Monnit looks to grow with the internet of things.

• Author: Biton, Adva
• Position: Around Utah

Salt Lake City -- Why can't our appliances just talk to us? Anybody who has ever woken up to, say, a warm refrigerator or a freezing house in the middle of winter has probably wondered that very thing.

Now, imagine you work in pharmaceuticals or food services. While it's beyond annoying to have to throw everything in your fridge away, it's devastating for a restaurant to have to toss out its stock. Local restaurant CAFE ZUPAS had to contend with those problems, as well as a San Francisco's Ben & Jerry's. While there are sensors in the fridges at both businesses, the sensors are dumb--they send out an alarm for any variance in temperature, leading to a lot of false positives (and headaches) for the owners.

Enter MONNIT. The Salt Lake City-based monitoring solutions company is helping make that dumb technology smarter, said Brad Walters, CEO and founder of Monnit.

"In 2010, we started Monnit wanting to create low-cost sensors for businesses. Businesses have things in their environments or assets where they want to see what's going on," said Walters. "Traditionally, that's done with a clipboard. We wanted to put an end to clipboards, globally. Walking around with a clipboard will be replaced by putting a piece of electronics on something and dynamically learning from it."

It's the "learning from it" part that makes Monnit so attractive to companies like Cafe Zupas and Ben & Jerry's. Monnit's sensors can be programmed to be more flexible than a normal sensor, and to make out reports within given time frames for its users.

For instance, if a pharmaceutical company needs to know the temperature of its drugs every 15 minutes, those reports can be logged every quarter-hour and saved. These reports can be accessed on a PC, on tablets, on cell phones--anywhere you can get data.

"There have been solutions out there that monitor temperatures, but...