When the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) launched last summer, the prominent backing of Intel inevitably sparked speculation that this would be a rival to the Qualcomm-led AllSeen Alliance. Its statements were too vague, however, to be clear that it would be a rival, not a complement, to AllSeen. But now it has released its first code, it is clear that the Intel-Qualcomm war has well and truly moved to the critical device discovery layer of the internet of things (IoT). Both the OIC’s new IoTivity platform and AllSeen, which is based on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn technology, seek to standardize the way that connected devices discover one another and set up communications in a peer-to-peer environment. The OIC’s approach is similar to…