Has San Francisco become too expensive? An article on Bloomberg business suggests the prices for accommodation and labor have become too high.
Author: Paul Wallbank
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How social media drove the Internet of Things hype
In our recent interview with Kevin Ashton, the man who coined the Internet of Things term, he raised an interesting thought about why the IoT had become such a popular concept.
Ashton surmised there were two factors at work, the first being a younger generation of computer users who took networked devices for granted and the other being that the rise of social media – specifically Twitter – meant the #IoT hashtag was accessible and easy to use.
And they’ve never lived in a paradigm where computers don’t gather their own information. So it’s very…the internet of things idea is incredibly natural to them. People who were using computers, let’s say, in the 80s and the early 90s, pre-internet, it can be a little less intuitive. So that’s one thing, but the other thing is, just a complete coincidence, I think, is Twitter. On the internet of things community on Twitter we use the hashtag IOT.
Now, it just so happens, first of all, IoT is very Twitter-friendly because it’s very short. But by calling this thing the internet of things, I inadvertently happened upon a three letter acronym that was distinctive. There aren’t many of those in the world. But there isn’t anything IOT stands for.
Now, we never used the term IoT in the early days because it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody, right? But I happened upon this distinctive three-letter acronym, and then Twitter came along. And it made it very easy for all these kids that were kind of internet of things natives to find one another and communicate with one another, and that really helped. That really helped. So there was some coincidence in that realm.
There’s no doubt the two factors Ashton identifies were critical in the popularity of the term but we shouldn’t overlook the marketing efforts of established hardware and software companies to find ways to make money out of the Internet of Things, what Cisco President John Chambers calls “the greatest opportunity of my lifetime.”
Coupled with the marketing efforts of big IT companies is that the IoT is now coming into its own as adding communications and computing power to almost any device becomes almost trivial. Indeed, Cisco’s often touted statistic of 50 billion connected devices by 2020 is almost certainly an understatement as everything from barbie dolls to bees to locomotives start communicating.
While the IoT is a good label and a boon to desperate marketers trying to describe what would otherwise be a mundane subject of communication protocols and hardware, the bigger forces at work are that the technologies are accessible and affordable to most businesses and individuals.
As those billions of connected Barbie Dolls and tractors roll out there’s a huge number of benefits and risks involved in networking all these devices and managing the data they generate, luckily we at least have a good term to describe the general concept.
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America’s fading middle class
The US middle class is losing ground reports the Pew Research Center citing its latest report that finds less than half of all Americans identify as middle class.
A fading middle class is bad news for companies basing their businesses on increasing consumer spending such as old school retailers, big box stores and fast food chains. The affluent youth culture of the 1960s consumerist model is particularly under threat as the falls in income have fallen disproportionately on the young, as this New York Times examination of American social trends shows.
The end of the 20th Century miracle
It’s hard to see this trend being reversed as the bulk of the Twentieth Century middle class miracle was the surge in well paid manufacturing jobs during and after World War II. After thirty years of seeing those roles going offshore, the next wave of technology threatens to do away with them altogether.
That next wave of technology doesn’t promise to be good for middle class professionals and managerial workers either as automation and artificial intelligence promise to do away with many of their well paid jobs as well.
A large middle class is historically an aberration, when the term was first formally used in Britain just on a hundred years ago only 20% of the population fitted the criteria – incredibly the US only started studying the nation’s middle classes in the 1950s – and prior to the industrial revolution only a tiny group of merchants and professionals could fit the description.
A wartime boom
It was the economic boom after the Second World War that saw the assumption of everybody except the most chronically disadvantaged becoming middle class.
That idea really started to pass in the early 1970s but as a myth it’s continued to hold on, partly due to easy credit that’s allowed workers on declining real incomes to keep up the charade of an ever increasingly prosperous middle class lifestyle.
However that charade is increasingly becoming harder as the Pell survey shows and that is bad news for those retailers, fast food companies and other businesses based on the 1960s consumer model.
All is not lost though, the vast majority of those falling out of the middle classes in 21st Century America – or Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand – will still have lives far richer and healthier than those of the middle classes a hundred years ago.
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Putting the smart vision into smart cities
“Smart cities need smart visions,” states Terry Bennett, Autodesk’s lead strategist for the infrastructure industry.
Bennett was speaking to Decoding The New Economy about how cities will evolve with smart technologies however he believes that data is not the answer.
“Smart doesn’t mean putting sensors on everything and collecting terabytes of data,” he says. “Just putting sensors in the road doesn’t make it a smart city. To have a smart city you need smart people with a smart vision.”
S.M.A.R.T
“We see smart as more as an acronym. The ‘S’ is for setting science based targets for the data being collected,” he explains. Those targets could be financial, environmental or quality of life, “you have to set targets to see that your plan is being carried out.
The M is for measuring against those targets while the A is for absorbing or analysing that information and using it effectively.
R is for retrofitting, with Bennett seeing that valuable existing assets that still have long lives ahead of them being best refitted with smart technologies to get better information out of them.
Shifting demographics and tastes
One of the challenges ahead for planners and designers are the changing demographics and usage patterns of cities as the next generation of workers promise to be far more mobile and not as fixed to central business districts.
An advantage for smarter cities is they have much more data available to make informed decisions and as patterns change, those municipalities can see the differences occurring sooner.
Coupled with newer construction methods that allow infrastructure to be built faster, cities are going to be able to quickly respond to changing usage and demands on services.
Contracting out innovation
Those fast construction methods create another need for change in contracting methods. “We have to start thinking more as manufacturing rather than construction,” he says. “We get bogged down a lot in the ‘contract’ part of contracting. We have contracts written in the 1950s that are today’s standard contracts.”
“You can’t build fast enough given the changes in demographics and technology using those older contracts. You basically contracting out innovation.”
For government this can be an opportunity, Bennett believes. If clients allow builders freedom in techniques and methods then costs can be reduced with more resilient results.
Ultimately it’s that resilience that matters with infrastructure being designed for decades, “if you’re designing for traffic patterns for today then you’re wrong.”
Paul travelled to Autodesk University in Los Vegas as a guest of Autodesk
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Google restructures its venture capital arm
Things haven’t been going too well at Google’s European venture capital firm so the company is restructuring its investment operations into one global organisatio reports Tech.Eu.
Even for the biggest company spotting opportunities isn’t easy.
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