Paul Wallbank is a speaker and writer charting how technology is changing society and business. Paul has four regular technology advice radio programs on ABC, a weekly column on the smartcompany.com.au website and has published seven books.
What does an English motorway junction tell us about evolving trade routes and communication networks?
One of the most maligned places in Britain is Spaghetti Junction, an interchange on the M6 Motorway just north of Birmingham’s city centre in the centre of the nation.
Despite its poor reputation, Spaghetti Junction though has a story to tell — a tale of how physical trade routes change slowly with the motorway being the latest of five major junctions in the area.
Courtesy of UK Highways Agency and Wikipedia
Immediately below the motorway are the major roads, connecting these and Birmingham were the reason for building Spaghetti Junction in the late 1960s.
Below those are the canals and it’s notable that just as Birmingham lies at the centre of Britain’s motorway network, it also formed the core of the industrial revolution’s canal network and much of the railway system.
Despite it’s importance the area is dingy and it’s not a good idea to hang around too long, particularly when you have an expensive camera, but it’s worthwhile to linger for a few minutes to appreciate how important these links were to the industrial revolution.
Following the canals away from Spaghetti Junction gives a feeling of the post-industrial nature of Birmingham’s economy something that the city, like most of Britain, is still struggling with.
Eventually the canal ends in the city’s convention centre district where a tourist can get a safer, and better, appreciation of Britain’s canal system at the Gas Street Canal Basin.
While the basin is a bit twee and touristy it does also give a friendly overview of the canal network that replicates closely the railway system that replaced it and today’s roads.
Whether our descendents will wander the abandoned motorways and freeways in two hundred years and wonder at our industrial might is something we might want to ponder. Whether what replaces them is another layer of infrastructure is another question.
Google’s London Campus offers a free coworking space in the basement that’s open to small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs.
Google’s London campus is credited by many in the City’s Silicon Roundabout district as being one of the catalysts for the explosion in the local tech centre.
One of the features of the London facility is the free co-working space the company offers which has become an important landmark for the city’s startup and small business community.
Getting into the basement co-working space requires pre-registration and, in theory, you’ll be able to pick up an access card when you first arrive.
In practice the cards are long out of stock, so just showing your registration confirmation with it’s code to the rather rude and brusque receptionists will get you buzzed in.
The coworking space takes up the entire basement with four distinct coworking spaces – a courtyard, an array of tables, a lounge area and a shared bench.
Immediately inside the door is the communal bench that seats around twenty people. These are probably the best if you’re happy to socialise while you work. Even if you don’t it’s worthwhile grabbing a spot here if you see one available during busy times.
Directly beside the workbench area is the Android demonstration station. This is a clever initiative by Google to showcase their mobile platform and encourage their developer community.
Across from the Android test bench is the lounge area, this will be your best bet to find a place should you arrive when the coworking space is busy. It isn’t the most comfortable and quiet place in the room though as it gets lots of foot traffic and is across from the café.
The café serves a standard range of sandwiches, coffees and drinks with specials on certain days. Prices aren’t dissimilar from most of the coffee shops in the neighbourhood although you might find better range and a quieter spot eating elsewhere.
One of the missed opportunities in the cafes is the opportunity to sell computer accessories like chargers and cables, during each visit this reviewer noticed how there was always someone asking to borrow other users’ accessories to charge their phones or synch their devices.
Alongside the coffee shop is the courtyard; on nice day this would be a good place to work or to enjoy a beer and a chat with fellow geeks in the afternoon. During this visit in November, the weather was dark and dank with the outdoor area only being used by people making phone calls.
Beside the courtyard is the desk area where the serious workers hunker down. These spaces tend to get taken early and some people seem to arrive shortly after opening at 9am and don’t leave until the room closes at 6pm. Get there before ten if you want a spot.
One of the problems in the room is the fight for power sockets. By mid-morning it’s almost impossible to find a spare plug so if you’re looking to recharge a device you may want to consider a local café.
Another problem with the coworking space is it gets very crowded and some of the regulars have a habit of spreading out or hogging power sockets. It may be necessary to be quite pushy to get a seat or power socket when someone is taking up too much space.
Overall, Google’s London Campus is a good facility that many other cities could use. However with its congestion mobile workers may find it easier to set up in one of the many geek friendly cafes in the neighbourhood like the nearby Ozone or Shoreditch Grind right on the Silicon Roundabout itself.
“We’re not just going to back the big businesses of today, we’re going to back the businesses of tomorrow.” Cameron said. “We are firmly on the side of the high-growth, highly innovative companies of the future.
Three years later London’s tech scene is booming with more than fifty incubators across the city and over three thousand digitally connected businesses in the Shoreditch district.
Building London’s resurgence
Gordon Innes, the CEO of the city’s economic development agency London and Partners, puts this down to a combination of factors including a young and diverse population coupled with being a global media and finance centre.
At the time of Cameron’s speech the cluster of tech startups around Shoreditch’s Silicon Roundabout area was already firmly established and the British government was acknowledging the industry’s successes.
“What we did, what the mayor did, what the government did,” Innes said, was to make sure that we removed as many barriers as possible to let the sector grow as rapidly as possible.”
The value of teamwork
Part of that effort involved business leaders, London & Partners, the mayor’s and Prime Minister’s advisers meeting on a regular basis to thrash out what the tech sector needed for the UK’s tech sector to thrive.
“There were changes to the tax credits for R&D and an important one was the Enterprise Incentive Scheme,” says Innes.
“Linked to that was a recognition of the need to link angels and high net worth individuals to be educated about the sector. It’s not just enough to balance the risk through the tax code.”
Another success for the UK startup sector was the British government introducing an entrepreneur’s visa that makes the country more attractive to foreign founders of startups.
Having built an community of tech startups, the city is now looking at how to grow the sector. “The big priority over the next few years is growing your business in London.” Innes says.
“Making sure you’ve not only have access to angel finance but also to stage one and stage two venture fund capital, you’ve got access to capital markets through new groups on the stock exchange and the AIM market.”
One of London’s big challenges is linking the city’s strong financial sector to the tech industry with a range of organisations like London Angels and City Meets Tech.
Sharing the vision
A notable point about the successes of London & Partners and Tech City UK is the co-operation between the levels of government along with having a shared vision of where the city should sit in the global economy.
Having a unified, strong and consistent vision is probably the best thing governments can offer a growing entrepreneurial or industry hub.
“Government can’t create that but government can certainly support it or, if it’s not careful, can destroy it,” says Innes.
London is showing how to support a growing sector of their business community, other cities need to be taking note how they can compete in a tough global market.
What’s striking about talking with Antoni is how passionate he is about Barcelona’s future and the importance of the city building new industries around the digital economy.
Particularly notable is the administration’s vision for the city which combines Barcelona’s traditional industries, such as the port, with future technologies.
“Barcelona has to become a city of culture, creativity, knowledge but mainly fairness and well being,” says Antoni when asked on where he sees his city as being in ten years time. “I would love to see my city as a place where people live near where they work, I would love to see the city self sufficient in energy and it should be zero emission city.”
“Rather than having a pattern of PITO – ‘Product In, Trash Out’ we should move to what we call the DIDO model – ‘Data In Data Out’.”
It’s a broad view for the future which many other city and state governments will be watching closely.
A Spanish startup shows how the internet of machines is changing the business world having installed their sensors into everything from space ships to koala bears.
A Spanish startup shows how the internet of machines is changing the business world having installed their sensors into everything from space ships to koala bears.
“Libelium comes from Libelula which means dragonfly,” says Alicia Asin, of the sensor company she co-founded with David Gascón. “The company was named after a swarming insect.”
“We try to solve the problem of dealing with a lot of different sensors and a lot of different protocols and different information systems so we created a hardware platform that sends any information using any communication protocol to any computer system.”
Bootstrapping a global business
Particularly impressive about Libelium is the business has grown to a global brand employing 40 people since 2007 when Alicia and David founded their business on their meagre savings.
“We started with literally wïth nothing, just 3,000 euros which is all you have when you are twenty-four” says Alicia.
After raising funds through some grants and investors, the company got on with selling their products.
“We never wanted to be a company where it’s comfortable for three years without making money so we shipped a product in seven months.”
“We realise now how smart that was.”
Agriculture and smart cities
Connected cites and agriculture are the sectors Alicia sees as being the greatest opportunities for the company.
“I think that cities are very interesting, not because of the technology but what it really means,” says Alicia. “If you are able to have a dashboard of the city’s performance and governments are willing to apply open data then you are really promoting transparency.
“That’s the best legacy of the Internet of Things.”
In Agriculture Alicia sees opportunities in high value crops like vineyards, “we can reduce the amount of fertilisers, we can prevent illnesses in vines and you can even design the type of wine as you can control the amount of sugar in the grapes.”
For Spain, companies like Libelium represent the future of the nation’s industry. “We really need to re-invent the country,” says Alicia.
“I’m always saying that Spain is becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe when it comes to smart cities. Not only in Barcelona but you also have Santander, you have Malaga, Madrid and Zarazoga.”
So it may be that along with a swarm of Libelium sensors, Spain also has a swarm of smart cities. It may be enough to re-invent the country along with the agriculture industry and local governments.
With more bootstrapped startups like Libelium, Spain may even build its own version of Silicon Valley.
It turns out his bravery wasn’t rewarded as Blackberry’s brave attempt to reclaim their smartphone market share failed and now their hopes of a private equity takeover has failed with Heins announcing his resignation.
Still he walks away with several million dollars, so life isn’t too hard for Thorsten.
For Blackberry though the struggle continues with the company hoping to raise a billion dollars through a convertible note issue. It would be an investor braver than Thorsten Heins who takes that offer.
That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.
Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.
With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.
For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.
In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.
That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.
Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.
It’s best to leave the tech at home if you want an enjoyable holiday, but sometimes you’re travelling for work.
During last week I spent the last two days travelling by train between conferences in Spain and the UK while trying to work, write and blog. The lesson is you need to leave the tech at home if you want an enjoyable holiday.
Some of us however are travelling for business so the option of leaving the technology at home isn’t an option. Here are some tips on how to work effectively while on the road.
Charge, charge, charge
If you want to be connected you have to charge your devices at every opportunity, you never know when the next opportunity will arise.
Three pin European power socket
One trap for players is the earthed adaptor plug as the third pin basically renders your equipment useless on most trains and bathrooms. So beg borrow or steal one that lacks the pin which will almost certainly leave you with dead batteries on a night train.
Get Connected
Don’t rely on WiFi, in many places it’s patchy and in France requires convoluted sign up plans. When you can get it, consider it a bonus.
If staying more than three days in a city buying a local pre-paid SIM saves money, but when travelling a lot in Europe it’s best to buy a European wide SIM which will cost more but won’t die at the border.
The dying on the border shouldn’t be understated. On the night train from Barcelona to Paris the service – which the salesman assured would work in France – stopped working the moment the train exited the tunnel from Spain at Cerbere.
Avoid night travel
Should you be intending to work while on the road, avoid night travel. You’ll get more work done in a hotel room or hostel than on a stuffy night train and be more productive than after an overnight flight.
Travel light
Keep things to a minimum, if you’re working that might mean laptops and big cameras but for leisure keep it simple. The less tech you carry, the fewer the power, security and other hassles you’ll encounter.
Forget a schedule
Work where you can and when you can. If you’re diligent then flight and train delays can be your friend in getting stuff done.
Get a room
Working in hostels is almost impossible and you risk having things stolen, staying with friends and relatives is great but their hospitality makes it hard get things done. Get a cheap room so you can work in peace.
An important thing about travel is that you are away from home to learn about and experience other places, spending your time stressing about finding a power socket or Wi-Fi access point is not why you’re on the road.
Overall, tech is a hassle when you’re travelling. If you’re on the road for pleasure keep most of it at home, if you’re working then keep it all to a minimum.
Barcelona’s Hotel Arts features friendly staff and a nice glass of cava in the evening.
Sitting next to Frank Gehry’s giant goldfish on the city’s waterfront and marina, Barcelona’s Arts Hotel was part of the city’s redevelopment after the 1992 Olympics.
Like the giant fish, the hotel is a quirky building with a strange layout including an entrance that requires guests to catch a lift to the lobby on first floor.
Once you find the lobby, the staff are an incredibly friendly bunch hailing from around the Eurozone, including Dutch, French and Icelandic workers among the Spanish staff.
If you happen to be in the hotel between five and six, the management puts on free cava and nibbles in the lobby.
Free Wi-Fi is available is available in the lobby which adds to it being a comfortable place to sit if you have time to kill after checking out.
The standard suites, known as Deluxe Rooms, are comfortable with all the features expected in a five star hotel.
Double beds are comfortable with a high tech bedside control panel with several pre-set lighting configurations, a built in alarm clock and electric blinds that do a very good job of keeping the sun out if you want to lie in.
The bathroom has a spacious bath with a separate shower, bidet and toilet along with a generous range of toiletries, toothbrush and razor. The bathrobes are particularly comfortable.
The writing desk is good but suffers from a lack of power sockets with only a double, standard European three pin plug slot that’s already used by the desklamp and cordless phone. You’ll have to at least unplug the phone to get some work done.
Both ethernet and wireless access are available with a 25 Euro a day charge for access. It is possible to leech off the free hotel access as it appears to allow consecutive logins after each twenty-four period expires.
The inroom coffee machine is a Nespresso unit — the innovation that has change hotel coffe. One drawback with these devices is that management restricts guests to two free cartridges a day with additional ones charged at an extortionate four euro each. If you’re a coffee addict, it’s worthwhile buying a box of cartridges from the supermarket two blocks away.
While you’re at the supermarket it’s worth buying some drinks and snacks to get around the standard extortionate five star minibar prices, be warned though that the term ‘mini-bar’ was coined for the tiny fridges in the hotel so if you bring your own supplies don’t expect to fit in anything larger than a 600ml bottle.
A similar problem affects the room safe which is big enough to fit passports, wallets and phones but not a 10″ iPad.
One of the features with the Arts Hotel are the delightful roof top gardens with quiet nooks and crannies featuring various sculptures and architectural features.
The hotel’s swimming pool is 25m but is fiendishly cold, it’s good to wake up to but the idea of doing 40 laps quickly evaporates as any more than ten minutes in the pool isn’t comfortable.
Warming up after a swim isn’t so bad with some hammocks to relax in, these are popular with conference delegates killing time after checking out from the hotel, so grab one early.
Overall, the hotel is a good choice if you’re not travelling on a budget. While the location is a little way from Barcelona’s major tourist attractions it’s a 15 minute walk from the El Born district of Barcelona and two of the city’s tourist bus routes.
The most notable thing about the Hotel Arts is the friendliness of its staff – even if you can’t afford to stay there it’s worthwhile dropping around the lobby at 5pm for a glass of cava.
How Barcelona is using smart devices to make their city better.
Spain and Barcelona have faced challenges in recent years as the economy was hit hard by the 2008 crisis. Now the city is looking to the internet for the next wave of prosperity.
This quest for reinvention isn’t new for the city, “Barcelona used to be an industrial city, that was badly hit by the economic crisis of the seventies,” said Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives. “There were some guys in the city at the time that decided that we had to keep on being an important city.”
“There’s a new generation of politicians, civil servants, of thinkers and people committed to the city that ten years ago started to work on a new phase of what the city was to become.”
Antoni Vives – Deputy Mayor of Barcelona
“We decided that Barcelona had to become the edgiest city in the world related to the new revolution and the new revolution was this one — the technology related to mobility, devices and mainly the internet.”
That vision resulted in Barcelona starting to rewire the city which was one of the reasons for Cisco choosing the city as the venue for its inaugural Internet of Things World Forum.
As part of the event, the City took delegates on tours of some of the connected infrastructure the city has installed. Here’s what we learned on the press tour.
The digital bus stop
Digital bus stop
The digital bus stop is one of the prides of Barcelona, not only does it display digital advertising and real time bus schedules it also offers tourist information, USB charging sockets and acts as a free WiFi base station.
One of the barriers Barcelona has encountered has been the Spanish telecoms regulators objection to the city providing municipal WiFi so services are restricted to the city’s property, which happens to include bus stops.
The bus stops themselves are connected to the city’s fibre network that runs most of the backhaul and connects many of the fixed devices.
Smart parking spots
Smart parking space
Connected to the city’s WiFi network are these smart parking spaces that detect the presence of cars through a combination of light and metal detectors.
The city’s plan is that payment and monitoring of the smart parking spots will happen online and with smartphone apps.
Powering the dot, which is a fairly dumb device, is a battery with an expected five to seven year lifespan. Interestingly, the dots don’t work with motorcycles.
One of the reporters on the tour questioned the durability of these devices given Barcelona doesn’t get extreme temperatures, the response from the Cisco and city staff indicates that ice or hot weather may shorten the lifespan of these devices.
Smart lighting and monitoring
Smart lights and monitors
In the square outside the Born Cultural Centre, the city has installed a row of streetlights with multiple features including CCTV, air monitoring and Wifi. All of these lights are connected to the city’s 500Km long undeground fibre network.
The fibre network itself is being installed progressively as the city carries out routine maintenance to roads and other underground services. By co-ordinating the work with other trades it reduces the installation cost dramatically.
Smart censors in the street lights
Smart rubbish bins
Smart rubbish bins in Barcelona
The connected garbage bins are one of the showpieces of the city’s services. By monitoring trash levels, the council’s sanitation team can plot the optimal routes for collection services.
Smart rubbish bins sensor
Again the sensors on the bins are fairly dumb devices that connect wirelessly to a base station, shown on the pole above the bins in the earlier photo, these track rubbish levels and later versions are expected to detect the presence of obnoxious or hazardous materials that might be dumped in the bin.
Single person operation of the connected garbage truck
Operators of the garbage trucks get real time updates to their routes which optimises their productivity. It’s cost savings in the city’s operations which is one of the key drivers for the city’s investment in these technologies.
Power savings
Smart lighting systems
One of the major cost savings identified by the Barcelona Council is in energy costs. Along with the expense of running garbage trucks unnecessarily are power bills.
Part of the smart lighting system is that it will dim when there’s no motion detected in the streets and lighten when pedestrians are around. This is intended to save money and help the city meet it’s zero carbon emission targets.
Barcelona and the future
Every single one of the technologies being shown today in Barcelona will be commonplace in most developed cities in the near future.
The problem for adopting these systems is going to be connectivity, in places where there aren’t the fibre optic services or easily deployed WiFi it will be difficult to install smart devices and monitor them.
Every major city is going to be facing the question of how they deploy these devices over the next decade as their residents expect better and more efficient service. Barcelona has taken the first steps that most others will follow.
Cisco Systems is making big bets on the internet of everything
“You might call us naïve, but we’re looking at changing the world,” Cisco CEO John Chambers told journalists at the Internet of Things World Forum in Barcelona yesterday.
That’s a big, hairy audacious goal which sounds feasible when the company estimates 50 billion devices will be connected to the net by the end of the decade in an industry worth 14 trillion dollars.
Given the size of the market there’s a concern that different standards will affect the industry.
One objective of Cisco holding its event in Barcelona was to start the process of creating standards around the connected devices as the company’s futurist, Dave Evans, pointed out that getting WiFi standards agreed early meant the technology was quickly accepted as users could be confident of their systems talking to each other.
Regardless of the standards adopted, the Internet of Things is already growing with industries from mining to logistics connecting their equipment. This is improving productivity and speeding up the supply chain.
The effects on industries promise to be huge.
Chambers’ message to CEOs was blunt, “by the time it’s obvious you have to move, it’s too late. Have the courage to think big. Have the courage to take risks.”
For Cisco the Internet of Things is probably not a risk at all, as the company that dominates the market for the equipment that is the plumbing of the net will almost certainly profit greatly from the adoption of connected equipment.
Other businesses won’t be in such a good position as their industries change and it’s worthwhile listening to Chambers’ advice.
This is an interesting, and somewhat provocative, idea. While there’s no doubt ubiquitous internet is an essential service in an advanced economy and increasingly critical to most industries, calling it a basic human right is a big call.
Perhaps we need to consider there is a kind of technological order of services, something similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.
In the tech sector the most basic is electricity as without power all this technology is useless.
Sitting above this are the core infrastructure like the cables, ducts, telegraph poles and subsea cables.
Then perhaps there is the internet itself including the routers, switches and base stations which keep the internet running.
Above those are the connected devices — the smartphones, the robot mining equipment and the internet fridge.
Processing all the data these devices generate is the job of the data centres and cloud computing services which make the internet of everything work.
So perhaps to describe broadband as a fundamental human right is overstating things when a large proportion of humanity doesn’t have access to reliable electricity or drinking water.
What’s interesting watching John Chambers talk is how passionate he is about the Internet of Everything, so much so he’s betting the company on it.
It’s understandable that John Chambers and Cisco would consider broadband internet to be one of life’s essentials as it is critical for the company’s growth and survival but for humanity we should remember that some technologies and services are more essential than others.
