Author Justin Grammens

Justin Grammens Speaks at AAUW

I’m extremely blessed to have the opportunity to speak before the The American Association of University Women ( AAUW ) on April 2nd! Nationally, the AAUW has been empowering women as individuals and as a community since 1881. For more than 130 years, we have worked together as a national grassroots organization to improve the…

What Should Be Driving IoT?

What actually drives our client's IoT | Lab651

I used to work for a large industrial company where I had the acronym “IoT” in my title. I was inundated with LinkedIn messages like “We can solve your IoT problems”, “We have an IoT solution that… ” or the worse one of all, “What’s your IoT strategy?” Where did all these IoT Subject Matter…

Why The Time Is Now

I had the extreme pleasure of recently keynoting the University of Minnesota’s Law School’s Symposium on the Internet of Things. During the opening remarks and the lunch keynote that I gave to the audience, I talked about the way in which intelligent “things” are more and more going to have an impact on our lives.…

The Three Truths of Invention

I was recently asked to speak at the Reve Reflect event on the topic of “Invention”. They purposefully left it open-ended as ( in their words ), “wanted the presenters to keep an eye on the creative process of inventing something, rather than the broad term of Innovation”. After speaking that evening on just a…

What Connected Products Can Learn from the Electric Car

More than 20 years ago GM produced the first mass-market electric car: the EV1. It was deemed as unprofitable by GM and subsequently was terminated in 1999. GM spent what I would assume to be millions of dollars crushing the EV1’s to end their development of electric cars. Fast forward to today. Elon Musk is…

Lab651 at the Innovation Jam

I was fortunate enough to speak at the 2nd Annual Innovation Jam, put on by my friends at Ciceron. The other speakers included Kent Strand from Accredent, Ashley Evenson from Ciceron, and Chuck Olson from Visual. Between the 4 of us, we covered topics ranging from the Internet of Things, proximity marketing using Beacons, new marketing techniques using programmatic advertising, and…

Harnessing the Power of the Internet of Things

Connected City, Harnessing the Power of IoT

The past month was a blur as the team at Lab651 was not only building connected products for our awesome clients, but I was also busy working with IoTFuse to execute on our 1000+ person conference called IoT Fuse: Conference 2017, teaching the Internet of Things at the University of Saint Thomas and publishing the…

Building Connected Classrooms

Outside of running the mobile and web applications team at Lab651, I teach a graduate-level course on the Internet of Things at the University of Saint Thomas. I have had the opportunity to experience situations where I wished that I was omniscient; able to see, hear and know all in the classroom. Therefore, when Wildflower…

Reflections on Returning to IoT North America

As the IoT industry was just starting to glom onto the term the “Internet of Things”, I attended the very first IoT North America Conference in Milwaukee, WI in 2014. Like others, I had been doing “IoT” and working with connected devices outside of my day job for many years. In fact, a good friend…

IoT in 2017

The Internet of Things As we’ve been building connected products, or what is commonly now called the “Internet of Things” (IoT) at Lab651, I decided to spend some time reflecting on where I see the industry going in 2017. There’s obviously more to the story than the 3 items below, which I’ll be writing about…