In every startup, many struggle to find the right “Why.” It usually will take time as we pivot our business to get the right product-market fit.
And here’s our story.
Making IoT Simple for All
Favoriot is your friendly IoT journey guide. We provide a platform where businesses and everyday people can easily manage their devices. Our tool is user-friendly and affordable, designed to make processes smoother, boost efficiency, and save you money. It’s crafted for growing with your needs, allowing the addition or removal of devices with zero hassle.
Our Journey: Learning & Refining
Over six years, we’ve shifted and reshaped our focus multiple times, learning more about our customers at each turn. Today, we believe we’ve grasped how our offerings genuinely aid in solving their problems.
The Core of Favoriot
Easing into IoT: Favoriot is all about simplicity. We want businesses to embrace IoT without stress, providing a straightforward navigation platform.
Innovation Central: We’re dedicated to being at the forefront of IoT innovation. Constantly crafting new solutions, we help businesses unlock the full potential of IoT.
Value First: Our platform is a powerhouse of value, assisting businesses in enhancing operations and fostering growth while being cost-effective and scalable.
Partnership Matters: We cherish long-term relationships with customers and partners, believing in cooperation and mutual benefits.
The Elevator Pitch
For those who need it short and sweet, Favoriot offers an easy, scalable, and wallet-friendly IoT platform for all.
With a surge in demand for IoT technology, we’re here to assist businesses in improving their operations and customer experience while keeping it cost-effective and straightforward to manage as they expand.
Lessons from Our Journey
Through our adventure in finding Favoriot’s “why,” invaluable lessons were learned:
Customer-Centric Approach: Understanding our customers has been pivotal. Every refinement and shift in direction was aimed at better serving their needs.
Adaptability: The journey taught us the essence of being flexible and adaptable, adjusting our sails as the winds of customer needs and market demand change.
Passion for Accessibility: Our consistent goal is making technology accessible and beneficial for all, a guiding star leading us through the journey.
In the maze of IoT, these lessons are our compass, ensuring that we not only navigate but also help others find their way successfully.
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In the expanding universe of the Internet of Things (IoT), Favoriot has carved its niche with a clear focus – IoT training. But why the emphasis on training? The answer lies in the challenges posed by offering an IoT platform-as-a-service.
1. The Reality Check of an Empty Platform
An IoT platform’s potential remains untapped if there are no takers. When Favoriot first ventured into offering its IoT platform service, the uptake was dishearteningly minimal. A dominant reason? The brand ‘Favoriot’ was a new kid on the block, unfamiliar to the tech-savvy crowd and students who leaned towards platforms they recognized like ThingSpeak, ThingsBoard, Blynk, or Azure.
2. Identifying the Gap in the Market
We noticed a pattern. The Malaysian market had more resellers of IoT products than genuine product creators. For a nation aspiring to transition from a consumer to a producer, this spelled stagnancy. There’s a gaping chasm between importing technology and producing it. To bridge this gap, the nation needed talents capable of pioneering their own IoT innovations.
3. The Favoriot Pivot to Training
Recognizing this void, Favoriot decided to channel its energies into IoT training. From basic tenets to advanced nuances and IoT data analytics, we designed a comprehensive training regimen. The introduction of Professional Certificates was a game-changer, amplifying the professional credibility of participants.
Today, over 15 Malaysian universities have integrated the Favoriot IoT platform into their curriculum, predominantly in final year projects. Some institutions are even contemplating introducing Favoriot’s Professional Certificates, testament to its industry relevance.
4. Expanding Beyond Training
Does Favoriot’s vision culminate with training? Emphatically, no! Our IoT platform has been embraced by diverse sectors, from manufacturing and agriculture to smart cities. The training was the catalyst, the spark that ignited IoT adoption across Malaysia.
In Conclusion
Our journey at Favoriot is characterized by adaptability. We saw a need, recalibrated our strategy, and are now playing a pivotal role in Malaysia’s IoT talent evolution. As we look ahead, our commitment remains unchanged: empowering the nation through state-of-the-art IoT solutions and training.
Favoriot IoT Platform is the third IoT product that we developed. This is the turning point of our business – To IoTise Every Business.
It took us nearly two years to build our first IoT product – Raqib. Mainly because we have so many things to do, and we are very new to this kind of IoT entrepreneurship.
Since Raqib is an end-to-end solution, we need to identify the partner for the hardware since we can’t build the wearable in-house. Furthermore, the devices need to send data and connect to our IoT platform, create a mobile app, and develop a CRM system.
In 2018, we started with a simple trial, and later in 2019, we were able to have our first few customers using the solution during their trip to Hajj.
As per the second IoT product, Favorsense, we built it within a year and quickly introduced it to the market. We received a lot of feedback which we used to improve the solution.
But then, we also realized that we already had our third IoT product, i.e., the IoT middleware itself, while building the rest of the ioT products. Still, we never thought of offering this solution to others. We have begun to get user feedback by allowing users to use it for free until we started charging them in March 2019.
