Brexit makes life harder for an Internet of Things startup At about the time when my startup will be wanting to sell to the EU at scale, Brexit may make 80 per cent of that market harder (more expensive) to reach. I run a green-tech startup, OpenTRV, selling smart radiator valves. Our natural core market is the EU (including the UK), which comprises about 500 million people and about …
Am I the only person feeling relieved?
Ordinarily I;d agree with that sentiment ...
Except that, in this case, you'll find that this isn't one of those "solution looking for a problem" devices, and yes security has been considered, and no it's not actually internet connected (unless you decide to extend it to make it so).
In this case, the OpenTRV project is to produce a smart radiator valve which is actually smart - it maintains room temperature based on occupancy and a simple "hot-cold" dial. Each valve can signal by radio (one way at the moment) to a remote relay to turn the boiler on only when there is at least one rad needing heat.
And it's all designed to be cheap - so it's within the grasp of those who would most benefit from the savings on heating bills it could bring. IIRC the target price when it goes on general sale is something like £150 for five valve heads and a boiler relay - which is considerably less than any of the commercial offerings currently available.
But switching to geek mode - it's all open. So if you want to hack it and do your own thing, you can :-)
You'll find more info over at opentrv.org.uk
THE EU project is falling apart, the EU won't exist in anything like it's current form in 10 years.
So you're saying there won't be just one period of uncertainty for a few years, but a continuous crisis going on for a decade or more - but that's nothing to worry about?
Do you juggle chainsaws for relaxation?
The world is an inherently uncertain place. To believe anything else is ridiculous naivety.
The EU is a failed experiment. By the time it inevitably implodes, exactly because of Brexit, the UK will already be in a more stable, independent position than the middle of the storm, and will even be able to take advantage of the many opportunities that the EU imploding will leave independent outsiders with.
Think of it this way:The EU is the Titanic. Its destiny is inevitable. Would you rather be on the big ship still listening to and beleiving in the ridiculous "unsinkable" claims even though the sea is slowly but clearly filling the ship up, or would you rather have already safely transferred to an admittedly smaller ship while the iceberg was still looming on the horizon?
Regardless of whether or not they are actually correct, making blanket statements like "The EU is a failed experiment" without adducing any evidence has no value whatsoever.
The previous version of the EU was Bismarck's creation of Germany based on a customs union, and adding states and statelets by, basically, saying "Do you want to join us and have free trade with Prussia or do you want your crappy little country to go down the pan?" Even Bavaria gave in eventually. Germany then went through a number of major crises including the little contretemps from 1934 to 1945 but nobody called it a "failed experiment", and the breaking up by the Soviet Union and separating of Pomerania and Prussia ended up with a reunification - after a lot of misery for the East Germans.
The US had a destructive Civil War and still has separatist movements, but nobody but a few crazies calls it a "failed experiment."
Let's have your evidence. And while you're at it remember the supposed reply of the Chinese historian asked about the long term significance of the French Revolution: "Much too early to say."
"Before criticising other peoples grammar, check your own."
Any post criticising another poster's spelling, grammar or punctuation is certain to contain a spelling, grammar or punctuation error of its own. It's like a law of physics or something.
Indeed. In this case: "peoples grammar".
the EU won't exist in anything like it's current form in 10 years
But one thing won't change: whatever reforms or improvement 10 years free of UK obstructionism brings, you still won't be allowed back in. Not in 20 years, not in 30.
PS: probably won't have the brexiteers wet dream trade deal either
You can't run a business by sticking your head in the sand and hoping your problem will go away. The EU will undoubtedly look different in 10 years, however, the reports on the death of the EU are great exaggerated. The single market and its associated custom union are highly beneficial for its members. Just wait until British exporters find out the overhead of rules of origin documentation, the EU red tape is a minor inconvenience compared to that.
"The single market and its associated custom union are highly beneficial for its members."
They are not. There is some efficiency in free movement of goods and lack of currency exchange but those benefits are not huge.
The customs union provides huge benefit to industries which are unable to complete in a global market, but, that is no benefit to members. They pay every penny that protection costs. An expensive scheme for pretending dead wood is still alive.
"The single market and its associated custom union are highly beneficial for its members."
They are not.
Interesting. When a brexiteer has a wet dream about trade deals it's guaranteed to be great. When the EU has an actual concrete 'trade deal' it's automatically a failure?
Day 1 of brexit negotiations may end very quickly when you have no actual choice when offered 4 or 0 of the 4 freedoms as the base deal.
"When the EU has an actual concrete 'trade deal' it's automatically a failure?"
