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The main product isn't the board -- CC3000+STM32 -- but rather the glorious and inscrutable cloud service that goes with it. The board designs are even being given away for free, it's OSHW.

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Their cloud software is also open sourced, and based on IEFT CoAp[1]. I see this being useful for a newbie maker, but for product shipping in any volume you'd integrate the CC3K directly ($11 vs $39) and you'd host the cloud server yourself, or pay them a nominal fee.

I am not seeing a cloud "operating system". Maybe I'm missing something??

But most of the magic is the cloud app that each device maker writes that does the heavy lifting, and that's pure web service; i.e. if it's X o'clock send command to turn on the sprinklers, unless it is raining in the user's zip code.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-core-coap-18

The OS part is that you're running the Spark firmware to manage comms and security, which talks to the Spark Cloud and makes the rest of it easy. Building the cloud app to be fast, stable, scalable, and secure from scratch is difficult, so this is a SaaS play. Plus, how are you going to manage your 100,000 devices in the field? With Spark you can even do it all with API calls.

and, uh, cough I just joined Spark as well...

oh hey! :)

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