-write in TypeScript
• Clean-up of obsolete code including the transition UI and router features which are no longer supported
• Bug fixes
• Security patches

Towards 2.0

Work has already begun on a 2.0 release of WebThings Gateway.

One of the main changes in 2.0 will be compliance with new W3C Web of Things standards. This means transitioning the whole WebThings platform from the current Web Thing API to compliance with upcoming W3C recommendations including WoT Thing Description 1.1, WoT Profile and WoT Discovery.

This is the result of a multi-year standardisation effort in collaboration with the W3C Web of Things Working Group to ensure that the latest W3C WoT specifications meet the needs of the WebThings project, and make the changes needed to make WebThings compliant with those standards.

Whilst this will be a breaking API change from 1.0, users shouldn’t notice any disruption and we’re working hard to minimise any impact on add-on developers. Stay tuned for more in the coming months.

Have Your Say

I have my own ideas about where to take the platform next, but I’d like to hear more from you, the WebThings community. I’d be really grateful if you could fill out this quick ten question survey to help us understand what benefits you’re currently getting from WebThings and how we can make it better.

What’s Next for WebThings after 1.0? was originally published in WebThingsIO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is your business wasting money on buildings which are under-utilised due to the COVID-19 pandemic and using more energy than necessary? Do you want to re-open those buildings, but need to safeguard and reassure occupants in order to do so?

Krellian offers a unified smart building platform, built on open standards, which can help make your premises smarter, safer and more sustainable through data analytics and building automation. Read on to find out more about how Krellian Hub and Krellian Console can help your business with its COVID-19 recovery and a reduced carbon footprint.

Twin Challenges

The two biggest challenges facing the world today need no introduction: The immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn; and the longer term implications of the ongoing climate crisis.

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic into a new normal, businesses are looking for ways to be smarter about how they use their buildings in order to optimise the use of physical space, safeguard its occupants and make buildings as efficient as possible.

The pandemic has accelerated trends towards e-commerce and flexible working and looks set to leave a lasting impact on the way people live, work and shop. Meanwhile we all face an increased urgency to decrease our carbon footprint and make our built environment more sustainable for the future.

The businesses who will thrive following the current economic downturn will be those who are able to adapt to this new normal and find smarter ways to operate.

Smart Buildings

Technology can help provide solutions to these big problems by helping us to gather data about what needs to be improved, and put in place the automation needed to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable.

Unfortunately building systems today typically use a range of separate proprietary technologies which can’t be linked together, which makes it difficult to get a complete picture and automate effectively. For example, if your heating, lighting and safety systems don’t know which parts of the building are occupied at what times of day and which appliances use the most electricity, it can be difficult to optimise energy usage and control the flow of people to reduce congestion.

Today Krellian is announcing two new products, built on the open WebThings platform, which will help unify smart building systems in order to provide more effective data analytics and building automation.

1. Krellian Hub is an enterprise Web of Things gateway which can unify a smart building by linking together incompatible building systems using open standards
2. Krellian Console is a service for securely monitoring and controlling multiple buildings via the cloud, in order to make them smarter, safer and more sustainable

When building systems (like lighting, heating, ventilation, safety, security and energy management) are all linked together, it’s possible to build up a comprehensive picture of building usage and automate more effectively in order to improve safety, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Krellian Hub

Krellian Hub consolidates your multi-vendor smart building systems into a single unified dashboard, to ensure you always have the full picture.

• Open — Prevent vendor lock-in with an extensible add-ons system and open standards-based API (Application Programming Interface)
• Reliable — Rugged edge computing designed for 24/7 operation, even during internet outages
• Secure — Automatic software updates and containerised security for complete peace of mind

Krellian Console

Krellian Console helps make your premises smarter, safer and more sustainable through building automation and data analytics.

• Smarter — Automate your buildings with an intuitive rules engine and open standards-based API (Application Programming Interface)
• Safer — Safeguard and reassure staff and customers with occupancy monitoring and connected digital signage
• Sustainable — Optimise energy usage to save money on bills and reduce your carbon footprint

Register Your Interest

Whether you work in offices, retail, hospitality, entertainment or any other industry with physical premises, Krellian would like to hear from you to better understand how we can help make your buildings smarter, safer and more sustainable.

