I can't put my hand on it now but I do recall somewhere that...

I can't put my hand on it now but I do recall somewhere that Xped stated they were looking at attaining 15% market share. 15% of billions of devices by 2020 will be an awful lot of chips @$1.50US each.

Xped have never craved World Domination I believe the potential, repeat potential, is there we could be the standard for A major IoT ecosystem.
There will be competing ecosystems Samsungs "Smart Things", Google "Nest" and Apple's offering and a few others. Each will have it's own market of loyal followers.
As far as a universal control goes that will be left to the open source programming community. At some stage some pre pubescent whizz kid will write an APP to control all things.

Xped's DeB is open source (it can be downloaded now free from the website) , Samsung have announced they are moving to open source I'm not sure about Nest or the others. It would not be difficult to combine all these open source controls into a single APP.

As for why is Xped spending money to develop DeB when it already exists. What currently exists is a proof of concept version a prototype if you will.
Xped have just engaged Codium to tart it up, make it look appealing and attractive to consumers. That's what true professionals do engage experts.

No cover ups, no hidden meanings. Just professional management going about their business.