This Silicon Valley store wants to sell the Internet of Things

A new retail shop in Silicon Valley is unlike those around it and will offer the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things is about objects being linked together. Think connected cars, thermostats controlled through your phone or drones that connect to Wi-Fi. But it's hard to convince anyone this sort of thing works through a website, or through traditional retailers, where products typically are organized by category, not how they relate to one another.

B8ta in Palo Alto, Calif., aims to create an environment that shows how all these things link up.

B8ta Chief Executive Vibhu Norby and his co-founders came from Nest Labs, the Google-owned company best known for its Wi-Fi-enabled modernist-style round thermostats, smoke detectors and other security devices. They saw how resource-intensive it was for a company selling an Internet of Things product to create environments inside retailers that adequately explain how everything works.

Nest Labs could afford it. Microsoft and Apple, too. But what about the thousands of smaller companies creating connected devices? This is the gap Norby wants B8ta to fill.