Visit krellian.com to find out more and register your interest today for early access to these innovative new products. You can also follow Krellian on Twitter and Facebook.

Make your premises smarter, safer and more sustainable with a unified smart building system was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we are announcing the release of WebThings Gateway 1.0 and setting out a vision for the future of the WebThings project.

WebThings

WebThings is an open source implementation of emerging W3C Web of Things standards and consists of three main components:

• WebThings Gateway — a software distribution for smart home gateways which enables users to directly monitor and control their home over the web, without a middleman
• WebThings Framework — a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things which directly expose the Web Thing Protocol
• WebThings Cloud — a collection of cloud services for securely deploying connected devices and remotely managing them over the internet

Flying the Nest

Following a company restructuring in August, Mozilla was looking for a new home for the WebThings community to continue their work.

Having co-founded the project whilst working at Mozilla, I joined discussions with two of my former colleagues Michael Stegeman and David Bryant about spinning out WebThings as an independent open source project. We worked with Mozilla on an agreement to transition the project to a new community-run home at webthings.io, and have spent the last three months working together on that transition.

WebThings Gateway 1.0

Today marks the public release of WebThings Gateway 1.0 and the formal transition of the WebThings platform to its new home at webthings.io. Going forward, Krellian will be sponsoring the new WebThings website and replacement cloud infrastructure, to continue to provide automatic software updates and a secure remote access service for WebThings gateways around the world.

You can read more about the 1.0 release and the transition of existing gateways to the new infrastructure on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

Krellian & WebThings

Krellian’s mission is to “extend the World Wide Web into physical spaces to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable.” WebThings provides an ideal open source platform, built on web standards, to help achieve that mission.

In the short term Krellian will be leveraging the WebThings Cloud remote access service as part of our new digital signage platform. In the longer term we plan to explore other enterprise use cases for the WebThings platform, to help make buildings smarter, safer and more sustainable.

These commercial applications of WebThings will help provide revenue streams to support the long term sustainability of the open source project and allow it to continue to develop and grow.

The WebThings Community

Krellian highly values the thriving community who have supported the WebThings project over the last four years. From hackers and makers to educators and hobbyists, the community have been pivotal in building, testing and promoting WebThings around the world.

Amongst their achievements is the translation of WebThings Gateway into 34 spoken languages, the creation of over a hundred gateway add-ons and the building of countless DIY projects in a dozen different programming languages. Community members have contributed their time and effort to help build and promote WebThings and support other members in using it in thousands of private smart homes around the world.

We intend to support the community to continue with their great work, and have put in place an open governance structure to distribute decision making and foster leadership amongst the global WebThings community.

Future Roadmap

The following are some ideas about where to take the platform next, but we’d also very much like to hear from the community about what they would like to see from the project going forward.

W3C Compliance

WebThings has been developed in parallel with, and has contributed to, the standardisation of the Web of Things at the W3C. Since the last release of WebThings Gateway in April, the W3C Thing Description specification has reached “recommendation” status and is now an international standard.

We’d like to work towards making WebThings compliant with this standard, as there are still a remaining number of differences between the W3C and Mozilla specifications. In order to fill in the gaps between Mozilla’s Web Thing API and the W3C’s Thing Description standard, we plan to continue to lead work on standardising the Web Thing Protocol as a concrete protocol for communicating with devices over the web.

Production Gateway OS

The main WebThings Gateway software image is currently built on top of the Raspbian Linux distribution. This served the project well for its initial target of DIY smart home users, using the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer.

As the platform matures, we would like to explore a more production-quality IoT operating system like Ubuntu Core or Balena OS on which to base the WebThings Gateway distribution.

This will have the following benefits:

1. A smaller footprint, reducing the minimum system requirements for running the gateway
2. Enabling the targeting of a wider range of hardware for consumer and enterprise use cases
3. Better security, through containerisation and automatic software updates for the underlying operating system

WebThings Controller

There was previously a project to build controller software for WebThings, to run on a controller device such as a smart speaker or smart display. The initial prototype was built on Android Things, but was discontinued when Google locked down the Android Things platform to specific OEMs and introduced restrictions on how it could be used.

Krellian would like to explore new controller software built on our open source Krellian Kiosk web runtime, which could allow for touch and voice input. This software would be designed so that it could either run on the same device as the gateway software, or on a separate controller device.

