The news also showcases how the evolution of the internet of things is moving beyond deep tech and connected gadgets into everyday life.

Connecting parents and stomachs

The two startups deal with issues near and dear to my own heart: parenting and food. Pantry, a startup that was created 16 months ago, provides a refrigerated kiosk to offices that uses RFID to track the meals stored in the kiosk. Yes, the internet of things is creating a resurgence of interest in RFID. Art Tkachenko, the founder of Pantry, is trying to use its kiosks as a source of new revenue for food companies and a way to deliver healthy food to office workers.

The kiosks work by having workers swipe their credit card to unlock the door. Then they choose between a few dozen meals, snacks and drinks available. As the worker removes the item, the RFID reader tracks the item removed and bills the customer’s card. Pantry also offers a dashboard for the food company tracking expiration dates, empty slots and analytics for future demand. The dashboard can help plan the best route for delivering replacement food to the kiosks around town, essentially using a connected device to create a service that expands the market for food wholesalers.

On the parenting side, Sproutling offers a sensor system for babies that wraps around an infant’s ankle and monitors its vital signs. The resulting data is sent to a parent’s smartphone and is aimed at augmenting (or even replacing) the baby monitor. As Sproutling co-founder and CEO Chris Bruce pointed out, a baby monitor isn’t an ideal experience when most parents just want to know that their baby is safe. Instead of actively watching a video monitor or listening to every cry, the Sproutling device would notify parents when something is wrong.

Both startups have received an undisclosed amount of funding from Lemnos as well as space in the facility. As hardware heats up a lot of entrepreneurs are pulling together cool projects with Arduino boards and cheap radios. But moving beyond the duct tape stage into something that could be both manufactured at scale and make money is a big leap. That’s one reason both founders are excited about Lemnos.

It’s also the reason that Klein, a former Nokia and Apple product executive, has decided to join as a partner as opposed to building his own hardware startup.

“Where do you learn that art of manufacturing and product design?” he asked. “I was blessed to work at Apple in the early 90s and built hardware teams. It’s a profession that you learn on the job and there aren’t as many people who learned at the big schools of Palm, Apple and Sun. But now it is so easy to get into hardware but there aren’t quite as many people who have been building [manufacturable] hardware for 15 years to help.”

Klein decided he wanted to help. Not just his own startup, but the 11 at Lemnos and the hardware community in general. Eventually he’d like to write a book that helps expand the knowledge farther afield, but Lemnos Labs is a good first step.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• 11 steps for scaling a startup

It’s a topic that came up recently during a conversation with SparkFun, the retailer of DIY electronics kits headquartered in Boulder, Colo. While sitting at a table with Nathan Seidle, the CEO of SparkFun and Pete Dokter, the director of engineering, we discussed the impact of Kickstarter on the firm’s business. In general, Kickstarter is great marketing for the DIY movement that SparkFun is dependent on, and it is happy to supply boards for prototypes.

However, once you start talking about huge production runs of an electronic board for the next big widget, or even worse, fulfilling those orders, Seidle is leery.

He pointed to the MaKey MaKey campaign of 2011 as an example. The MaKey MaKey team, which was building a kit for would-be hardware hackers, worked with SparkFun ahead of the campaign to guarantee the production of the needed boards and for fulfillment. If the MaKey MaKey campaign was successful, SparkFun would manufacture and assemble the product and then ship it out.

What happened next was a nightmare for SparkFun, which to this day is still seeing at least two returns a week from the product. The problem wasn’t a bad product, but bad data. As Seidle puts it, Kickstarter doesn’t have checks in place to ensure people don’t enter the wrong address or make other mistakes when ordering a product.

The result was that about 40 percent of the data Kickstarter sent over on behalf of Makey MaKey needed clarification. That led to SparkFun’s customer service people trying to verify addresses — one example: is there a Houston, South Africa? — and it is still leading to returns. Seidle vowed to avoid that side of the business from this point forward.

Luckily a quick check among the people doing current and former Kickstarter projects shows that there are plenty of companies that will offer fulfillment for Kickstarter orders, and most entrepreneurs plan to use them. But it’s yet another sign of the holes we need to fill if we’re going to make the transition from the more traditional large-scale manufacturing process or the traditional funding models for a crowd sourced future.

