IoT Entrepreneurs: myDevices Wants Your Raspberry Pi Ideas

Internet of Things (IoT) company myDevices has announced a competition that it hopes will help build new partnerships centered on Rasbperry Pi, the inexpensive, open source-friendly hardware platform.

myDevices announced the initiative, Raspberry Pi Call for Projects, on Monday, March 14 — which, in case you are not a geek, also happens to be Pi Day.

The competition requires applicants to use Cayenne, myDevices’ IoT programming platform, to develop IoT solutions for Raspberry Pi hardware. The solutions can incorporate “any variety of sensors, actuators, and extensions,” the company says. Full application details are available online.

Winners will get a free trip to Maker Faire in May, where they’ll demonstrate their IoT solution.

The Raspberry Pi Call for Projects is not exactly a partner program, but it signals myDevices’ interest in building partnerships centered on Raspberry Pi hardware and standards-based IoT solutions. Deals like this are an inexpensive and simple way to build momentum, especially for a company interested in reaching budding entrepreneurs who have innovations to offer to the IoT world but are hard to reach through a traditional channel program.

The contest is also significant for underlining the increasing business importance of Raspberry Pi computers. So far, the line of ARM-based devices, which can be obtained for as little as five dollars, has been popular with tinkerers and open source fans, but has seen less production-level deployment. Expect that to change as companies like myDevices push business investment in the Raspberry Pi in areas like IoT, where the potential for low-cost, flexible hardware combined with easy-to-use programming frameworks like Cayenne promises to be quite extensive.