WebThings App

A native WebThings mobile app could act as a general purpose Web of Things client. This could potentially:

1. Help to streamline the setup process of a WebThings Gateway
2. Act as a client for native web things which don’t need a gateway
3. Help with the standardisation process by providing a user friendly reference implementation of a Web of Things client

WebThings Cloud

Finally, we would like to explore expanding the WebThings Cloud offering. This could include an online dashboard for monitoring and controlling devices across multiple premises, and cloud to cloud integrations with other IoT platforms and voice assistants.

We’re excited about this new chapter in the WebThings story, and look forward to working closely with the community on our vision of a connected world where technology is seamlessly woven into the spaces around us and improves the lives of those who use it.

You can find out more about WebThings at its new home of webthings.io, follow @WebThingsIO on Twitter and sign up for the email newsletter to keep up to date with all the latest news.

A New Future for the WebThings IoT Platform was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Getting Your Business Going Again

I’ve been looking at ways technology could help small to medium sized businesses as the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and we start to adjust to a new normal. With profound changes needed to the way that we live, work and shop, I’m looking at the role digital signage could play in helping to effectively communicate social distancing measures to safeguard and reassure staff and customers.

As lockdown is gradually lifted, staff and customers will need to be kept updated with the latest measures put in place to protect them in order to keep them safe and give them the confidence to work and shop. As we all adapt the way we do business, digital signage could also play a longer term role in better connecting digital and physical retail channels in order to help businesses grow.

If you’re planning how to safely get your businesses going again and would be able to spare 20–30 minutes of your time, I’d love to have a chat to learn more about your needs and the kinds of problems you are trying to solve. Please get in touch at ben@krellian.com.

Krellian Box

Based on what I’ve learned so far, I’m currently working on quickly bringing to market a product called Krellian Box, a box which turns any TV into a connected digital sign.

This simple and affordable solution will enable you to re-purpose an existing HD TV or monitor as a digital sign, create content using the web-based tool of your choice, and deploy content to screens by simply copying and pasting its URL. You will then be able to update signs remotely whenever you need to via a simple web interface, without needing to be physically present at each signage location. If this is something that interests you then you can register your interest today and be kept informed when the product becomes available.

Whatever stage you’re at in planning your business’s recovery from COVID-19, feel free to get in touch.

Hassle-free Digital Signage for the COVID-19 Recovery was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the last six weeks I’ve been enrolled in YCombinator’s Startup School, working towards the launch of a new technology startup.

Today I’m excited to introduce Krellian, a software platform for interactive digital signage, built on web standards.

If you walk around any large town or city today you’ll notice that you’re surrounded by screens. Digital billboards, information kiosks, self-service kiosks, interactive exhibits, digital menus and departure boards.

A lot of those screens are running outdated consumer-grade operating systems and proprietary content runtimes. They’re unreliable, inefficient and insecure. How many times have you seen a digital billboard that’s gone dark, departure boards with a Windows error message on the screen or even ATMs with a blue screen of death?

With Krellian, I am building a software platform for interactive digital signage, built on web standards. A simple, reliable web-based operating system and a secure cloud service for monitoring, controlling and deploying content to connected displays over the internet.

Krellian’s products will build on everything I have learnt over the last decade working on Webian, Firefox OS and Mozilla WebThings. I believe the web technologies I’ve helped standardise around installable web apps and the Web of Things could have enormous potential if applied to the digital signage market.

For example, a purpose-built operating system for displaying modern web content, which can be remotely managed over the internet, could significantly reduce content creation costs and technician call-out fees.

I’m also delighted that Krellian has been accepted onto the High Potential Startups programme, powered by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership. Over the next six months we’ll be working together to better understand customer needs, bring products to market and ultimately grow the business to create more high-tech jobs in the North East of England.

Are you interested in providing in-person digital experiences to your customers? Perhaps you work in advertising, hospitality, healthcare, museums, travel, retail or entertainment? Or do you sell digital signage to your own customers? I’d love to hear more about your needs and the problems you are trying to solve.

Register your interest today at krellian.com and follow Krellian on Twitter and Facebook.

Introducing Krellian — Interactive Digital Signage was originally published in Krellian on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2017 I wrote about the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the B2G (Boot to Gecko) open source software project as an empty GitHub repository in 2011, to shipping as Firefox OS on five million devices worldwide, and then eventually being “transitioned” to the community in 2016.

