Project combining Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a flowmeter to collect Business Intelligence for Beer Industry

Hi,

Is the use of the service free, and will it remain free? I'm confused because on the home page it is stated

"You can freely register at Carriots cloud platform and start creating smart objects"

But the terms of service contains this:

iii) your nonpayment of any fees or other sums due to Carriots or any other party related to your use of the Service,

If it will not remain free, what will be the approximate cost and pricing model, so that people can decide up-front if they wish to invest time

based on the level of the future cost.

From their website:

It is Free to start then pay for what you use: Get started without

any upfront costs and build and app for up to 10 devices. If you

need to serve more devices pay only for the resources you use

as your application grows.

Not very free - I'm sure there are btter ways.

MK

Hmmmm, electronic point of sale will provide all the same data. although this may more quickly tell a paranoid landlord how much beer is going missing on a particular shift.

What's the company's data usage / privacy policy? Is it just data mining?

Hi Jonathan,

I think the company is promoting their service to allow any device to send events to their server and run some logic,

which is fine if they really do intend to keep it free, since otherwise they should at least state the future price, otherwise people

may invest time in developing for it without knowing this, and being beta testers for future paying customers which would thus be

unfair. They're a business, they have to make money, so that's fine, I just wanted to check if they were not just making people

free beta-testers for them and then drop the free offer.

People could do a lot themselves with (say) Google AppEngine (whose prices are openly listed for the free and pay tiers) but would have

to develop the app themselves (which for a simple use-case would not be hard), whereas the value-add that carriotts is offering is that it's already

done for you. Which is fine if they really do intend to keep it free, or openly mention their pricing - not saying they haven't, I probably

wasn't very observant when I visited their site.

Funny

This same type of thing came up at our KiwiBots meeting the other night.

Someone was sending data from their small app to one of the 'free' services, and suddenly it wasn't free.

No way of getting the data back, so there was a years worth gone.

The boys then said to use RRD ( http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/) to collect the data which is free.

It appears there are a few applications already, so maybe some of the hard work has been done.

One of the others uses Cacti ( http://www.cacti.net/ ) which uses RRD to plot his wind turbine and temperature data.

GoogleApp was also mentioned.

Mark

I've had a quick snoop through the terms and conditions and privacy policy and nothing really jumps out (with the caveat that the T&C are liable to change at any time...) The company is EU based, so that makes me a little less uneasy! No pricing as there is no premium account available yet - just a free beta account at the mo. Beta will end "June 2013" and premium account will launch, but free account will still be available. Data is available at any time - but currently within the traffic limits of the free account and providing that the account is still active.

I find it a little ironic that at a time when the Pi is promoting inclusivity in computing that everyone and his dog seems to be getting primed to hand over all of their processing needs to some opaque cloud. Probably best to wait a while to see how it all shakes out. I'm sure that in the fullness of time a lot of the little pioneers will disappear or get gobbled up by the bigger fish, who will then start monkeying with the T&C. So if you have a nuclear reactor in the garden shed I wouldn't hand over temperature monitoring of the core to a cloud app just yet. [/tinfoil hat mode]

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in answering this conversation, we missed the notifications to be alerted on the conversation.

We will try to answer all the questions:

1. Carriots is a company based in Spain that markets its Platform as a Service under a Freemium model.

2. We have two types of accounts Free Accounts and Corporate accounts (Premium).

3. The FREE account will remain FREE FOR EVER as long as the company provides this service.

4. The FREE account will retain all its fuctionallities or will be even improved, never downsized. You will always have 10 devices for FREE to use.

5. The cost of the Corporate account is 2€ per device per month and you will have extra features than the free account and most of all, no limit to the number of devices used in your project. This account will be launched in September when our Beta phase ends. Once the Beta phase ends, FREE accounts will still be available and even will have some extra features.

6. All the accounts, even FREE will have in a few days a feature to export your data to a CSV file. You data is yours and we want your data to be exportable.

