CEO of Blues Wireless, Blues Wireless
Search every verified Ray Ozzie interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ray Ozzie, CEO of Blues Wireless, has been active in discussions about the Internet of Things (IoT) and the challenges of simplifying cellular connectivity for developers. In a December 2023 fireside chat, Ozzie described his company's focus on creating an "embeddable data pump" that allows hardware developers to treat cellular as a straightforward data pipe, bypassing complexities such as power management, security, and modem commands. He noted that Blues Wireless products, including the Note Card and Swan module, are designed to reduce the time from prototype to deployment, aiming to shrink a typical three-year cycle to six months. Ozzie also expressed views on the IoT ecosystem, stating that it remains fragmented and that the industry has not yet "picked the winners" in terms of toolchains, which he said keeps the market chaotic. Ozzie has also discussed his involvement with Safecast, a citizen-science project that grew out of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. He described how volunteers, including himself, collaborated to measure radiation and publish open data after the meltdown, an effort he said demonstrated how IoT technology can provide environmental awareness. In November 2021, Ozzie helped unveil the Safecast Air Note, an outdoor air quality monitor that sells for $150 with no ongoing subscription, and which contributes data to the Safecast open dataset under a Creative Commons Zero license. He has characterized the device as a simple, single-purpose tool for measuring outdoor particulate matter.
“A couple weeks after the meltdown we converged in Tokyo and decided the best thing we could do was use our skills to measure radiation on the ground because the government and the power company had their hands full and really weren't giving people any data they could use to ascertain whether their children were safe.”
“From that experience I learned how IoT technology can be used to give us a viewpoint of the state of our environment — just giving people awareness puts us in a much better position than treating resources as infinite.”
“There are many hurdles — power management, security, dealing with AT commands and modems and state tables — and so I created Blues Wireless specifically early on focused on cellular to help customers make it much easier to build cellular-enabled products.”
“The ecosystem is still very fragmented; we have not done the hard work of picking the winners yet — things will not become simpler for customers until we collectively decide to put our weight behind a toolchain that everyone can rally around.”
“You can like or hate Visual Studio Code, but the developer community decided it was going to win and everyone rallied around it — until the community picks winners like that for IoT, the market will remain chaotic.”
“I'm not big on the word convergence — LoRaWAN exists side by side with cellular and Bluetooth; what's important is finding harmony, maybe agreeing on higher layers, semantics or common APIs so these technologies can live side by side.”
“I view LoRaWAN as more 'LoRa land' than a true WAN because the cellular network is really the only WAN we've got at the moment with ubiquity — satellite may change that in time but ubiquity matters.”
“I'm actually very excited about what's going on in the NTN satellite space — there's untapped potential, message rates will drop, and another viable wide area network could emerge for IoT.”
“The biggest challenge and opportunity is to reduce the time it takes from concept to value — if today it takes three years from prototype to deployment, I'd like it to be six months, and that will require agreeing on a limited toolkit and practices.”
“What it is is it's a very small cellular module — somebody might look at it and say it's just a modem — but really it's a new composition of function supposed to enable developers to treat cellular as a data pipe as opposed to the mystical nature of it today.”
“The best thing we could do was to measure data and publish both the way that we measured the data and the data itself — without saying is it safe or not safe — but publishing it in a way that was open data that let people who really knew what they were doing help citizens understand the threat.”
“Could we make a completely different developer experience where the hardware developer could not worry about cellular data plans — just get a cellular card from a distributor like DigiKey or Mouser or Avnet, treat cloud connectivity as part of their BOM and assume as soon as they plugged in it would work and auto self-...”
“Bill Gates asked if I would take over his role — I took over Bill's job as Chief Software Architect and tried to shift the course of the supertanker by a few good degrees; I had a pretty direct role in initiating the Azure project.”
“The Microsoft culture was a very divisionalized culture and there was a lot of internal competition, and trying to shift that company toward services was challenging.”
“What I'm trying to do with Blues is concentrate on the communication domain: help people focus on what they're building and create this little embeddable data pump — do it economically, manageable at scale, and make it very easy for hardware developers to drop a cellular data pipe into their designs.”
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As the creator of Lotus Notes, the iconic corporate environment for online collaboration, as well as Microsoft’s former CTO and chief software architect and creator of Azure, Ray Ozzie has helped define the modern digital workplace. He has devoted his life since the 1970s to connecting people with computers and developing collaborative tools. On March 18, 2021, Ray was honored by CHM for a lifetime of work in collaborative software and software entrepreneurship. As part of a special backstage event, Ray Ozzie gave a personal tour of his collection of computing artifacts. For all footage from…
... Here - Ray Ozzie, Blues Wireless 2:03:12 | A Future that Works for Everybody - Pete Warden, Google 2:19:00 | Extracting Value ...
As the creator of Lotus Notes, the iconic corporate environment for online collaboration, as well as Microsoft’s former CTO and chief software architect and creator of Azure, Ray Ozzie has helped define the modern digital workplace. He has devoted his life since the 1970s to connecting people with computers and developing collaborative tools. On March 18, 2021, Ray was honored by CHM for a lifetime of work in collaborative software and software entrepreneurship. For all footage from “Building a Better World through Tech for Collaboration: A Celebration of Ray Ozzie” video extras, and related…
As the creator of Lotus Notes, the iconic corporate environment for online collaboration, as well as Microsoft's former CTO and ...
Safecast key advisor Ray Ozzie joins us from his home workshop outside of Boston to unveil the next-generation air quality and ...
Interviewed by Marc Weber on 2020-12-10 in Manchester, MA X9392.2021 © Computer History Museum Ray Ozzie was inspired by online collaboration in college, on the mainframe-based PLATO system. The arc of his career has been adapting collaborative features to successive platforms: Personal computers, the Internet, the cloud, mobile, and now the internet of things. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was a leading-edge computing environment for education created at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1960. By the early 1970s it was also evolving into perhaps…
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