In the two years or so since Mozilla announced the end of Firefox OS as a Mozilla-run project, the B2G source code has found its way into a surprising number of commercial products. In fact since Mozilla moved on from Firefox OS, its derivatives have shipped on an order of magnitude more devices than during its entire time under Mozilla’s leadership and it has gone on to form the basis of the third largest and fastest growing mobile operating system in the world.

In this blog post I take a look at the legacy of the B2G project, some of the devices you can buy today running B2G code, and other related efforts which still continue inside and outside Mozilla. I will cover KaiOS, Panasonic’s My Home Screen, Servonk, Webian, Astian OS, IceWolf OS and the latest in Mozilla Research & Development. I’ll then explain why I think there’s a strong argument for Mozilla to take a more active role in supporting downstream users of Gecko in future, and even the B2G codebase itself.

KaiOS

Probably the most notable fork of the B2G source code is KaiOS from KaiOS Technologies. It was started in 2016 with a team of 30 people and has since grown to have offices in France, Germany, Taiwan, India, Brazil, Hong Kong and mainland China in addition to its headquarters in the US.

KaiOS has a UI optimised for non-touch “smart feature phones” with physical keypads and small colour screens. That includes the hugely popular JioPhone in India, HMD’s nostalgic re-launch of the Nokia 8110, and the recently announced $7 WizPhone in Indonesia. With these devices KaiOS is very much continuing the Firefox OS vision of “connecting the next billion”, with low end devices aimed mainly at emerging markets.

JioPhone

The JioPhone has been extremely popular in India since its launch in July 2017, in part due to being given away for free, with a security deposit of ₹1500 ($21 USD) which can be refunded by returning the device to Jio stores after three years.

The JioPhone 2 was released in July 2018 at a price of ₹2,999 ($42 USD). It has a full QWERTY keyboard and has apps for Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube.

Nokia 8110

The Nokia 8110 is available internationally, including here in the UK with a recommended retail price of £69.99 ($89) unlocked. It’s available from many popular retailers and mobile network providers including Carphone Warehouse, Currys, John Lewis, Amazon, Vodafone, EE, GiffGaff and BT.

The Nokia 8110 is a very neat little device with an intuitive UI reminiscent of Symbian, but with a modern twist. It’s surprising how much of the web actually works on such a small non-touch screen, though it’s a very fiddly experience if you’re used to a touch screen smartphone.

The presence of Google Assistant on feature phones at this price point is remarkable and it works surprisingly well. To implement Google Assistant for KaiOS, Google have created a custom HTML5 app packaged for the mozApp app runtime KaiOS inherited from B2G.

When I first bought the Nokia 8110 the bundled app store had a grand total of eight apps in it and there’s no way to install web apps from the browser. Since then it has grown a little, but only to about 30 apps and most of them are games. (The JioPhone comes with its own app store called JioStore and not all apps are available on all KaiOS devices, e.g. WhatsApp.)

WizPhone WP006

The WizPhone WP006 was recently announced in Indonesia in partnership with Google and Alfamart and can be purchased from vending machines for only IDR99,000 ($7).

Other KaiOS Devices

Other devices running KaiOS include:

• Alcatel OneTouch Go Flip
• MaxCom 241 and 281
• Doro 7050 and 7060
• CAT B35
• MTN Phone (coming in 2019)

Rapid Growth

By the end of 2017 KaiOS had shipped on 30 million phones in the U.S., Canada, and India via partnerships with 20 carriers.

By June 2018 it had reached 40 million devices and Google made a $22m investment in the company. As part of that agreement KaiOS Technologies agreed to bundle Google services, including Google Assistant.

As of the end of 2018 it has reached over 50 million devices across North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa.

According to StatCounter, as of the end of 2018 KaiOS was the third largest mobile operating system in the world after Android and iOS, with 1.13% market share worldwide.

In India it has 4.55% market share, beating Apple’s iOS into second place.

Strategy Analytics are forecasting that KaiOS device shipments will grow 50% year on year in 2019, with more than 30% of those shipments coming from non-India markets such as Africa, South East Asia and Latin America. This, they say, will make it the “world’s fastest growing major platform”.

