CSR dives into the Internet of Things
The company runs its own servers called the CSR Service Delivery System that currently act as a configuration interface for CSR’s connected audio devices. This will form the basis of an IoT service, said Joep van Beurden, CEO of CSR at the opening of a new R&D centre in Bristol.
In the first step CSR quietly yesterday acquired Cambridge-based Receiva, a music streaming service that manages the interface between connected devices and Internet services such as streaming radio and Spotify. This will use the Service Delivery System to keep track of all the different audio streaming services via a simple API.
“If you have automated building with thousands of nodes you want to be able to manage these centrally and update them securely,” he said. “What we are now working on the same servers giving the opportunity to configure and update a mesh of devices. The real story is in the cloud so we need a third layer. We are not going to be a service provider but we have the CSR Service Delivery System that’s the next layer of software for easy access into the Internet. We would absolutely make the APIs available to developers who will come up with very clever apps.”
CSR has developed an overlay for the Bluetooth Smart 4.0 standard that gives mesh networking on low cost, low power Bluetooth devices. Samsung is launching a range of light bulbs controlled via a mobile phone using the technology and CSR is in the process of adding this to Bluetooth as an open standard and is talking with 30 other tier one OEMs. “We are not interested in fragmenting the Bluetooth standard,” said van Beurden.
Although this will be available to any third party developers via an API he says this will not compete with cloud IoT services such as Xively and Axeda which last week teamed up with Wind River to offer IoT management in the cloud. “We are not competing with them, we want to connect to these guys,” said van Beurden.
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