The Things Podcast

Building installers trust cable, not wireless. The answer: start with two or three LoRaWAN sensors and one gateway, then scale from a room to the whole building.

Guest: Luca Georg (SENSISE)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

SENSISE grew out of building-sensor hardware and now offers the full LoRaWAN chain for buildings: consulting and range tests, sensors, gateways, network and application server, a dashboard and support. The guest explains how the system coexists with an existing building management system via BACnet, Modbus or MQTT, why gateway placement affects battery life through the spreading factor, how customers export their data, and why battery life of up to 10 years is the hardest claim to sell.

Sensors tell you about a problem; actuators fix it. Why reliable downlinks, integrators and time spent in real buildings decide whether smart-building devices succeed.

Guest: Lyubomir Yanchev (MClimate)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Lyubomir Yanchev, CEO of MClimate, explains how the company moved from smart home to LoRaWAN radiator thermostats and other actuators for smart buildings. He covers why room-by-room control matters when buildings account for roughly 36 to 40% of CO2 emissions, how EU rules and bank lending push building owners, and why system integrators are the real customers. His advice for new device makers: build for quality, since one site visit costs a few thousand euro, and start inside real buildings.

The IoT use cases are old; what AI changes is how easy they are to build: no training data, no custom model, just an image, a prompt and a workflow.

Guest: Kenta Yasukawa (Soracom)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Kenta Yasukawa, CTO and co-founder of Soracom, explains why AI was the missing piece in IoT and how zero-shot models lower the barrier to camera-based applications. He covers Soracom's SGP.32 eSIM products, natural-language queries over fleet data and Soracom Flux, with production examples from counting bento boxes to reduce food loss to measuring how full cargo containers are. He also argues for mixing AI with deterministic code and logging every AI decision so failures become learning data.

Devices stay in the field for 10 to 15 years, but Zephyr support lasted 5: Canonical now applies the Ubuntu long-term support model to microcontrollers.

Guest: Jean-Charles Verdié (Canonical)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Jean-Charles Verdié, Director of Devices/IoT Field Engineering at Canonical, explains Zephyr LTS: a predictable release every two years with support for up to 15 years. He links it to the Cyber Resilience Act, to over-the-air updates for Zephyr and to reported Zephyr security issues rising from about 10 a year to more than 250 this year. He also describes a development environment that can be rebuilt unchanged 11 years later, and why the era of fire-and-forget devices is over.

Cellular IoT devices used to be stuck with one connectivity vendor for life. SGP.32 makes remote profile swaps possible, so the real question becomes which provider fits each device.

Guest: Ohad Peled (SymbIoT B.V.)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Ohad Peled, founder and CEO of SymbIoT, explains the difference between SIM form factors and profile management, how the eIM and an orchestration layer let a fleet switch profiles per region or use case, and why buyers should compare regulation, SLAs and real coverage rather than marketing claims. He also covers SymbIoT's open-source eIM for testing pilots on one device set, and the IoT connectivity marketplace listing more than 80 vendors.

IoT deal values are rising, and buyers pay most for solutions embedded in a customer's daily operations, not for hardware alone or AI sprinkled on top.

Guests: Allen Proithis (Capstone Partners), Joseph Radecki (KPMG Corporate Finance)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Allen Proithis, CEO of Capstone Partners, and Joseph Radecki, Managing Director at KPMG Corporate Finance, explain what drives IoT and physical AI valuations today. Pure hardware trades in the upper single digits of EBITDA and about 2 times revenue, while hardware-enabled software sold as a subscription reaches 12 to 14 times EBITDA. They also discuss why the all-in-one IoT platform bet did not hold, and why private equity is consolidating IoT MVNOs with managed services and deep channels.

How Edge Impulse grew from launch in 2020 to 844,000 projects, and why its coming AI agents still need a domain expert to validate the result.

Guest: Louis Moreau (Edge Impulse)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 23 September 2026

Louis Moreau, Head of Developer Relations at Edge Impulse, explains the growth behind 844,000 active projects: a generous free tier, education and courseware, an ambassador programme and developer events. He covers life inside Qualcomm alongside Arduino, agentic workflows that search feature extraction and model architecture faster and help build full applications, and why robotics, starting with data collection, is the next big step.

IoT devices stay in the field for 10 to 15 years. SGP.32 means the connectivity choice made in year one no longer has to last that long.

Guest: Vincent Korstanje (Kigen)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 23 September 2026

Vincent Korstanje, CEO of Kigen, explains why it took the industry so long to get eSIM right for IoT and what SGP.32 changes for device makers. He covers Kigen's starter kit with ready-to-use MVNO profiles, its neutral role across more than 250 connectivity providers, a SIM OS small enough for a 2 mm by 2 mm eSIM, Kigen Pulse with full API access, factory provisioning and the coming SGP.42 standard, and why the eIM does not create a new lock-in.

The 50 billion devices never came and cloud-only data is on its way out; what is buzzing now is edge AI, security by design and a new wave of chip start-ups.

Guest: Navneeta Deo (Deep Tech Strategy)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 22 September 2026

Navneeta Deo, an adviser to semiconductor deep-tech start-ups with about 15 years in semiconductors and IoT, looks at the IoT ideas that went extinct: the 50 billion devices forecast for 2020, easy IoT revenue and sending all data to the cloud. She explains why edge AI and security by design now lead, which ideas she sees from chip start-ups, from neuromorphic computing to optical processing, and how the go-to-market of chip companies and IoT companies differs.

Devices in the field will never all speak the same protocol, so the W3C Web of Things lets them describe themselves in one common language, from Modbus to LoRaWAN.

Guests: Ege Korkan (Siemens AG), Haoyu Ren (Siemens AG)

The Things Podcast, recorded live at The Things Conference 2026, Amsterdam, 23 September 2026

Ege Korkan (IoT Architect) and Haoyu Ren (Research Scientist) of Siemens AG explain how the W3C Web of Things lets you talk to any device in the same language, whatever protocol or vendor sits underneath. Two versions of the standard are out and the next is in progress, with new protocol bindings and LoRaWAN support brought to the LoRa community at this conference. They also cover digital twins, TinyML and why a model trained in summer may fail in winter, and why industrial AI needs 100%, not 99%.