Panasonic My Home Screen

KaiOS is not the only fork of B2G. Panasonic was the first hardware vendor to create Firefox OS based smart TVs, which received great reviews for their user friendly design when they were released in 2015. When Mozilla stopped work on Firefox OS, Panasonic continued development of the software as My Home Screen 2.0 and later My Home Screen 3.0.

As of 2019 most Panasonic smart TVs are still running this B2G fork. There are localised variations being sold running My Home Screen all over the world including in North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Oceania. They range from the low end 24" LED TX-24FS500B in the UK for £279 ($359) to the very high end 77" OLED TH-77EZ1000H in Hong Kong for HK$139,000 ($17,700).

A notable exception is the US, where Panasonic recently stopped selling TVs due to difficult market conditions. But here in the UK you’ll come across these smart TVs when walking into most popular high street electronics retailers like John Lewis, Currys and Argos. Some listings on online stores even still refer to these TVs as “powered by Firefox OS”, despite the official change in branding.

My Home Screen 3.0 is probably a bit of a Frankenstein of web and native code under the hood at this point, with support for a wide range of live and on-demand video platforms, but the user interface has remained largely the same.

I have Panasonic TVs running both the Firefox OS branded and My Home Screen 3.0 branded software and while the browser has barely changed, app development has become much more locked down.

With the latest “HTML v3 SDK” (based on the “Hybrid broadcast broadband TV” standard), developer accounts are basically invitation only. I applied for an account and Panasonic first wanted to know what app I was developing so they could decide whether they wanted it in their store.

This is quite a contrast from the original Firefox OS TVs where anyone could enable developer mode and and anyone could submit an app to the Firefox Marketplace.

Still, with most of the major apps like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video already supported, My Home Screen continues to provide a slick and compelling user experience for smart TVs.

In total Panasonic sells approximately 7 million TVs per year worldwide.

Servonk

In January 2018 the tech lead of KaiOS, Fabrice Desré (previously tech lead of B2G at Mozilla), started an open source project called Servonk. Servonk is kind of a “Boot to Servo” like the original Boot to Gecko project, but based on Mozilla’s experimental Servo rendering engine.

Servonk takes advantage of the cutting edge features of Servo, is largely built on the Rust programming language and roughly follows the slimmed down architecture we started to transition to towards the end of the B2G project.

Whilst a very cool open source project, Servonk is unlikely to ship on commercial devices any time soon, although there are some early discussions around shipping a version of the Necunos NC_1 (community edition) with B2G or Servonk pre-loaded.

Servo is still a very experimental browser engine which can’t render the majority of web pages on the web today. Inside Mozilla, work on Servo has recently mostly been focused on VR applications and moving parts of Servo over to Gecko as part of the Quantum project. Servo itself is currently still a research project.

According to the README, the main motivation of Servonk is to scratch a personal itch to build an alternative open source OS, and encourage contributions to Servo from outside Mozilla. If you join the (still surprisingly busy) #b2g channel on irc.mozilla.org, you’ll find that most recent discussions are around Servonk.

Webian

My own Webian project predated B2G but still continues to crawl along, learning from many of the lessons of Firefox OS and using the web standards it helped create. Webian is an operating system dedicated to running standards-based web apps.

The desktop version is currently built on the experimental Quantum Browser Runtime (qbrt) from Mozilla and the touch version is based on Android Things and GeckoView.

The current approach I’m using for touch-based devices is to implement the system UI as an Android app which runs on top of Android Things. Android Things is basically a special version of Android which only runs a single app (no default system UI like a status bar or task manager is included), enabling device makers to have full control over the system UI.

Android Things has been used to build a range of commercial “smart displays” from Lenovo, LG and Samsung (though notably not Google’s own Home Hub smart display which is based on the more lightweight Google Cast platform). I’m using Android Things to build my own browser-based OS using Gecko via GeckoView with a native system UI in written in Java. The idea is that standard web apps can then be discovered and installed from the web using their Web App Manifest and Service Workers where available.

The upside of building on Android Things is that Google maintains the underlying OS and Android APIs, while I have full control over the system UI and can use Gecko via its existing well-supported Android widget layer. The downside is that it can probably never perform as well as B2G could have done on the same hardware because it requires that additional Java layer, the removal of which was one of B2G’s biggest benefits. And of course Android itself is controlled by Google.

