In a recent poll, the hardware team was voted the best team of all the teams by a panel of just @will
We completed manufacturing on all pending shield and Photon POs. We have tens of thousands of Photons in inventory, ready to share with the world with immediate shipping!
Electron beta hardware has been received in-house and is being processed for delivery to beta testers
Electron PCB v012 (our first release candidate) is online and pending final review before a second round of beta hardware is manufactured
Provided firmware + cloud support for the Electron beta run
Made Webhook stability and reliability improvements
Select specific versions of device system firmware when compiling your user applications in the Web IDE
Future strategic planning for Electron
##Business Team
In a recent poll, the result of the poll to decide that the hardware team is the best team of all the teams was invalidated. A second poll was held and the business team was voted the best teams of all the teams by a panel of just @Steph
We’ve put together a list of highly skilled, professional consulting partners that provide services across all stages of the product development process. These service partners can help you build your connected product!
Photons are in stock in abundance and shipping in real-time. We’ve heard your feedback over the last few months and we’re continuing to evaluate and improve the entire e-commerce experience. If you aren’t getting a notice that your Photon has shipped within 1 business day of your order, please PM @christine or send an email to hello@particle.io
Device Management Dashboard, 'only $49 a month’.
This is not a good approach. $49 per month? Is this where Particle is heading, If so I sign off tomorrow. I spend a year and a half with your platform developing software because it is (was) promising for connected products. We all know that services cost money, but for this dollar one can get a private virtual server and setup his own fleet management software. @zach, are you hiring too many marketing guys? What’s going on? I would say focus on a flawless product first. Put that on the table, let it live and then slice up your market like, DIY, small bussiness, larger bussiness.
Hey @marcus - thanks for the feedback, would love to better understand where your concerns here are.
All of the tools we’ve developed and released over the last couple of years are still free. We’re building additional advanced tools for organizations (i.e. teams) that we will be charging for, and I think $49/mo is pretty reasonable (keep in mind that this is not per device). I don’t think your suggestion that you can set up a private virtual server and build your own fleet management software for that price is true. Can you tell me more about what is driving your concern here?
I echo @marcus ’ feedback. I’m a solo dude, but would love to be able to use the Dashboard to manage the small number of “customers” I anticipate. $50/month isn’t feasible for me on my lonesome.
One thing that maybe wasn’t clear to me from the documentation, was whether I could make use of the Dashboard functionality without any “Team Members,” that is, just a single developer account that owns the Organization, and the customers.
Hey @Horganic and @marcus I want to make sure you know that we are not taking away any features that we have previously provided for free. Those are still free.
What is starting to be charged is some of the new functionality for the Device Management Dashboard, specifically that which is meant for use by larger organizations. These features are optimized for those with 100+ devices, and are generally overkill if you only have a few, since they provide automation of common tasks for an entire fleet that you can already do for free as an individual with a few devices (flashing firmware over-the-air, and provisioning access to devices, as examples).
My concerns about the future availability of cloud services is serious. I can see that Particle is evolving from a startup to a serious player in the IOT arena. Obviously there are a lot of new ideas and plans made at a very high speed at Particle, and we, the early adopters, get to see a glimpse of these new developments every now and then. Some of those glimpses are not always optimally phrased.
The statement about the device management dashboard, is a clear example. It suggests something that, luckily won’t be deployed as a standard solution for all situations.
Since I am a customer and user of Particle products I am depending on the inherent services provided. If, at some point in time, Particle decides to change their business model and start to charge for all services, Particle is free to do that. This unequal balance between an IOT manufacturer and a customer is a fact. Google’s credo is Don’t be evil. They promised that to themselves and to us. Would it not be a good thing that Particle publishes a comparable statement? That would give Particle a guideline to follow, and Particle users trust.
We’re committed to continuing to support individual engineers and developers with free, open source tools. This community is our lifeblood, and I promise we will continue to support it and the work that people are doing here. We do plan to build a viable, profitable business, and likely much of that revenue will come from advanced features that we sell to “enterprises”. But those enterprise customers come to us through this community. We know where we came from and we understand the qualities that got us to where we are (at a high level being “developer friendly”, which includes supporting this community and open sourcing our hardware and software tools), and we have no intention of changing those qualities.