IoT M&A Target Candidates Insights from Patents

Smart Home Energy Management
Ecofactor provides automated energy savings, comfort and control through energy efficiency, demand response and HVAC performance monitoring services. Ecofactor holds 26 issued US patents including one design patent regarding thermostat. In assessment of the commercial importance (e.g., potential commercial implementation or licensing potential), Ecofactor patents ranked second following Samsung Electronics among top 10 innovators in the smart home patent landscape research.

Allure Energy is a smart home energy management company based in Austin, Texas. Allure Energy develops leading-edge smart energy management solutions for many IoT applications. Allure Energy holds 22 issued US patents. Significant number of forward citations shows the high quality of the family patents. Especially, many patents of most key industry players including Google (Nest Lab), GE and Honeywell in the smart energy management heavily cited Allure Energy patents.

Smart Home Automation
Neura provides the intelligence IoT platform and human-centered smart home application solutions. Neura patent application US20150019714 illustrates the adaptable autonomous smart home system. The adaptable autonomous smart home system can recognize the contextual or semantic profiling of a person or place or devices (physical environment) based on sensed data by the IoT devices. The adaptable autonomous smart home system determines particular interpretation instructions (define particular IoT device control rules) that are associated with the particular physical environment and dynamically updates the control rules for changing physical environment.

Pie Digital provides cloud-based services for smart home applications. Pie Digital patent application US20140201340 illustrates the smart home system that can dramatically simplify and automate the configuration, maintenance and integration of the IoT devices in the home and office.

Smart Home Personal Care
Jibo provides the world’s first social robot for the home. Jibo patent application US20140277735 illustrates the friendly, helpful and intelligent home robot that can adapt to reside continually in the environment of a person and to interact with a user. Jibo can provide emotional engagement with the user. Jibo can sense and respond and learn as the user engage with Jibo.

Affectiva is an emotion sensing technology company that grew out of MIT’s Media Lab. Affectiva patent application US20140200463 illustrates a practical possibility of implementation of emotion-aware smart home IoT applications by determining well-being status from an analysis of facial information and physiological information of an individual.

Connected Cars
INRIX analyzes traffic and movement data from 100’s of data sources including the most robust crowd-sourced network of 175 million vehicles and devices. INRIX patent application US20150035666 illustrates the system for monitoring the user driving behavior in various driving contexts, and presenting driving suggestions of alternative driving behaviors. The presentation of the alternative driving behaviors to the user can facilitate changes in user driving behavior that improve the safety, efficiency, and/or comfort of the driving experience.

Zubie was formed in 2012 as a joint venture between Best Buy and Open Air Equity Partners. Since began with a focus on connected car applications for consumers in the US, and has expanded globally into services for insurers, small businesses, large fleets and auto dealers.

US20140167983 illustrates an integration of the smart home and connected car system. Smart home system includes home smart appliance networks, home smart energy systems, smart lighting system and others. The smart home system can include sensors or components that are physically located at different places throughout the home and are in communication with a central “command center” that consolidates information from each of the sensor/components whether a particular entry door, window, or garage door is opened, or whether a motion sensor has sensed any motion, or whether a particular light or set of lights is off/on or a current temperature of the house

Connected Healthcare
Bobo Analytics is a smart healthcare technology and data analytics company for performance optimization. Bobo Analytics patent application US20140073486 illustrates the physiological measurement systems for continuous health and fitness monitoring. A lightweight wearable system is provided to collect various physiological data continuously from a wearer without the need for a chest strap. The system also enables monitoring of the physiological parameters in addition to heart rate including body temperature, heart rate variability, motion, sleep, stress, fitness level, recovery level, effect of a workout routine on health, caloric expenditure. The system enables automatic interpretation of the physiological parameters to assess the cardiovascular intensity experienced by a user.

Hello builds hardware and software to help people live better through understanding themselves and the world around them. Founded in 2012 and based in San Francisco, California. Hello is a team of designers, engineers, and operations staff. US20140249760 illustrates the system including wearable or portable monitoring device that can detect user’s activities, behaviors, habit information, and health. The monitoring system determines user’s melanin level.

IoT Security
Zscaler is a global cloud-based information security company. Zscaler patent application US20140208426 illustrates the system for dynamic cloud-based malware behavior analysis. The cloud-based behavioral analysis system includes nodes that communicatively coupled to the users. The nodes perform inline monitoring and malware detection and preclusion.

IoT Big Data Analytics
Bit Stew Systems provides the premier platform for handling complex data integration, data analysis, and predictive automation for connected devices on the Industrial Internet. In the electricity supply industry, a typical advanced metering infrastructure network comprises millions of smart meters, each containing multiple hardware and software elements, sending hundreds of millions of data points per day through a variety of communications networks to an array of back-office systems. Bit Stew Systems patent application US20150213035 illustrates the big data analytics system for organizing, searching and accessing data created by multiple disparate data sources within a utility supply system.

Cloud for IoT
EVRYTHNGprovides the IoT cloud platform that connects any consumer product to the Web and manages real-time data to drive applications. EVRYTHNG patent application US20140181256 illustrates the system that can compute the object identifier and contextual information based on pre-defined set of rules and map the object identifier and contextual information to an entry point associated with a specific computer application. The system provides access to the specific the application to the end-user through the cloud services.

IoT FinTech
PayRange provides the credit card solutions for machines. PayRange patent application US20150227928 illustrates the mobile-device-to-machine payment system for facilitating a cost-effective and easy-to-use cashless transaction for purchase of products or services by a user from a payment accepting unit such as vending, parking meters, luggage carts, transit ticketing, laundromats and amusement.

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