In the quest to get mindshare of the maker movement, ARM and IBM yesterday announced an Internet of Things starter kit based on an ARM Cortex M4 powered board, connected to the IBM BlueMix cloud service. ARM’s aim, similar to a previous initiative by Intel covered on this site is to help migrate the IoT enthusiasts who may be the founders of the next big thing away from Arduino towards ARM-based development platforms that can then be easily productised. Intel’s Edison-based development kit also links up to the same IBM data collection platform, so this is clearly not an exclusive relationship.
The second phase of the initiative will be an open-source operating system for embedded objects being developed by ARM called mbed, which is due for beta release later this year.