What happy chimps and sixteenth century art have in common
Pentworth House in West Sussex, UK is a National Trust property that houses a significant collection of artworks, including the 1592 Molyneux Globe. However, this collection was at risk of being destroyed after several valuable pieces were growing mold in storage. In an attempt to save the collection, the National Trust approached Blue Maestro for help to salvage the art. Their solution is a device placed inside the art frames to help the Trust monitor the environmental condition of the storage. Blue Maestro’s innovative technology enabled museum curators to quickly deal with any signs of damaging temperature and humidity to prevent the onset of mold through sensors that are monitored via a smartphone-centric platform. The system has proven to be so successful it is used to save art collections in National Trust properties elsewhere in the UK.
And it’s not just art lovers who have something to celebrate when it comes to Blue Maestro’s cutting-edge internet of things (IoT) innovations – they also work with the Chester Zoo in northwest England to help provide an ideal environment for animals within their enclosures. A key component to maintaining optimal animal welfare is regularly monitoring animals’ enclosures for humidity and temperature, but with more than 20,000 animals at the facility, zookeepers realized there had to be a better solution than physically checking each enclosure multiple times a day. Enter: Blue Maestro’s Tempo Discs – a smartphone-centric environmental monitor that can be placed in animal enclosures to monitor and log temperature, humidity, air pressure, and dew point. The zoo now uses the Tempo Discs throughout its animal enclosures, providing the zookeepers with useful, real-time data, and helping to keep the animals happy and healthy!
About Blue Maestro
Blue Maestro was founded 10 years ago by entrepreneurs Richard Hancock and Kirstin Hancock, and they are a proudly UK-based company with staff located around the world. Their team designs and builds custom IoT sensors that deliver app-based data management, making it easy for their customers to monitor sensors from their smartphones.
What about patents?
The sensors that Blue Maestro make are exactly the type of device that can be affected by standard-essential patent (SEP) abuse and unfair licencing practices. Sensors of this type employ standard technologies such as Bluetooth, 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi to work. Some standards, such as Bluetooth, include patents that manufacturers can use for free. For others, a royalty fee must be paid to the SEP holder at some point in the device’s supply chain. While that sounds fairly straight-forward, it often is not that easy. SEP holders can use their position of power to disrupt SMEs’ ability to licence standards. Although these aggressive negotiation tactics may technically be legal, unreasonable licencing terms make it hard for smaller business to licence standards essential to IoT, limiting their ability to innovate and grow.
What complicates the process is that a single standardised technology may include hundreds, or even thousands, of patents which must be licenced—and there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to licencing them. This creates complexity and risk for SMEs, which must navigate this confusing landscape with limited resources and often without in-house expertise. It is crucial that companies check which SEPs they use and licence in their products. Understanding exposure to SEP abuse will help companies protect themselves from unexpected royalty fees, legal proceedings, and even injunctions – all of which can be the outcome of abusive SEP licencing practices.
To ensure SMEs like Blue Maestro can continue to innovate across industries, we must ensure fair and transparent access to SEPs. This is why we are proud to work with standard setting organizations (SSOs) and other bodies to ensure that SMEs are properly protected and have access to the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms under which SEPs should be licenced. More clarity is essential to avoid power imbalances between SMEs seeking to licence SEPs and the large corporations that hold them.
Check out bluemaestro.com for more examples of their work. If you’d like to become a member of ACT | The App Association, join up here.