We spoke with co-founder and CEO of DiscoveryIoT Selvam VMS to find out more about their ICO, business model, token use case and more!

Below you will find a brief introduction of DiscoveryIoT project. To watch the full conversation with Selvam and have a full ICO Grill experience, visit the link at the end of the article.

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Problems DiscoveryIot solves

1. Enterprises are unable to track products through their supply chain
2. Hardware costs of IoT products are prohibitive, restricting their penetration
3. IoT communications networks are unreliable, expensive and controlled by few companies

Discovery enables enterprise clients to track their products at very low costs. Typically, it would cost the company less than 3 US Cents to track their product over an entire month (assuming 12 pings a day per product)!! This is 60-100x lower in cost compared to the existing product tracking solutions, thereby enabling companies to adopt Discovery as a solution of choice.

Since all the data is stored in distributed ledgers of a blockchain, it is 100% reliable and secure from any hacking efforts.

The core product is the revolutionary CLIOT – a smart, self-charging IoT tag, that can be embedded on the products to be tracked. This tag works on the principle of ambient backscatter – a path-breaking concept that helps the device draw power from the surrounding electromagnetic waves, making it self-supporting. Priced at <10 US Cents, the CLIOT would help convert the daily & mundane products (like toothpaste tubes) into smart devices, thereby helping unleashing the true potential of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Discovery would allow for the enterprise users to create custom reports based on their unique business needs. The reports can be also be shared across the organization through creation of multiple users on the platform. The visibility of data can be controlled at each user level, giving the admin users complete control on who sees what in the organization. These reports would support tabular, graphical formats (charts and graphs), and can be integrated on maps.

A high-level dashboard with all mission-critical information can be built into a dashboard for the client. This dashboard would contain all the information that are pertinent for the client. This dashboard can be customized as required by the client directly. A system for generating alerts and warnings can also be created by the user directly.

Competitive landscape

Currently existing IoT solutions revolve around the concepts of RFID (Radio Frequency Identifiable Devices), telecom network or other specialized communication devices.

While RFID has been used as the primary tracking mechanism globally over the past 2 decades, it has some serious limitations. Though the tag cost has come down significantly to about $0.15 per tag, the major drawbacks of using RFID for tracking are the communication range and the requirement of a reader. The underlying architecture of RFID requires a reader to recover data from a tag. This would exponentially increase the infrastructure cost for large scale applications.

Other existing solutions such as WiFi, telecom and specialized IoT networks also cannot solve all the problems of reach, cost and scalability.

Blockchain & token use case

Discovery has created Compass – the World’s First Decentralized Smartphone Infrastructure Access Protocol. A Blockchain 4.0 protocol, Compass is built to develop next generation Decentralized Apps on smartphones. Compass is an Intelligent Blockless DAG Protocol that is built on the concept of AI, Edge Computing, Geographical and Semantic Nodes.

DIS token has a very clear utility in the Discovery Network, as well as in the Compass protocol. In the Discovery Network Solution, the DIS token plays the role of a process enabler, that is, it is the medium of exchange of value between the buyer (enterprise clients) and the seller (the user community).

The value of this token is this directly proportional to the usability and the value generated in the network. In other words, the DIS token clearly represents a consumable resource (data transferred through the mobile phone’s network), which is valuable from the buyer’s perspective. Using local fiat for this purpose would not only be cumbersome (imagine transferring USD to millions of users on daily basis from/to bank accounts) and expensive (bank charges would represent a significant % of such low-value transfers), but also take a significant time (banks typically credit payments in 24-48 hrs). Moreover, using local fiat would route the system through a central processor (bank) which is contrary to the fundamentals of the blockchain technology.

Current development stage

The company launched a semi-automatic product tracking solution in March 2017, where the products are tracked on a manual basis and captured through a mobile application interface at the top
distributor/retailer/wholesaler locations. Though this has improved product visibility tremendously for brands, it was not a real-time solution, and was prone to error as a manually run process. Moreover, with the involvement of a human effort, the solution was not cost-effective.

In September 2017 the founders started building out the technology stack for a fully automated, blockchain based tracking solution. The overall architecture has now been defined. A Beta version of the product (Minimum Viable Product) is being developed now and is expected to be launched by May/June 2018. This will be a Bluetooth based architecture and will automate the complete tracking process. However, given that Bluetooth beacons are not cheap (they cost ~ $6 per unit), it is being launched in a recycling mode (where the Bluetooth beacon is to be reused at one level in the supply chain, say a warehouse). The reader part of the system runs on a mobile reader application which pairs with the Bluetooth beacon and thus recognizes the exact location of each individual tag. To avoid errors in the process and reduce manual intervention, an IR-based Robotics solution is also implemented at the warehouse. An initial version of the same has been launched at the warehouse level, where every product in/out of the warehouse is being tracked automatically, through the following steps:

Step 1: Affixation of the tag
Every product that is required to be tracked is affixed with the Bluetooth tag. In the current process, the tag is being affixed at the warehouse level, since our geographic presence is limited and because the tag needs to be reused after it reaches the retail level. This affixation is a manual process involved at the entry point of the
warehouse.

Step 2: Tag Allocation
Once the tag is affixed on the product, it is ͞allocated͟ to a particular stock keeping unit/batch (SKU). Based this allocation, every movement of the tag is assigned to the SKU it is assigned to.

Step 3: Tag Removal for reuse
As the tag exits the particular level in the supply chain (the warehouse in this case), the tag is removed from the product and taken back into the inventory for reuse. This is a manual process and is done in order to use the same tag over and over again, as the economics would not work out for each unit of the product to absorb the cost of the tag.

Watch full talk with co-founder and CEO of DiscoveryIoT here