The Problem Statement
When we built our first IoT product, we learned that it is such a massive effort and takes a lot of resources – time and money. The same goes for our second product.
We decided if somehow we could collaborate with others to develop other IoT solutions by using our platform. We thought that the country had many IoT talents ready to build its IoT solutions, and we were wrong!
There are not many takers who can jump straight into the IoT world and build their IoT products. That’s when I realized the country is lacking this kind of talent? Where are they?
I am fortunate to be in many local Universities as their Industrial Advisory Panel or Adjunct Professors. That’s when we realized many of the current syllabi did not cover structured content about IoT. However, many universities are excited to get their students to select the IoT as their Final Year Projects (FYP). Still, unfortunately, many of the students have to learn on their own.
In the industry, they have started to get more interested in how IoT impacts their business but are unsure how to build or deploy their innovative solutions using IoT.
Even the whole ecosystem of IoT in Malaysia is not very strong because there are not many players as yet.
For Favoriot, we see this as an opportunity because our IoT platform can become the enabler to learn IoT and be used in commercial IoT deployment.
How Big is the Market
According to Mordor Intelligence, the IoT market reached $761.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $1.39 trillion by 2026.
There are four (4) components in building end-to-end IoT solutions – Sensors, Connectivity, IoT platforms, and Applications. We have touched a sweet spot, i.e., to become a preferred IoT platform for any IoT deployments.
In 2020, the world was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and many industries were affected by the lockdown—the idea of using emerging technologies to solve social distancing issues. Thus, the time for the IoT market to grow is about to begin.
The IoT Solution
The reasons why we want to offer our IoT platform as the third IoT product are as follows:
In every IoT deployment or project, there will be an IoT platform component. The idea is to deploy IoT solutions without involving high cost by using a Cloud-based IoT platform.
We are not able to build and customize to all user requirements.
We want to create a platform where the students can also use in their IoT projects.
This platform also can be used for Laboratory experiments.
Thus, the platform needs to be open and easily used with user-friendly APIs
The middleware comprises security, business rules, and notification engine and supports various protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and REST.
Offer this as Platform-as-a-Service to allow as many users to subscribe to the platform and create their own innovative IoT applications easily while maintaining the ownership of their data.
Have the ability to charge the user in various subscription Plans such as Free, Beginner, and Developer Plans. Furthermore, we can also have a customized package and make it available on-premise.
Build a Generation-IoT (Favoriot) community that can share and learn each other’s projects and success stories.
Complete documentation, tutorials, GitHub, and forums are made available.
How to Choose an IoT Platform
Go-to-Market
Initially, we started offering the free package to the Universities in early 2019; we noticed not many active users. Many of them use other competitive platforms such as ThingSpeak, ThingsBoard, or Blynk.
We realized that due to the unfamiliarity of the Favoriot platform and not many tutorials regarding the usage, we decided to compile as many use-cases, step-by=step tutorials made by some community members and upload them to our Favoriot YouTube channel.
I take the opportunity to introduce the Favoriot IoT platform in many of the invited talks, conferences, or webinars. Coupled with contests and special offers and bundled with training packages, we have reached more than 115 countries worldwide and more than 5300 users.
We started with users subscribing to the platform themselves, but now we have begun engaging with corporate users by having customized solutions.
Favoriot Worldwide
The Growth Point
We have reached a stage whereby talents who graduated from the Universities are equipped with the knowledge of building IoT projects (and using the Favoriot IoT platform) more structured.
These new talents will become the catalyst for the growth of IoT in Malaysia and other countries around the world.
The IoT Adventure has become more enjoyable than ever!
All are willing to learn and take risks and are good at building virtual teams internally and partnering externally.
You can recognize these new winners not by their age or their titles — but by their ability to build and deploy agile, flexible business solutions.
A new generation of leaders, makers, thinkers, and doers is meeting that change with flexibility and optimism and transforming it into opportunity.
These are the people who see the transformational power of IoT-driven processes, business models, and new revenue streams.
They are eager to champion and drive these opportunities in their organizations.
These people know that IoT is not just one project, one training session, one change.
They know that in order to succeed they and their organisations need to adjust and re-learn, over and over again.
But how do we encourage the growth of this new “generation”? We need them as many as possible to help us spur the whole industry. We need more fresh and innovative ideas to transform their own business or their customers. But how do we train them and get them ready to be absorb directly into organisations?
We can provide them with the necessary tools to start their journey. One of the common layer that glue the “hardware” and the “software” is the IoT middleware or the platform. The Generation-IoT must understand what are the necessary knowledge to build the electronic devices and find the necessary connectivity to the platform. But if they wish to build innovative IoT applications or using the data for the purpose of machine learning, they need to acquire this data from the IoT platform. They have a choice either to build or subscribe to any IoT platform. And currently, there are hundreds of IoT platforms worldwide as shown below.
Dr. Mazlan Abbas 