ACT | The App Association represents app developers and tech small businesses creating new innovations in all corners of the globe. This week, we feature one of our newest European members, Wyres, to understand why technology standards are integral to growth opportunities for their business and tech innovators everywhere.
The small town of Grenoble, located at the foot of the French Alps, is a hub for France’s growing internet of things (IoT) tech ecosystem and home to our member Wyres. Led by CEO Jean-Michel Rosset and chief technology officer Brian Wyld, Wyres offers geolocation solutions to help industrial and supply chain customers around the world track their assets and logistic containers, both indoors and outdoors. Their products use strategically placed battery operated IoT devices and a hosted internet infrastructure to track Wyres mobile geolocation devices. Given the wide array of enterprises and industries they serve worldwide, Wyres depends on the ability to access standard technologies to ensure their products and services are effective and useful to every consumer.
Wyres’s geolocation solutions depend on its cloud platform to deliver a wide range of features and services to a variety of industries. Specifically, the company has developed a multi-method location solver and a set of powerful algorithms to gather location information and data from device sensors, tags, and beacons to help businesses manage their assets, protect their workforce, and monitor supply chain logistics.
The success of Wyres’s technology solutions lies in their ability to integrate standard technologies like the LoRaWAN network architecture, Bluetooth, and wi-fi capabilities into the proprietary solutions they develop. These standard technologies ensure Wyres’s products and services remain compatible and can be accessed on devices used by manufacturers, warehouse inventory workers, transportation and shipping staff, and more.
Wyres’s 10-person team can serve a diverse group of customers with unique needs because they innovate on top of standard technologies to develop the products their customers want. Without the ability to license access to standardized technologies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may simply avoid using those technologies, or worse, be forced to redesign their product or become unable to serve the broadest community of consumers.
The ability to reasonably license standard essential patents (SEPs) for standard technologies enables companies to grow and scale up their businesses. For this reason, Wyres joins the thousands of SMEs and innovators across industries in support of a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing environment that supports innovation at all levels of the value chain. The FRAND commitment patent holders make voluntarily helps give companies clear expectations when licensing a patent for a standard technology and ensures they are able to invest and innovate accordingly. This commitment provides a level of certainty regarding the value of a license, which is based on the utility of the SEP and not surrounding factors unconnected to the patent, to ensure licensing fees cannot arbitrarily fluctuate.
As Wyres looks to the future, they join the variety of businesses eager to innovate with 4G and 5G technologies to enhance their product offerings. For innovators and SMEs, it is important to uphold licensing practices that offer access to standard technologies for any willing licensee, rather than face the possibility of indiscriminate use-based licensing demands that would effectively tax the innovations done on top of a standard.
We are excited to watch innovators like Wyres thrive and grow. On behalf of our members in the United States, the European Union, and around the globe, we remain committed to advocating for a standards and SEP licensing environment that benefits innovators of all sizes and will continue to work to ensure SEP licensing occurs on a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis.
To learn more about Wyres and their innovative geolocation solutions, please click here.
To learn more about standard essential patents and fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing commitments, check out our All Things FRAND initiative at www.allthingsFRAND.com