Astian OS

Astian OS calls itself a successor to Firefox OS, but it’s more of a spiritual fork than an actual derivative. It’s really a desktop Linux distribution with a love for web apps, based on Devuan (a fork of Debian).

IceWolf OS

Originally known as Plánium OS, IceWolf OS (see what they did there?) is an open source project started in Brazil. According to its Twitter profile, IceWolf OS was inspired by Firefox OS and is built on web technologies.

After experiments with NodeJS & Chromium, Electron and NW.js, the project leader Patrick A Lima is now making an effort to move back to Gecko, along with its new Firefox OS inspired name. Unfortunately (as I have experienced myself), Gecko is much harder to embed due to the monolithic nature of its architecture.

Mozilla Projects

My current job is working in Research & Development in the Emerging Technologies department of Mozilla. Many of the current projects in Emerging Technologies have their origins in Firefox OS.

The WebVR effort culminating in the Firefox Reality browser was first started as a potential new form factor for Firefox OS in VR headsets.

DeepSpeech was born as part of the Vaani voice assistant for Firefox OS, and may eventually be used in a voice browser called Firefox Listen.

The current Mozilla IoT effort includes some early work on smart displays using Android Things and GeckoView.

Legacy

In the five years under Mozilla’s leadership around five million devices were shipped running Firefox OS. Since then over 50 million smart feature phones and millions of smart TVs have shipped running B2G code, and several new software projects have been derived from or inspired by it.

According to StatCounter, on mobile there are now more users of the KaiOS browser than Firefox (1.13% vs. 0.34%).

Their numbers show that KaiOS browser market share overtook Firefox on mobile some time in April 2018 and shows no signs of stopping.

With the current rate of growth of KaiOS and corresponding decline of Firefox market share, if KaiOS sticks with Gecko and Mozilla doesn’t manage to turn things around, it’s feasible that KaiOS could eventually become the biggest consumer of Gecko altogether.

But KaiOS is currently running a very old patched version of Gecko 48 and Panasonic’s My Home Screen 3.0 is running Gecko 34, while the latest version of Gecko in Firefox is 64.

KaiOS Technologies and Panasonic are being prevented from upgrading to a newer version of Gecko because Mozilla removed all B2G code from the mozilla-central code repository, including the Gonk widget layer. Since then there have been significant architectural changes to Gecko as part of the Quantum project which make it very difficult for downstream projects to port B2G to the latest version.

This unfortunately means that the legacy of Firefox OS is currently tens of millions of phones and TVs across the world running an out of date browser engine which can probably never be updated. This potentially puts the users of those devices at risk, but also holds back the web platform as a whole.

The Future

So what will these companies do next? It’s very likely that without support from Mozilla, KaiOS will be forced to migrate from Gecko to Google’s Blink engine. In fact I understand there’s already work under way to do this, with support from the Google Chrome team.

The resulting architecture could look a lot like an Android/Chrome OS hybrid, something which has been speculated about for years. Panasonic could then use that same codebase, or just move to another software stack altogether.

A port of B2G to Blink is a huge undertaking, but if it comes to fruition it would further contribute to the WebKit/Blink monoculture we’re increasingly seeing on the web platform today with Chrome, Safari, Opera, Samsung Internet, Edge and Brave.

With both Opera and Microsoft having given up on their own browser engines in favour of building Chromium-based browsers, Mozilla really have the last ground-up alternative implementation of the web platform. This is hugely important because without multiple interoperable implementations, there can be no web standards.

There are ongoing efforts by Mozilla to target new Android-based platforms with Gecko-based browser apps on FireTV, Amazon Echo Show and VR headsets, as well as specialised browsers aimed at emerging markets. But while the rate of decline of Firefox market share has been slowing in recent times, with competitors converging on the Chromium code base and overall Mozilla market share still shrinking, the future of Gecko and the diversity and health of the web platform is looking a little bleak.

Conclusions

Since Mozilla discontinued Firefox OS, B2G source code has found its way into a surprising number of commercial products and now forms the basis of the third largest and fastest growing mobile operating system in the world. However, those devices are currently running out of date versions of Gecko, use locked down packaged app stores, are developed behind closed doors, and are arguably not a great showcase of the open web in the way B2G was originally intended to be.

