CIO Year Ahead: BRCK to improve IOT in emerging markets with Pico

The BRCK team announced the company’s ambition to tap into Internet of Things (IoT) in emerging markets with its latest offering, the Pico BRCK, an IoT device.

This was said during the CIO Year Ahead event held at the Norfolk hotel, by the BRCK team.  “IoT is the way two devices talk to one another using the internet as a communication platform. You have things such as temperature in a house; whereby if you want to set the temperature at a certain level you just do the set up and the devices will manage it for you,” said Mr. Segeni Ng’ethe, BRCK, during a one on one interview.

Mr. Ng’ethe gave a further example of an IoT system whereby a camera in a fridge takes note of food that is about to get finished notifying  the owner about it via text so that he/she can take care of it.

“But if you look at that, all those applications make sense for the developed world, there is nothing there that addresses the day to day challenges we face (in emerging markets) and yet there are many,” he added.

With a lot of Kenya’s economy being based on Agriculture, Mr. Ng’ethe said that there are so many things one can do within the space of agriculture for IoT, things such as; livestock management, soil monitoring, crop monitoring and green house management.

BRCK saw such gaps in the emerging market and rolled out the Pico BRCK, back in November 2015. The Pico BRCK is an IoT device; a small box shaped device with an in-built modem used to communicate with servers on the cloud.

“The Pico BRCK has a GPS tracker so that you know the exact location you have placed it, the device also has data storage onboard so any data collected can be stored both on the cloud and on the specific device. It’s a device that can do many functions but the most important function is collecting information and sending it somewhere,” Mr. Ng’ethe added.

BRCK’s team displayed a case study of the Pico BRCK, during the recently concluded CIO Year Ahead event, where it is being used at a water plant to monitor the distribution of water from the plant to the end users ensuring that water lose is monitored and subsequently corrected.

“This is just a case study for the device as it can be used to monitor other things, depending on the user’s needs,” Mr. Ng’ethe concluded.