BlackBerry is launching a series of projects called Project Ion for the internet of things with the idea of using its experience in building secure, connected devices to connect sensors, cars and anything else in a secure fashion to a cloud back end. Alec Saunders, the vice president of cloud at BlackBerry, launched the project at the O’Reilly Solid conference in San Francisco with a call for developers to try to build applications on the proposed platform. The project is a cloud back end and BlackBerry’s QNX software that allows a device to send information back to the cloud. When it comes to the cloud portion, Saunders said in an interview before his talk, “We have stolen liberally from open source software in computing and networking that has been going on in the last couple of years. Many of them didn’t exist in the form we are using them in, 18 months ago.”