It’s also a good idea to double and triple check your address when you enter it into Kickstarter.

Update: Kickstarter’s Dave Ghallagher notes that Kickstarter fixed the bad data problem by implementing an address validation system back in 2012, too late for the MaKey MaKey project, but in place for existing projects.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

DataDirect built hScaler to meet the speed and performance needs of those customers while offering ease of use for enterprise customers keen on Hadoop. Speed aside, hScaler stands out because it does away with direct-attached storage and incorporates RAID architecture instead. It lets users scale computing and storage resources independent of one another, precluding the chore of swapping out a server when a disk fails, as my colleague Derrick Harris has written.

The hScaler appliance, which runs with the Hortonworks Data Platform, can move fast with InfiniBand storage capable of operating at 40 gigabytes per second. In a sample configuration, 504 terabytes of storage are possible in a rack. The rack is four times as dense as a conventional data center rack, requiring less spending for cooling and square footage.

Because they aim to speed up and simplify Hadoop deployments, appliances such as hScaler are catching on, and DataDirect Chief Technology Officer Jean-Luc Chatelain expects the trend to continue. Greenplum, Oracle, Teradata and other companies sell appliances capable of running Hadoop jobs. For the sake of taking advantage of easy and quick data analytics processing, Chatelain sees the Hadoop hardware trend only getting bigger.

Appliances could be useful for enterprises looking to run Hadoop jobs, as employees can save time and focus more on building applications. Big data veterans will talk about innovative uses of Hadoop and other big data technologies at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference on March 20-21 in New York.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• A near-term outlook for big data
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

The company’s new PureData System for Analytics features Netezza technology, which enables analytics inside databases. The New York Stock Exchange is already using the system to spot trading peculiarities that might warrant investigations, said Phil Francisco, vice president of big data product management at IBM.

“They keep track of every element of trading activity on their trading floors daily,” Francisco told me. “… And they’re able to do analysis on seven years of data.” The system also monitors systems-level data and shows if there’s enough capacity to handle major changes in trading volumes.

To capitalize on growth markets and do business with companies with lower IT infrastructure budgets, IBM is also releasing a miniature version of the PureApplication system for quickly deploying applications.

Also new is a PureFlex converged system — with compute, networking and storage all in one — targeting managed service providers. The system precludes setup and system administration, which can cut costs. It also simplifies the process of adding capacity on infrastucture in the data center, Francisco said.

IBM arrived to the converged-hardware party well after Oracle  unveiled its Exadata Database Machine, a database appliance and several specialized boxes, including the Big Data Appliance. (Updated: IBM disputes this, claiming it was working on data warehouse appliances back in 2003.) EMC is also in this market with the Greenplum Data Computing Appliance.

In October, following the introduction of the PureData line, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham questioned whether big data needs a specialized box. The real development, she wrote, was not the technological achievement but the acknowledgment that providing easy-to-use services is important.

This story was updated Tuesday after IBM objected to a suggestion that Oracle had beaten it to market with converged hardware, citing work in 2004 on data-warehouse appliances.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Health care and big data in 2012
• How data warehousing is now a cost-effective solution for businesses
• How to manage big data without breaking the bank

The rise of open source, cloud computing and the newly created distribution channels has also dramatically changed how solutions and businesses are created – known as “lean methodology” – and has been embodied by The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In a similar manner, the costs associated with startups that include a hardware component are also going through a rapid decline.

And at the same time as these cost reductions, Kickstarter has created a marketplace for the crowd funding of hardware projects. More importantly, it has created a framework for startups to essentially run “smoke tests” — as advocated by Ries — to ascertain whether there is demand for a product or service, as well as the price points that the market might accept.

So why does hardware or Internet of Things need an accelerator?

