One of the sponsors at Hackaday Superconference 2017 is Hologram.io. In the attendee bag I saw a sticker with their name and logo. It was just one of many names and logo stickers in the bag so it didn't make much of an impression beyond "I saw it". The name "Hologram" made me think they were some sort of video or image related system, possibly VR. But when I dug deeper I found a SIM card with the company name and logo on it.

Hologram SIM

Well, now, this is different. Since video and VR are very data-intensive services, I doubt my initial guess was right. So they have something to do with the cellular network, but I had a badge to hack and thought I'd get more information later.

As it turned out, I didn't have to go looking for more information, they came to me. Specifically two people wearing T-shirts with the Hologram logo were walking through the badge hacking area and wanted to know more about my Luggable PC. I paused my project to answer their questions and generally chat to see what people are interested in. (A big part of the fun of hanging around supercon.) I asked about their company and got the quick sales pitch: they make it easy to use cellular data.

Their SIM is just the starting point. It allows access to cellular data worldwide without having to worry about dealing with cellular carriers. Hologram takes care of that. To help curious experimenters get started, their entry-level "Developer" plan is free for the first megabyte of data in the month. Additional data would be $0.60/mb which is not the cheapest rate, but if only a few megabytes a month are needed, it should still end up cheaper than the monthly fee charged by every other carrier.

That sounds great, but they go further: Hologram Nova is a USB device that acts as a cellular data modem and can be plugged into a Raspberry Pi, or a Beaglebone, basically any computer running Linux to give it cellular data connectivity.

What if a Linux computer is overkill for the task at hand? What about projects that could be handled by something simpler like an Arduino? They've got that covered, too. Their Hologram Dash is a board with self-contained cellular hardware and a CPU that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. No computer necessary.

Now I'm impressed. I've had project ideas that would send data over the cellular network, but they were sitting in the low-priority stack because I didn't feel motivated enough to deal with all the overhead of using cellular data. Now I know I could pay Hologram to deal with the ugly parts and focus on my idea.

I hadn't heard of the name before Supercon, and now I'm contemplating projects that would use their service. Their sponsorship outreach effort is a success here.