Internet of things get popular in developed and emerged countries and big metropols. There are many area to find position to gain popularity with services, which are the part of these IoT ecosystem.

Helium History

Helium was founded in 2013 by Shawn Fanning, Sean Carey and Amir Haleem.

If the first name sounds familiar, that’s because Shawn fanning is the co-founder of Napster, the first peer-to-peer music sharing platform, which amassed over 27 million users in its short three-year lifespan.

Shawn currently serves as an advisor to Helium, likely because he has half a dozen other startups on the go.

Sean Carey is a seasoned systems architect, and he served as Helium’s CTO until he stepped down in 2015. Sean’s presentation about Helium at hardwired NYC is the oldest video about the project that I could find, and it’s worth checking out if you have the time.

Amir Haleem is a professional gamer and video game designer, and he was once the best Quake player in the world respect.

He currently sits as Helium CEO and is a die-hard cypherpunk. According to Amir, Helium was the outcome of one of the many conversations with Napster Shawn over the years after meeting him in 2005. They wanted to recreate the peer-to-peer model of Napster with wireless networks and without the risk of being shut down for breaking laws as Napster did with copyright.

Initially, they were hoping to target the telecommunications market. Still, they realized that the red tape would make it next to impossible, and the existing players had too much financial and political power.

At the time, the concept of the internet of things or IoT was becoming increasingly popular as wireless devices were becoming more common. IoT is the buzzword of all buzzwords these days, and it consists of extracting data from the real world using sensors. These sensors include things like laptops, mobile phones, parking meters, and even dog collars.

Amir had some friends who had tried and failed to get IoT projects off the ground. He realized that IoT companies were failing because creating IoT infrastructure in a centralized manner made zero economic sense.

The low frequency used for IoT also has no laws licensing or regulations attached, at least in the United States where Helium was based. This made IoT the perfect fit for Helium’s peer-to-peer network.

The only problem is that Helium had no way to incentivize people to set up this peer-to-peer IoT network, and the whole project stalled as a result. When crypto started making headlines in 2016, however, Amir realized that cryptocurrency could create the right incentives.

After being inspired by the Filecoin (FIL) white paper in 2017, Amir rallied the gang, and they got to work. Read More…