While many of the conditions are highly conducive to support the rise of Maker communities, it’s still a relatively immature ecosystem. Much of the activity and noise is focused on just hacking around rather than having a commercial focus. It’s a good thing and encourages innovation, but tapping into this high energy Maker culture with a guiding hand from experienced mentors has the potential of spawning new ideas – the black swans for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

More interestingly, this emerging market is also attracting some extremely smart entrepreneurs who avoid the trends and fashions of others and like to play on the edges. The technical complexities associated with hardware – the things that make it hard – immediately limits participation to only the brightest engineers.

But it’s not all a bed of roses. It has been previously highlighted that technology projects have one of the lowest success rates among all Kickstarter categories, with only 29% percent being successful. Only fashion projects do worse. In addition, not every project goes well. Delays occur, especially with more complex projects. Some teams over stretch themselves and fail to deal with many aspects of the delivery that are new to them. Even Kickstarter has been forced to admit that “it’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected.”

And this is where accelerators can help to nurture and support the best and the brightest in this emerging Maker community. As entrepreneurs with domain experience and expertise, mentors can provide first hand knowledge in managing the complexities associated with designing, prototyping, building and the manufacturing of physical devices — which reduces the operational and investment risks of projects.

There are other ways that an accelerator can help, too.

Being a hardware entrepreneur is also a very lonely existence, unlike our more popular and mainstream web service cousins. The peer to peer learning and cohort effect of getting the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the same sector working alongside each other cannot be underestimated, both during the program and in the future.

Finally, there are real practical differences between hardware and software which make being part of a dedicated accelerator even more valuable.

Hardware development has specific resource requirements that include access to a workshop space that with, say, 2D laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers and so on as well as support from industrial designers and engineers. Any of these individual resources might be prohibitively expensive or difficult to source, but within the framework of an accelerator their shared cost and accessibility can be invaluable.

Hardware is hard. But that’s what makes it fun and highly investable – given the right resources, environment and support structures. Why shouldn’t the Internet of Things have a dedicated acceleration program?

Jon Bradford is the CEO and co-founder of Springboard, which launched its SpringboardIoT accelerator this week. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a new Internet of Things startup.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

But in an interview with The Seattle Times, CEO Steve Ballmer hinted that, with its new tablet, Microsoft is aiming to compete on features more than price. Ballmer said the “sweet spot” would be between “$300 to about $700 or $800.”

“I think most people would tell you that the iPad is not a superexpensive device. … (When) people offer cheaper, they do less. They look less good, they’re chintzier, they’re cheaper.

If you say to somebody, would you use one of the 7-inch tablets, would somebody ever use a Kindle (Kindle Fire, $199) to do their homework? The answer is no; you never would. It’s just not a good enough product. It doesn’t mean you might not read a book on it….”

The Verge points out that the company could still offer a lower price with a subscription to Microsoft’s Xbox Music service, but Ballmer’s comments seem to indicate that the vendor is planning to present Surface as a higher-end, highly functional device.

In the interview, Ballmer also said that while Microsoft was born as a software company, over the next five to ten years, the company will retain its core capability in software but evolve into more of a “devices-and-services company.”

“[That] is a little different,” he said. “Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it’s a different form of delivery…. Doesn’t mean we have to make every device. I don’t want you to leap to that conclusion. We’ll have partners who make devices with our software in it and our services built in.”

Ballmer also defended the company’s so-called “stack-ranking” management system, which was called out as destructive and demoralizing in a damning Vanity Fair article in August on “Microsoft’s Lost Decade.” (In the system, supervisors are forced to place employees into tiers based on performance.)

While Vanity Fair said former Microsoft employees maintain that the system led to a counter-productive corporate culture, Ballmer said it rewards top talent and nudges lower performers to get with the program.

“I think you always want to have a system that has a chance to recognize people who are doing a great job, a good job, and helping people who are still doing maybe even a decent job, but they’re not doing as good a job as the other folks,” he said. “It helps to let those people recognize where they stand.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

As much as anything, it’s a stark reminder that disruption doesn’t give a crap about legacies. This is something that I have seen again and again in my twenty years as an entrepreneur in network infrastructure, Web-based services and mobile applications.

Once upon a time, Dell was the personification of the American dream. Born in Michael Dell’s college dorm room, Dell’s founding had the homegrown optimism of a Norman Rockwell painting. Dell was the embodiment of scalable build logistics, coupled with standout customer service. It was the Amazon of personal computing — before Amazon existed.

