One startup has set out to change this. Qoitech specialises in energy optimisation, realising the importance of being able to provide long life, high reliability, and low power consumption in battery driven devices. 

Founder Vanja Samuelsson was working with research from upcoming 5G tech, exploring the Internet of Things (IoT) aspect of how and why everything is going to be connected, as well as making sure the connective elements are actually useful to the end user. 

Throughout the research, Samuelsson realised that the way the new tech was being created was not optimal from an energy point of view, it needs to be done in an agile way, but many companies don’t have the tools to do it. 

Samuelsson found that increasingly where it comes to IoT, hardware has become an off-the-shelf commodity, treated only as a vessel to put layers of software over, but the hardware is an integral part of the product, and plays just as significant a role in battery life as the software and end application do. Because of this, Samuelsson began to research all three of these aspects together, looking for the best way to integrate them into the ecosystem of the product to achieve the most efficient result.

The effect of seeing these deficiencies in energy optimisation encouraged Samuelsson and her team to begin brainstorming to create something that would take energy optimisation out of the labs and away from expensive equipment, and that could instead provide developers with all the tools they needed for energy optimisation in one compact solution. The result was Otii. 

Otii is a power analyser and supply, functioning as an all in one tool as it contains everything you need for energy optimisation. It can power the device, measure the device, correlate the software you are putting onto the device with those measurements to see what is draining the battery, and can act as a battery itself. All of these functions allow Otii to definitively state how long the battery will last, instead of giving a flimsy average. 

Otii uses a compact, lightweight, plug-and-play approach, with an intuitive Graphics User Interface (GUI) that Qoitech refined through feedback and suggestions from its hugely successful forum of developers, helping them to create an energy optimisation device for developers, by developers. 

From her journey through founding Qoitech and creating Otii, Samuelsson shared three lessons she learned about creating a startup, the first being you to always look for lessons. If you are always looking to learn more then you will always be improving, learn from your mistakes quickly and look to people doing similar things for information that could be beneficial to you. 

The second lesson Samuelsson offered, was that when you try to launch something like this, everyone has advice for you, but that does not make it good advice. Be critical of the advice you receive to make sure it is actually helpful to your unique business. 

Finally, Samuelsson emphasised that creating anything is all about mistakes. Make them, it’s fine, good even, so long as you learn from them. Making mistakes is not a big deal, it’s part of the process, all that is important is that you learn from them and know for next time.