7. We really want to thank our Beta testers and our commitment is to still support a community for makers with FREE accounts and services. Please also check our forum forum.carriots.com where we help a lot of our free users and implements their suggestions during this Beta phase.

We hope all these statements solve your questions. If you have any more please let us know. We will be glad to respond and be clear on our Strategy and T&C.

On another topic and related to Jonathan thoughts on the Pi and cloud relation. Our vision is that a Platform on the cloud like Carriots just boost the power of the PI by integrating it with other devices and more systems. For example in this project scenario the data gathered will end a Business Intelligence suite like cognos for data mining but the device can also trigger maintenance alarms to external systems. All these features can not be done exclusively by the Pi, specially if you consider thousands of devices collecting information.

We hope this post is not too late and we would be glad to hear what you think!

Regards,

The Carriots Team.

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

I find it a little ironic that at a time when the Pi is promoting inclusivity in computing that everyone and his dog seems to be getting primed to hand over all of their processing needs to some opaque cloud.

Indeed, it's ironic and it's also quite puzzling.  After all, the new generation of cheap networkable ARM boards isn't limited to just data gathering and desktop computing alone, but also performs very nicely in personal network servers.  There is rarely any need to risk using cloud services anymore, and by running your own ARM server there is no extra cost involved if you exceed the limits offered by a "free" cloud service.  Avoiding the cloud also gives you far better control over availability and privacy.

This doesn't mean that I don't see a role for cloud services:  Big Iron still has a role to play where small ARM servers and residential Internet connections run out of steam.  However, such services are better structured as non-authoritative caches for sync'd-to-cloud user content (more like CDNs) than as authoritative content repositories in their own right.  Done that way, you could employ two or more such services to give you some resilience, rather than relying on the Single Point of Failure of a single company.

I guess it's still early days in the "ARM revolution".  The masses still want to congregate together in single-provider social networking sites, so it may take a while for control to return to the leaves of the Internet tree, as it was back before when the megacorps started partitioning themselves off into proprietary services and denying federation.

Perhaps PRISM and all the recent domestic spying scandal will awaken a few more people to the merits of running ARM servers and controlling your own data.  (I don't mean to exclude low-power x86 here, but so far their prices have not come down into the "Pi niche" ballpark.)

Re Carriots, it seems like a reasonable offering, especially for business --- 2 euro per device per month is petty cash for the vast majority of companies, so if that it sustainable then they could have the basis of a working business.  I wouldn't advise individuals to use the cloud though, for many reasons as well as those already stated.

Morgaine.

Thank you Morgaine for your feedback.

Our software is a B2B product designed for Business. Nevertheless we want to support a community of makers that can use our platform for free to prototype a new product. Several new businesses are sprouting around our software. By providing a free account with up to 10 devices many proof-of-concepts can be done by startup or hackers. What we hope is that those new business will later on need a corporate account if they want because their project needs more than 10 devices.

Anyway, many of the questions of why mixing a RPi with the cloud, come from the fact that RPi has many many uses than what at the beginning thought, beyond education or home enviroment. We think it is great that many companies use the Pi to prototype or to embrace the industrial internet. That will benifit the whole RPi commmunity. 

Anyway we hope you give Carriots a try and that you like!

Regards!

The Carriots Team.

Hi "Carriots Team".

That seems fairly reasonable to me, especially since you declare "You[r] data is yours and we want your data to be exportable," which of course is good.  One slight proviso --- you need to make it exportable even if you decide to disallow service for an account.  Without that, you are effectively saying "Your data is no longer yours if we choose to cancel your account", which is a bad loophole in an otherwise good ethic.  Login should still be permitted for data retrieval, just no more writing.  A time limit for data retrieval after write-termination is another possibility.

A second point is that there is nothing Pi-specific in controlling a valve through GPIO, so it's not particularly useful to limit your business audience to Pi users alone.  In addition to the BeagleBone Black in the same price niche as Pi, there are countless other boards out there allowing GPIO control, and more appearing every day.  In Element 14's "Single Board Computer" space, there are daily discussions about new ARM boards that can do this.

Nice to hear from you.