As for HP, you remember “the HP way” and the original “two founders in a garage” narrative, right? The company was a true force driven by clear directives such as, “attack the undefended hill” and “number one or two in each targeted market.”

However, there is a paradoxical truth. Although disruptive change takes far longer to occur than most people account for, once it kicks in, it steamrolls incumbents faster than they can course-correct.

The paradox of the disrupted

At its core, the Dell and HP story is about the shift to integrated, differentiated systems lead by software (see also, Mark Andreessen’s “Why Software is Eating the World”). Like most hardware-centric companies, neither HP nor Dell ever grokked software, certainly not in terms of any integrated strategy (JetSend, Chai and WebOS were all failed software efforts by HP). This gets to the nut of why these guys missed the boat on mobile and tablets. HP, after all, actually owned Palm, yet lacked both the clarity and conviction to intelligently pursue the software play required to succeed in mobile — only the single largest segment of the next 20 years!

Then again, they didn’t think they had to. After all, the horizontal model that made Microsoft a lethal killer in segment after segment had dominated the conventional wisdom of the preceding 20 years. Built on the premise of industry alignment around loosely-coupled, but coordinated efforts between hardware and software component makers, the horizontal ethos dictated that hardware folks worry about hardware and leave the software differentiation to the software guys — separation of church and state, so to speak.

We’re all lemmings in terms of following what works. So when the horizontal model made Bill Gates the richest man in the world, industry after industry embraced it as the one right way.

With the advent of the Internet, however, a vicious cycle of commoditization — horizontal’s downside — began to play out. We are now at the endgame of that cycle, a point where few companies can make money via commodity economics, and HP and Dell are Exhibit A and B, respectively.

I believe that the next 20 years will look a lot less like the Microsoft model and more like the Apple differentiation model, where every effort is focused on the central goal of delivering complete product solutions and richer, more satisfying customer outcomes. In other words, we’ll move to an economy where businesses and industries are defined by tight integration from bricks and clicks to hardware, software and service — aka, the vertical model.

Does either HP or Dell have what it takes to make this transition? No one really knows. But what gets me excited is that some companies will figure this one out. Their success will, in turn, provide the roadmap to re-invention for the next generation of innovators to follow. We are lemmings after all.

So get ready, as we are at the end of a cycle, and approaching the beginning of a new one. It’s post-global, post-digital and post-commoditization. The new cycle is all about making the inefficient more efficient, and creating differentiation where commodization exists. The rise of integrated systems is upon us.

Mark Sigal is an eight-time entrepreneur, whose ventures have sold to Apple, IBM and Intel. He is chief product officer at Unicorn Labs, an eBooks and eLearning platform provider.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Quest, of Aliso Viejo, Calif., makes software that helps tie together all the complicated pieces of software that large enterprises run, and it will also give Dell an experience roster of software sales people to help the Round Rock, Texas-based computer company make its transition to software and services. While Quest’s middleware offering may not be as sexy as a big data service or cloud computing software, Dell has actually been working in those areas over the past few years via acquisitions of companies such as Boomi, Wyse, Force10 and Compellent, and partnerships with companies such as Aster Data Systems and Cloudera.

However, Dell had to pay up for Quest, which had entered into an agreement with Insight Partners back in March to sell the company for $23 per share (roughly $2 billion). Dell and Insight then got into a bidding war, with Insight’s latest coming in at $25.75 in mid June. But Dell apparently trumped that with its $28 per share bid, and is walking away with the prize.

With this buy Dell will be able to help tie together the legacy back-end software and databases that enterprises are running and nets 1,500 software sales staff and 1,300 software developers to beef up Dell’s $1.2 billion software business. Quest generated $857 million in global revenue based on its fiscal year 2011 results, and will be one of Dell’s larger purchases.