I don’t necessarily think that smart feature phones and smart TVs would have been a great success for Mozilla had they pursued those product directions themselves with Firefox OS. Nor are those form factors necessarily the best showcase of the capabilities of the open web. However, the unexpected continuing legacy of B2G does serve to demonstrate just how much value still existed in what has proven to be a very versatile and scalable platform.

From low end $7 phones with tiny 2.4" screens to high end $17,000 TVs with 77" 4K screens, B2G has continued to perform.

In my personal opinion, Mozilla should seriously consider working with KaiOS Technologies to re-introduce the Gonk widget layer to mozilla-central, and re-claim some ownership over the B2G codebase. KaiOS could then use a slimmed down B2G architecture with local system services as had been the plan with the B2G Transition Project, and adopt modern web standards for installable web apps.

This would enable KaiOS to continue running an up-to-date version of Gecko on millions of devices rather than move to Blink, which many of their employees and partners might actually prefer, and could significantly contribute to the diversity and health of the web. I also believe this could open up enormous future opportunities for new product areas for Mozilla as well.

There are new form factors emerging today such as smart displays (Amazon Echo Show, Lenovo Smart Display, Google Home Hub) and tablet hybrid devices (Pixel Slate, ASUS Chromebook Flip) which could be a great fit for B2G and the open web.

With continuing explorations in voice, mixed reality and IoT there are many new potential product areas for Mozilla which could benefit from the B2G software stack.

Smart displays, for example, could be the ideal home for a voice-first trusted personal agent, consistent with Mozilla’s new three year strategy. Whilst early smart display products are being built on Google’s Android Things platform and that could be an option for Mozilla as well, even Google itself used Google Cast for its own Google Home Hub product, a more lightweight technology stack much more similar to B2G. B2G could give Mozilla and partners an edge in this market, with a platform less controlled by Google.

There could be other use cases for B2G in VR headsets, the smart home and countless connected devices we have yet to dream up.

Personally I would love to see Mozilla emerge from the comfort zone I fear it has retreated into in recent years, shipping Firefox browsers on others’ platforms where the web is always a second class citizen. I’d like to see some new big bets in products and partnerships where the web platform is allowed to take centre stage once again, where Mozilla isn’t constrained by the rules of other platforms.

The web is the platform. Let’s allow it to shine.

Originally posted on Mozilla Hacks.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are built on open standards which are decentralized by design, with anyone free to implement those standards and connect to the network without the need for a central point of control. This has resulted in the explosive growth of hundreds of millions of personal computers and billions of smartphones which can all talk to each other over a single global network.

As technology advances from personal computers and smartphones to a world where everything around us is connected to the Internet, new types of devices in our homes, cities, cars, clothes and even our bodies are going online every day.

The Internet of Things

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is a term to describe how physical objects are being connected to the Internet so that they can be discovered, monitored, controlled or interacted with. Like any advancement in technology these innovations bring with them enormous new opportunities, but also new risks.

At Mozilla our mission is “to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.”

This mission has never been more important than in a time when everything around us is being connected to the Internet. As new types of devices come online, they bring with them significant new challenges around security, privacy and interoperability.

Many of the new devices being connected to the Internet are insecure, do not receive software updates to fix vulnerabilities and raise new privacy questions around the collection, storage and use of large quantities of extremely personal data.

Additionally, most IoT devices today use proprietary vertical technology stacks which are built around a central point of control and which don’t always talk to each other. When they do talk to each other it requires per-vendor integrations to connect those systems together. There are efforts to create standards, but the landscape is extremely complex and there’s still not yet a single dominant model or market leader.

The Web of Things

Using the Internet of Things today is a lot like sharing information on the Internet before the World Wide Web existed. There were competing hypertext systems and proprietary GUIs, but the Internet lacked a unifying application layer protocol for sharing and linking information.

The “Web of Things” (WoT) is an effort to take the lessons learned from the World Wide Web and apply them to IoT. It’s about creating a decentralized Internet of Things by giving Things URLs on the web to make them linkable and discoverable, and defining a standard data model and APIs to make them interoperable.

The Web of Things is not just another vertical IoT technology stack to compete with existing platforms. It is intended as a unifying horizontal application layer to bridge together multiple underlying IoT protocols.

Rather than start from scratch, the Web of Things is built on existing, proven web standards like REST, HTTP, JSON, WebSockets and TLS. The Web of Things will also require new web standards. In particular, we think there is a need for a Web Thing Description format to describe things, a REST style Web Thing API to interact with them, and possibly a new generation of HTTP better optimised for IoT use cases and use by resource constrained devices.

