It’s been a little over a week since my trip out to Minneapolis as a guest speaker for Prime Academy and IoT Fuse to share Helium’s decentralized approach to building a wireless network. We’re flipping the deployment model on its head by incentivizing and rewarding a community using a combination of hardware, software, networking protocols, and a new physical blockchain.

TL;DR

The weather was cold, but the people were warm.

Minneapolis has a blossoming tech focus.

Attendees were engaged and expressed excitement about what Helium is building.

To participate join the Helium Hotspot waitlist here.

Thanks Patrick, Emily and everyone who came out, we’ll be back.

We met Patrick last November at IoT Expo (more about our IoT Expo experience here). Intrigued by our project he described a thriving tech community in Minneapolis and invited us to participate in their first IoT Fuse meetup of 2019.

He also introduced us to other relevant tech organizations in the area so we could arrange additional meetings.

First day I met Greg of Exosite over coffee in the hotel. Exosite is a SaaS company focused on remote condition monitoring and preventative maintenance targeting industrial machines.

I used the analogy of how AirBnB has become the largest accommodation provider without real estate. Similarly, we believe a community-driven approach can deploy wireless infrastructure faster AND provide better coverage more affordable than the centralized slugs who currently dominate. Since Greg is familiar with blockchain (hosts a local blockchain meetup) I went into depth about our consensus model and proof of coverage (for more details, go here).

After our meeting wrapped up, it wasn’t long before I needed to head to Prime Academy to speak during their lunch and to get there navigated through the Skyway to stay indoors and avoid the cold.

Follow the Skyway

Prime Academy is a developer bootcamp focused on training students full stack engineering and user experience design. Emily from Prime showed me where to set up while students warmed up their lunch.

“Lunch and learns” can be a good opportunity, but if the content or delivery isn’t compelling folks focus more on their lunch than the learning. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, and there were many good questions from the students in between mouthfuls both during and after the presentation.

Credit: Prime Academy

After lunch onto Saint Paul to meet with Lab 651’s co-founder Justin (who’s also an IoT Fuse leader). Justin explained that Lab 651 is focused on industrial companies with IoT use cases including working with companies to track high-value assets, monitor temperatures, and fill levels.

I slid a Helium Hotspot across the table to Justin and described various capabilities including scalability (thousands of machines to a single hotspot), range (miles), and minimal battery consumption (years) for connected devices (machines). For more technical details, including the software-defined radio, see this post.

Back to the hotel for a meeting with the Helium team via Google Hangouts and then off to the main event i.e., the IoT Fuse meetup: Decentralization Night: Building Communities, IoT Ownership.

Beer and pizza were plentiful, and the long room hosted by Agosto was full.

In my experience, the amount of engagement is a gauge of success for a presentation. That night the questions came fast and furious and ranged from high-level questions about the project itself and our decentralized approach to very detailed questions about how our physical blockchain and consensus model would be used to reward hotspot owners providing wireless coverage for IoT devices.

Big thanks to the attendees and organizers who took the time to provide kind feedback. Here’s a sample: