Friday Q&A: ThingWorx promises not to make SkyNet

If ThingWorx COO John Richardson has his way, your refrigerator will order groceries, your FedEx package will @reply you on Twitter and your entire house will be controlled from a single application on your smartphone.
The Downingtown-based company (for now, anyway) made a splash in mid-February when secured $5 million from Safeguard Scientifics to develop a platform for what it calls the “Internet of Things.” The company wants to enable real-life objects to communicate with one another and with users to make for a smarter world. Using ThingWorx, your refrigerator will be able to communicate with the local ShopRite when your milk is low or a manufacturer will be able to get detailed analytics about an assembly line’s efficiency from his machines.
After the jump, we ask Richardson about preventing a real-life Terminator and why the company is already plotting a move from Downingtown.


As always, edited for length and clarity.
It was hard for us to grasp what the company does from the website and press releases. Can you explain this to me like I’m a three year old?
I will, but let me tell you that we’re working on new content. Right now it’s like “Holy buzzwords Batman!” but we’ll fix that. Part of it was on purpose so we could lie low.
If you think about the Internet, it was really about searching documents. But it kind of evolved to a more social environment. The next real evolution we see coming is devices on the Internet. We wanted to take the experience that we had in manufacturing software and bring it to 2011, to allow people to communicate with devices in a secure way. What we’ve created is a platform that allows you to build applications faster that brings the social and semantic web components to devices.
When you say “applications” I assume you mean software on things like appliances…
Let me give you an example: If I’m a company and I have a bottling line, that line has smart devices on it that program the syrup that goes into the mix, the quality … We’ll be able to connect those devices and make them accessible anywhere. So the manager can be on vacation and access his equipment.
We could also use ThingWorx to control appliances in our home. Imagine that I pull up in my driveway and whip out my iPhone to turn on my lights, open the garage door and turn on my oven to 360 degrees. You can do that now, but you need specific apps. The beauty of the platform is that it will connect them all.
The Internet has a series of conventions, standards and languages but my stove doesnt have the same mechanics as my garage door opener. How will you guys navigate that?
But they will. All of this stuff we are buying will have devices that can communicate with the Internet. The one caveat is that manufactures will have specialized protocals to communicate with their devices. Hopefully there will be one protocal that all these devices use, but I’ll be old and grey by then.
The science fiction fan in us is worried you are making SkyNet, where all of our devices are on one system and then revolt against us. Am I crazy?
It’s funny that you say that, we were just talking about that. There’s maybe some components in there that are possible, but its doubtful [laughs].
You guys are based in Dowingtown, will you stay there? Are you moving to the city?
We’ll probably move to Exton. There’s a big office complex there, it’s very convenient for folks coming in all directions. We don’t need to be close to any manufacturing hub. The business is global. We have partners in Germany, Brazil and Australia. We could be in North Dakota and it wouldn’t matter. We’re all from this area and love the Philadelphia charm.