Funny how you think of a customs union as a trade 'deal' when much of its aim is to discourage trade with the rest of the world.
Discouraging imports by tariffs and other measures and so enabling and encouraging inefficient local production is not a viable long term solution - it just ends up making you poorer.
"Discouraging imports by tariffs and other measures and so enabling and encouraging inefficient local production is not a viable long term solution - it just ends up making you poorer."
Scuse me? Who's getting poorer courtesy of corporate offshoring of the UK's manufacturing, call centre, and other similar sectors? Who'd be less poor than they currently are, if those jobs were still in the UK?
"Who'd be less poor than they currently are, if those jobs were still in the UK?"
Erm .. the people who would be doing those jobs rather than being on the dole maybe ?
The taxpayers who don't have to foot the bill for the aforementioned dole.
The stock holders of the companies that no longer have a problem employing experienced people in those sectors because the junior jobs are no longer farmed off to the far east.
other than that .. naah ya right.
Look at the array of logos found on the boxes of many pieces of electronic equipment. Some of them read like the Star Wars opening crawl (FCC, CE, TUV Rhineland, BS1234, Chinese and Japanese symbols), yet as they're all there they logically can't conflict.
(CE is pretty useless anyway, if the manufacturer promises that they follow the guidelines then they can stamp the CE logo onto it.)
@PyroBrit The devil is in the detail - or, in this case, the kerning. CE, or Conformité Européenne, has been a mandatory marking since the mid eighties. Some Chinese manufacturers have sneakily appropriated it, modifying the logo ever so very slightly, and claiming that it stands for China Export. Who'da’thunk it? Dodgy Chinese company ripping something off and claiming that it's original and nothing to do with whatever they were copying in the first place?
I digress. The ‘real’ CE logo, that is Conformité Européenne, has wider spacing - put two circles side by side (more or less) and the left curves form the C and the E. In the dodgy rip off, the circles would overlap because the letters C and E have been jammed up against one another.
In the one you get some assurance that checks have been made, and rules have been abided by. In the other you get a warning that the item is complete crap and made with no care whatsoever, or concern for rules that might prevent it from spontaneously combusting.
I’ll bet that some of you already knew this, others will be paying more attention to the kerning in future, and most couldn’t give a crap. Okay. The nerdgasm is now over.
Whilst the chinese aren't great respecters of intellectual property (neither was the USA until recently and only in some areas), if the mark is registered there, its entirely possible to start enforcing via passing off laws (they do exist there)
The driver is political will to do so....
OTOH I've seen plenty of substandard EU-made stuff with CE logos. It's a safety declaration, not a reliability one.
The Raspberry Pi website used to have a long writeup on this kind of thing on their website which, if I recall correctly, concluded that the "China Export" logo stuff was a bit of a myth. But I may recall incorrectly, and have been unable to confirm, as I haven't been able to find these writeups for a while.
Anybody else remember them?
Google is a US company. It manages to sell its IoT gadgets (Nest) into the UK and rest of EU. They comply with whatever standards/regulations/testing/type approval are required in that market.
"The simple answer is dull: no drastic changes are likely."
Should have been the subtitle of the story.
"equally onerous but entirely different."
Well they don't have to be onerous, they just have to be different to be an additional burden to industry and barrier to trade from both sides.
But of course, this was exactly what the Brexiteers promised. A land of hope and glory, free from all that terrible foreign EU red-tape, holding back our superior industries. Now we can be free, make up our own regulations, and pretend the rest of Europe doesn't exist and doesn't matter! We can start trading with the colonies again in inches and shillings and the British Empire will once again rule the waves! Hurrah!
Or not.
"Outside the EU, the UK will have to get a similar treatyies in place."
Remember the UK will also have to wait in line rather than use the fast track lane reserved for representatives of major markets/trading bloc's - the EU is a market of over 500m people, a Brexit UK circa 60m with no preferential access to other markets...
So the key point is there is nothing to worry about?
Yet somehow wrapped with a misleading headline and a load of scary what-ifs.
Note: I have occasionally been involved with CE and other test processes in house or carried out by a third party. None of these things are scary. An extra one on the list isn't a worry, even in the extremely unlikely event that the UK diverged from the CE process.
so it boils down to nothing much changes and we won't be able to make up our own rules in the future as we need to keep them compatible with CE (which we'll have less influence on) so we haven't "taken back our sovereignty" in any way - if anything we've given some control away.
I suspect this will turn out to be the case in many more areas while in others we've taken a machine gun to both feet.
Go Brexit!!!!
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