The transaction is expected to close in Dell’s third fiscal quarter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

There’s been an awful lot written about Steve Jobs in the wake of the Apple co-founder’s death, and that has only increased in the wake of the new biography from Walter Isaacson, which a number of media outlets have been running excerpts from. In addition to Jobs’ opinion about topics like Google, the book also includes some comments from famous tech-industry players about Jobs, and one of them is from Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates — a man who was Apple’s nemesis in many ways. Gates says he liked Jobs, but that the Apple CEO “never really understood much about technology.” The Microsoft billionaire no doubt saw that as a put-down, but looked at another way, it was one of Jobs’ biggest strengths.

Although the two men apparently gained a grudging respect for each other, they couldn’t really be any more different, both as people and as CEOs and founders of technology companies. Jobs, who famously spent time in India and was a practising Buddhist, apparently told Isaacson that Gates would have been a more interesting person “if he had dropped acid or gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” while Gates told the author that Jobs was “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly flawed as a human being.” The Microsoft founder also admitted that Jobs had an “amazing instinct for what works” — while Jobs said that Gates was “basically unimaginative and has never invented anything [but] just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

The part about ripping off other people’s ideas could also be applied to Apple, of course, at least in its early days, since much of the graphical user interface that made the company’s computers so recognizable and gained Apple designer Jef Raskin so much fame — the mouse, the desktop metaphor, the icons, file folders and pull-down menus — were based on ideas originally developed by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center division.

Technology is the least important thing about Apple products

But while Gates saying that Jobs “never really understood much about technology” was probably intended as a criticism, the truth is that in most cases the technology is the least important thing about Apple’s products, and probably wouldn’t appear anywhere on the list of the main reasons why devices like the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad are so appealing. Someone like Gates, who spent his youth programming and was involved in much of the code behind things like Windows, would like to believe that superior technology wins — but for most users of both software and hardware, design is what wins.

Jobs was a famous admirer of Dieter Rams, a designer for Braun who had a number of mottos and aphorisms about design — one of which was that “good design will make a product understandable.” That applies to a lot of Apple’s most famous products, which were so painstakingly designed to be usable, even when (like the original iPod shuffle) they didn’t even have a screen to tell you what was going on inside them. A video of a one-year-old child using an iPad and then trying to use the same gestures on a magazine (embedded below) went viral recently, and Daniel Donahoo at Wired pointed out that in addition to the message that much traditional media is “broken” from a usability point of view, it also reinforced just how instinctive much of Apple’s design and usability is.

When people talk about Apple’s design principles and philosophy, they often mention the unrelenting focus on simplicity (based in part on Rams’ motto: “Less, but better”). Jobs said that among the most important decisions in product design were what not to include and that this process involved “saying no to 1,000 things.” That’s a very difficult principle to adhere to at the best of times — but it’s especially hard if you are a technology geek and obsessed with all the ways in which your product is going to beat your competitors because of the cool features it has. That’s what causes the classic “feature creep” phenomenon, which often occurs when professional engineers get hold of a device.

It’s not about the features — it’s about usability

In a nutshell, that’s what accounts for much of the difference between Microsoft and Apple, or between Apple and just about everyone else — not the technology but the usability. Think about the early days of the MP3 player, before the iPod came out: I had an early device made by Archos that was a brilliant piece of technology, a laptop hard drive with a shell that turned it into a music player, and it held a then-staggering 6 gigabytes of music. It was also an ugly piece of crap in a lot of ways — it was huge and bulky and unfriendly to use, but I used it anyway. Until I saw an iPod.

Lots of people focus on how Apple’s design was similar to high-end furniture or other non-technological products, with its white or black exterior and clean lines, but the real killer appeal of the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad was how easy they are to use, and how integral that ease of use and design is to the product itself. Microsoft made plenty of MP3 players and tablets and the Zune and so on, many of which were fine from a technology point of view. But did anyone want to rush out and buy them? No. That’s not to say Apple hasn’t produced some great technology, from FireWire to the oleophobic coating on the iPhone screen — but the technology isn’t the most important part of those devices.

I’m sure when Bill Gates looks at the iPad or the iPhone, he thinks about all the features it doesn’t have, or all the things that it can’t do. But no one else thinks about those things — all they are interested in is what they can do, and how much fun it is doing them, and how appealing those devices are. And that is one of Steve Jobs’ biggest gifts to the world of technology and design.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications