Investment in Internet of Things companies has doubled in the past five years reports CB Insights from from $768 million in 2010 to over $1.9 billion in 2014.
But who is doing the investing? CB Insights research finds Intel Capital is the biggest player in the space with Qualcomm coming in second.
That two hardware vendors are the biggest investors in the field tells us much about how the tech industry is seeing the IoT as being a key part of the sector’s future.
As autonomous vehicles get closer to being commonplace, the question now is what do we do with the armies of displaced truck and taxi drivers.
When Uber founder Travis Kalanick was asked about this earlier this week he suggested that the company may be involved in vocational training for out of work taxi drivers, Tech Crunch reports.
Kalanick’s suggestion raises a number of interesting possibilities – we may see a training levy placed on the new tech companies to fund vocational colleges or develop a new generation of apprenticeship schemes.
The question though is what skills would be best for today’s displaced workers to acquire? One idea is to give them training in statistics in an attempt to address the looming shortage of data scientists.
Another angle could be to train them in programming so they code their way back into the workforce.
Whatever course we take, nations are going to have to face the need to reskill their workforces. Kalanick’s suggestion should be the start of a larger conversation on how we fund that training.
The Navigating the Internet of Things Forum held in Sydney earlier today promised how businesses can navigate the technologies that promise to change society and – more specifically how can Australian enterprises use the IoT – sadly it didn’t quite deliver.
On the panel, sponsored by Telstra and held in the telco’s Sydney Experience Centre were the Australian Computer Society’s CEO, Andrew Johnson; Uber’s Sydney’s city lead, Glenn O’Sullivan; ZappQ founder Naomi Henn and the man responsible for the entire Internet of Things label and creator of WeMo, Kevin Ashton.
To start with the panel was very much consumer focused with talk around connected fish tanks, spa baths and discussion around the now defunct home automation service Ninja Blocks. It wasn’t until Ashton mentioned the use of autonomous vehicles in Rio Tinto’s Australian mines that the discussion of industrial uses really came into play.
“The most powerful applications in the IoT are in manufacturing and logistics”, said Ashton who also noted during the privacy discussion how “government are conflicted when it comes to protecting our data.”
Ashton’s point was well made given the audience questions were also largely about the privacy and security aspects of the IoT, an important issue highlighted by a story today on how police wearable cameras are being shipped with known spyware installed.
One other key aspect was the skills shortage. Ashton noted that data scientists are going to be the profession most in demand in an age where almost every device is collecting information with the ACS’s Johnson flagged how it will be the consultants and IT support industry that will have the task of rolling out the IoT to the small business community.
Ultimately though the Navigating The Internet of Things forum didn’t really hit its mark. Any manager or company owner hoping to understand how the IoT would help their business would have left the room as uncertain how these technologies were going to affect them as how they would have started the day.
One of the things that’s missing at events like this are people actually using these services or supplying the products. During the introduction to the event, Telstra manager Mark Chapman described how Adelaide City Council is piloting the company’s Cumulocity platform using Libelium sensors.
Libelium is one of the good stories on how the IoT is changing cities and businesses, something that founder Alicia Asin described to Decoding the New Economy three years ago.
Describing how the Internet of Things will change businesses requires hearing more from people like Asin and those delivering the products and services driving the evolutions in today’s society.
Sadly, those voices were missing on today’s panel. If the opportunities presented by the internet of things are going to be realised, then the people finding real results with the technologies today need to be heard.
“I always compare it to moving out of your family’s basement,” says Zendesk founder Mikkel Svane about his company’s going public last year.
Svane was talking to Decoding The New Economy after 18 eventful months that have seen the company go public and his publishing of a book on the journey of taking a startup to the market.
“There’s a lot of things you have to do different,” says Svane on becoming a listed company. “You’re on your own in many ways and you have to explain how things make sense. I think we’ve really embraced it and we enjoy it.”
While Zendesk was never classified as ‘unicorn’, having never been valued a billion dollars while private, Svane is relaxed about the stratospheric valuations of the current group of tech unicorns.
“Most of these unicorn companies are amazing, they are changing the world and the lives of people,” he says. “Even if there is a correction most of these companies will do fine.”
“The thing about the private market is you don’t have pessimism build in, you only have optimism,” Svane explains. “But in the public markets there are people shorting your stock because they have a different view, you don’t have that when you’re private. That’s why valuations can get a little out of control.”
For Svane, his optimistic view comes partly from Zendesk’s entry into the enterprise market, “in the last couple of years we’ve had some incredible momentum. We’ve done that while we’ve stayed true to our roots, to the small businesses and the startups.”
“Enterprises have a different set of needs and issues, the bigger you get as a company the harder it is to be agile and nimble.”
“Companies have hundreds of thousands of customers, they have millions of interactions and have all these data points. Managing these data points is hard. They also have to deal with compliance and have to figure out all these different things.”
Figuring out many different things is one of the themes touched on Svane’s book Startup Land which he sees as being important in helping both he and the company understand their values, “I thought it was important to be honest about our roots and where we come from.”
“We haven’t sorted everything out,” he says. “Things are still complicated for us and we’re still in the early stages of building the company we want to build.”
“I think it’s important when you’re a fast growing company, doubling in size every year, having an anchor point about what you are is important. If you have a good clear idea of where you come from and why you do what you do it’s easier.”
“The process of writing this book helped me understand a lot better why we’re doing this. Not that I found the answers but now I have a much better understanding.”
For Svane one of the things he’s proudest of over the past two years is how many people that Zendesk’s success has helped, “it’s important to create wealth for every one. One of the things I’m proud of is how we’ve created wealth for regular employees, we complete changed their lives.”
“As long as you’re creating real wealth, not just for shareholder and investors, then that’s something to be proud of.”
HR startup Zenefits is the latest tech unicorn to feel the wrath of an investor downgrade.
It’s becoming clear that even if the current Silicon Valley boom isn’t over then at least the mania is draining from the market.
For businesses looking for investor funds, this is bad news as money is going to be increasingly hard to come by. Making matters worse, a funding shortage will cause some of the companies with high burn rates to go broke which will increase investor caution.
We may be about to see a lot of the tech startups looking closely at how they are spending their money and that may not be a bad thing.