The Web of Things is not just a Mozilla Initiative, there is already a well established Web of Things community and related standardization efforts at the IETF, W3C, OCF and OGC. Mozilla plans to be a participant in this community to help define new web standards and promote best practices around privacy, security and interoperability.

From this existing work three key integration patterns have emerged for connecting things to the web, defined by the point at which a Web of Things API is exposed to the Internet.

Direct Integration Pattern

The simplest pattern is the direct integration pattern where a device exposes a Web of Things API directly to the Internet. This is useful for relatively high powered devices which can support TCP/IP and HTTP and can be directly connected to the Internet (e.g. a WiFi camera). This pattern can be tricky for devices on a home network which may need to use NAT or TCP tunneling in order to traverse a firewall. It also more directly exposes the device to security threats from the Internet.

Gateway Integration Pattern

The gateway integration pattern is useful for resource-constrained devices which can’t run an HTTP server themselves and so use a gateway to bridge them to the web. This pattern is particularly useful for devices which have limited power or which use PAN network technologies like Bluetooth or ZigBee that don’t directly connect to the Internet (e.g. a battery powered door sensor). A gateway can also be used to bridge all kinds of existing IoT devices to the web.

Cloud Integration Pattern

In the cloud integration pattern the Web of Things API is exposed by a cloud server which acts as a gateway remotely and the device uses some other protocol to communicate with the server on the back end. This pattern is particularly useful for a large number of devices over a wide geographic area which need to be centrally co-ordinated (e.g. air pollution sensors).

Project Things by Mozilla

In the Emerging Technologies team at Mozilla we’re working on an experimental framework of software and services to help developers connect “things” to the web in a safe, secure and interoperable way.

Project Things will initially focus on developing three components:

• Things Gateway — An open source implementation of a Web of Things gateway which helps bridge existing IoT devices to the web
• Things Cloud — A collection of Mozilla-hosted cloud services to help manage a large number of IoT devices over a wide geographic area
• Things Framework — Reusable software components to help create IoT devices which directly connect to the Web of Things

Things Gateway

Today we’re announcing the availability of a prototype of the first component of this system, the Things Gateway. We’ve made available a software image you can use to build your own Web of Things gateway using a Raspberry Pi.

So far this early prototype has the following features:

• Easily discover the gateway on your local network
• Choose a web address which connects your home to the Internet via a secure TLS tunnel requiring zero configuration on your home network
• Create a username and password to authorize access to your gateway
• Discover and connect commercially available ZigBee and Z-Wave smart plugs to the gateway
• Turn those smart plugs on and off from a web app hosted on the gateway itself

We’re releasing this prototype very early on in its development so that hackers and makers can get their hands on the source code to build their own Web of Things gateway and contribute to the project from an early stage.

This initial prototype is implemented in JavaScript with a NodeJS web server, but we are exploring an adapter add-on system to allow developers to build their own Web of Things adapters using other programming languages like Rust in the future.

Web Thing API

Our goal in building this IoT framework is to lead by example in creating a Web of Things implementation which embodies Mozilla’s values and helps drive IoT standards around security, privacy and interoperability. The intention is not just to create a Mozilla IoT platform but an open source implementation of a Web of Things API which anyone is free to implement themselves using the programming language and operating system of their choice.

To this end, we have started working on a draft Web Thing API specification to eventually propose for standardization. This includes a simple but extensible Web Thing Description format with a default JSON encoding, and a REST + WebSockets Web Thing API. We hope this pragmatic approach will appeal to web developers and help turn them into WoT developers who can help realize our vision of a decentralized Internet of Things.

We encourage developers to experiment with using this draft API in real life use cases and provide feedback on how well it works so that we can improve it.

Get Involved

There are many ways you can contribute to this effort, some of which are:

• Build a Web Thing — build your own IoT device which uses the Web Thing API
• Create an adapter — Create an adapter to bridge an existing IoT protocol or device to the web
• Hack on Project Things — Help us develop Mozilla’s Web of Things implementation

You can find out more at iot.mozilla.org and all of our source code is on GitHub. You can find us in #iot on irc.mozilla.org or on our public mailing list.