EVRYTHNG, the Smart Products Platform, aims to bring to life a vision where every physical product in our world participates in the digital ecosystem with its own unique web identity.
The company’s technology provides this identity, called an Active Digital Identity™, through intelligent software in the cloud. It allows products to appear as a web service API to applications, to share data, and to drive applications with cloud-based analytics and machine intelligence.
As a business model, EVRYTHNG provides a B2B enterprise platform-as a- service to global consumer product manufacturers, making it possible for these organizations to collect and manage data about their physical products throughout their respective lifecycles.
EVRYTHNG is backed by private equity and staffed by a team of 50 people operating across offices in London, New York, San Francisco and Minsk. The company has worked closely with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on the standardization of the web of things framework, and with GS1 on the digitization of global product coding standards.
Transforming Products
Through digital printing, printed electronics, embedded computing technologies and sensors, digital identification can now be attached to almost any type of physical product. This means that the approximately four trillion products made and sold to consumers each year can generate data about themselves and deliver information and digital applications to anyone interacting with them.
This transforms everyday objects into powerful digital assets for the companies that make and sell them. Whilst product digitization offers transformational opportunities for businesses, it is not possible without large scale data management. This is the problem EVRYTHNG addresses through their Smart Products Platform managing billions of Active Digital Identities™.
This identity provides perpetual access to the web and makes use of standard web protocols to provide APIs so applications can work with product data regardless of how the product is physically connected. Data can be collected from products scanned with a smartphone or connected to the internet.
EVRYTHNG’s integration with GS1, the world’s coding standards for physical products, means that almost every product can be digitized, leveraging well-established mechanisms in the supply chain. The pervasiveness of the web and the standardization of web protocols makes it possible for multiple stakeholders to interact with the same product identity on the web to aggregate and share data.
Real-time analytics and machine learning technologies within EVRYTHNG’s platform processes diverse sets of product data using algorithms developed in standard coding languages to drive diverse supply chain and direct-to-consumer applications.
The Innovative Leader
A computer scientist by training, Niall Murphy is a technologist, serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He is also the Co-founder and CEO of EVRYTHNG.
With 25 years of experience in innovation and future thinking, Niall has built pioneering businesses in internet infrastructure, the mobile internet and web services in Europe, US, and Africa.
Before founding EVRYTHNG, Niall co-founded a pan-European WiFi network called The Cloud, which was acquired by News Corporation’s BSkyB in 2011. In the mid-90s he founded one of the first internet service providers in Africa, which was acquired by UUnet. He also cofounded The Digital Thinking Network, a scenario thinking consultancy based in Amsterdam.
Niall is a co-author of the WiFi roaming framework adopted by the IETF, and has co-authored a number of patents. He serves on the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom’s advisory board.
Helping Consumer Brands
The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and every possible thing that can be connected, will be. This offers tremendous opportunity for value creation and new business models.
Manufacturers can identify and track every physical thing they make and sell, and brands are realizing they must embrace this digital transformation to remain competitive. EVRYTHNG’s digital identity and data management platform helps consumer product brands compete in various ways:
- Cutting Costs: By digitizing their physical products, clients minimize inventory losses, improve forecast accuracy, reduce the cost of recalls and combat the gray market.
- Winning Customers: Physical products become a new channel to directly engage customers, collect first-party data to deepen consumer relationships, and deliver direct-toconsumer e-commerce and digital services.
- Owning Data: Data is of critical value in building and maintaining competitiveness. Data access and ownership opens new business models and enables collaboration between business units, partners, retailers and consumers. The EVRYTHNG platform enables an open ecosystem in which brands own the data from their products across multiple applications and ‘actors’ within the lifecycle.
- Ease of Deployment: For product manufacturers, digitizing products on a large scale is a complex operation. EVRYTHNG’s partnerships with the world’s largest packaging companies allows for the addition of digital triggers at source to all types of products and materials. This enables brands to focus on the applications they want to run to remain competitive, rather than the operational mechanics of digitally enabling physical products at huge scale.
A Bright Future
EVRYTHNG plans to manage one trillion digital consumer product identities by the end of 2020. This growth will be achieved by:
- Automatic provisioning of digital identities as products made through EVRYTHNG’s partnerships deep in the supply chain with the world’s largest packaging and supply chain service providers.
- The roll-out of digital identity integrated with the standard GS1 coding used by more than two million product manufacturers globally to identify their products for point of sale.
- Optimizing the ease of use of the EVRYTHNG platform and APIs to enable product manufacturers, application developers and other service providers to easily work with product data through intelligent digital identities on the web. The digitization of products will have profound implications for the consumer products industry:
- Analytical intelligence brought to the supply chain will have a large impact on the 2.5% of global trade estimated to be lost to counterfeiting, the 7% of estimated revenues lost to under- and overstocking in retail and 1.25% lost entirely during transportation.
- Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer engagement via the physical product will help brands address the challenges of declining loyalty, evident in 2017 when 41% of consumers switched companies over a lack of trust and poor personalization, costing businesses $756 billion. With product data directly accessible to consumers through digital interfaces on the product, information about its origin, quality and authentication will become readily available to them. Brands can build stronger direct relationships with their customers, offering more personalized experiences and innovation in service delivery