The blockchain-based data sharing platform Streamr announced new partnerships with Nokia and OSIsoft on Wednesday morning at Consensus 2018, further building the connection between blockchain and internet-of-things enabled technologies.
These partnerships will be built on top of Streamr’s real-time data marketplace, also launched Wednesday, for connecting producers and consumers via a common interface. The web-based application will allow providers to list their real-time data streams and consumers to subscribe and purchase for those streams with the pricing and fee schedule terms all codified in Ethereum-based smart contracts.
“The launch of our Marketplace represents a pivotal moment for our platform and underlines our commitment to driving the future of data utilization and monetization,” said Henri Pikhala, CEO of Streamr, contending that such a marketplace is critical to the realization of grand visions for "smart cities" and interconnected economies.
“To realize our vision of a sustainable, equitable, and efficient data economy, we needed to create a space in which buyers and sellers could come together freely, and today we have achieved just that,” he continued, adding that:
"If people want to own their data, legislation won’t do that for us"
Nokia will integrate its Kuha transportable base stations into Streamr’s data marketplace to connect rural populations with mobile data networks, while allowing those users to monetize their data and integrate with IoT sensors and devices.
“Providing smart mobile coverage for up to four billion individuals across the world is a major challenge and current solutions don’t go far enough,” said Martti Ylikoski, Radio System Evolution Lead at Nokia.
He continued:
“Our approach is bringing connectivity to unconnected parts of the world. We recognize a growing movement of empowered mobile customers who want to control and monetize their own data. Our partnership with Streamr reflects our firm belief in the platform, as well as our commitment to better serve our customers.”
OSIsoft is a leading provider of operational intelligence in the oil and gas industry and provides an enterprise platform that allows more than 1,000 utilities and infrastructure companies to collect, manage, analyze and visualize data.
“By integrating OSIsoft’s PI System with the Streamr Marketplace, we take a step toward offering our customers the ability to share and monetize their operations data,” said Richard Beeson, CTO of OSIsoft, adding that the value proposition for his firm lies in plugging OSIsoft's enterprise platform seamlessly into an open source platform while allowing for continuous value generation on multiple fronts.
He explained:
"These customers using our PI system are managing over 1.5 billion streams of data. These are data hungry companies. The low hanging fruit here is really for them to be able to obtain data from sources that might be outside of their realm [and] also to participate in making that data available in various scenarios."
The announcements come on the heels of a data monetization deal inked with Hewlett Packard last week in which the Streamr platform will be deployed for data collection in automobiles.
