The Money Is In Selling Access To Unsecured Devices Not The Devices #DesignFiction

I am telling you that all you need is for each of your devices to respond to your presale validation requests and you can sell it many times over, to a variety of cybersecurity players. You can sell to the Chinese, to the Russian, a variety of rogue actors, and even to some researchers and news outlets. The money in all of this isn't in the manufacturing, and selling of IoT devices, or even the data generated from them--it is selling unsecured access to them once they are plugged into any network.

A camera, microphone, speaker, light, crockpot, or any other device--it doesn't matter. The smaller, cheaper, and more entertaining the better. You manufacture in large quantities, ship in bulk, and encourage the giving away of each device making it irresistible for users to plug it into their network. The more devices you can muster with a presale device validation ping, the more you can request from your buyers, with the market for these type of buyers growing by 200X in the next six months.

The trick is to stay in tune with each trend in wearables, home, and office gear. This week it's the workplace cubicle fan that measures the temperature, and next week its the mini lava lamp posting your mood to Twitter. The Internet connectivity should be simple, convenient, and entertaining, making plugging it into the network rewarding for the user. Once this is done, each device can ping home its availability for command and control. There are a growing number of trade magazines that cover the device trends, but usually by the time they've been covered it is yesterday's news, so you have to do your own research.

Take a look at our catalog, crunch the number in the spreadsheet template we provided you with--you will see the numbers pencil out for selling access to these unsecured devices, not selling the devices themselves.