A good name is worth more than a thousand words: meet Artik.cloud, helping Samsung make its IoT offering even smarter
One of the key advantages of all the new domain extensions like .club, .global or .cloud that have been reaching the market in recent times is the fact that they offer the opportunity to overcome the ”generic”, one-size-fits-all nature of legacy extensions and add immediate, visible context to a web-address.
Although .cloud only entered the domain market very recently, in just over 2 months of general availability it has already proven to be a very popular choice for many companies, startups and individuals from all over the world looking to leverage the great power of the keyword "cloud" to enhance their online presence.
While typically big corporations are quite slow at adopting the latest trends, it is quite refreshing to see how a market leader like Samsung was able to show how simple it is to leverage new domain extensions by choosing the artik.cloud domain as the home of their new Artik Cloud offering,
announced earlier this week at the Samsung Developer Summit in San Francisco.
The beauty of this choice is in how natural and obvious it feels: a short and clear domain name that does away with the irrelevant clutter of a generic extension and instead elegantly starts telling the story of the product behind it before you even click on it.
For us, it is a source of particular pride as the artik.cloud domain and the Artik Cloud product it represents take a leading place right at the cross-road between some of the most innovative fields in technology these days.
As cloud computing is rapidly moving from being ”cutting edge” to ”mainstream”, innovators are quickly shifting their focus to what is tipped to be the next big thing: ”Internet of Things” (IoT), often also referred to more simply as ”connected devices”.
Interestingly enough though, it is when ”Internet of Things” meets ”Cloud” that the really smart stuff starts to happen. Integration with cloud-based services is enabling IoT manufacturers to make devices truly smart. For example allowing sensors to interact with the broader internet and draw information they can automatically use to do their thing and make everyday things run that little bit more smoothly - be it a smart thermostat adapting the temperature of our home based on the weather forecast, or even a fridge ordering milk when we run out.
With various analysts estimating the number of connected devices to reach 50 billion by 2020, it is no surprise this is big business and many technology giants, including Google and Facebook, are pouring serious resources in IoT technology and projects.
Few companies are better positioned to succeed in this field than Samsung, which intends to make all of its products — from phones to washing machines — connected devices by 2020.
But beyond simply making its own products smarter, Samsung is also showing true vision and leadership by making its IoT solutions available to other manufacturers interested in building connected devices, opening this field up also to players with great ideas but that don't necessarily havethe time and resources to build a whole framework on their own. On the hardware side, the
ARTIK chips family offers a broad array of smart functions and connectivity that can easily and quickly make all sorts of devices ”smart”. On the software side, Samsung is now closing the circle by launching its new ARTIK.cloud platform.
Building on the expertise of Smartthings, a company it acquired a couple of years ago, Samsung has been quietly developing a cloud-based platform that allows device manufacturers to easily create a connected device and companion mobile application without having to actually build and maintain the Cloud components of that solution. And while clearly the Artik chips and the Artik cloud are optimized for each other, the two systems remain open, standard-compliant and interoperable also with other manufacturers' solutions, allowing unprecedented flexibility for device makers to build truly remarkable new products and services.
Samsung's commitment to openness is also highlighted by its choice to give the hardware and software components separate dedicated websites. While the two certainly share a product name, Samsung's attention to detail is highlighted by the clever usage of domain extensions that gives each of their offerings a clear and distinct identity while providing a good opportunity to reinforce the Artik brand. So while Artik.io is the home for the IoT sensors, the cloud platform takes full advantage of the .cloud extension to provide immediate and relevant context to visitors with a matching domain,
Artik.cloud.