Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
Posts relating to the internet of things, IoT and M2M technologies
Security with the internet of things is becoming a serious issue warns HP
Following yesterday’s posts on BlackBerry, security and the Internet of Things, HP Fortify released a report saying seventy percent of IoT devices are vulnerable to hackers.
The list of weaknesses is chilling and illustrates why IoT security is an issue that has to be resolved now.
It may well be that John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO, has backed the right horse for his company.
How companies embrace big data and the internet of things illustrates the digital divide in the small business world
One of the questions about the development of Big Data has been how small businesses can use all the information pouring into their operations.
The New York Times this weekend has a feature illustrating some small business applications for big data.
In one of the case studies Brian Janezic, a 27 year old owner of two car washes in Arizona, created his own application that automates his business and monitors consumable levels.
The story further highlights how businesses like The Serbian Lion that haven’t done the simple basics like online listings are being left far behind more nimbler operations like Janezic’s.
Contrasting the two operations illustrates the digital divide between businesses. The sad thing is that many of the baby boomer owned enterprises not embracing the new technologies are further compromising the assets their proprietors are depending upon for their retirement.
Apple makes its stake for the smarthome while Canada builds the smart fridge
On the seventh anniversary the release of the iPhone, Apple makes it clear they see smarthome as the next opportunity.
The latest Apple ad showcases the iPhone at the centre of the connected home controlling baby monitors, GPS enabled pet collars and smart lights. The massage is Apple’s iHome brings families together.
While Apple is showing its cuddly side, those vendors who think an iHome is going to a great opportunity may well find they’re working with a ruthless competitor as reports claim Apple is about to launch its own range of smart home devices.
Meanwhile in Canada, they have better things to do with smart kitchen appliances…..
Jailbreaking the smarthome opens some complications for the Internet of Things
The news that hackers have turned their attention to Nest thermostats raises some delicious possibilities for the Internet of Things.
Jailbreaking smartphones has been normal for years as people circumvent restrictions to add features or software and there’s no reason that this can’t be done to smart thermostats, light bulbs or kettles.
Almost all the smart devices being deployed have processors and capabilities far greater than what’s needed to carry out their designed purpose, so an imaginative hacker can do some interesting things with a jailbroken home automation system.
Using your kettle to control your lights or fridge to open your garage door is a bit of gimmick but there’s plenty of potential for doing some cool, and mischievous, things.
While hacking the smart home for kicks might be relatively harmless, tinkering with industrial devices could have unintended and disastrous consequences. It’s another example why security is one of the top concerns as the Internet of Things is rolled out.
Microsoft’s partnership with American Family Insurance shows how insurers are adopting the Internet of Things, is the community ready for real time monitoring of risk?
Earlier this week, Microsoft Ventures announced a partnership with American Family Insurance in an accelerator for home automation services.
The insurance industry has an obvious interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) as constant monitoring allows them to make more accurate assessments of risk and quickly adjust policies or premiums when circumstances change.
“We are focused on helping early stage companies bring new products and services to market that can make our policyholders’ homes and lives safer,” Microsoft’s media release quotes Dan Reed, American Family Ventures’ Managing Director as saying.
For consumers and the public at large, there a serious implications of constant monitoring by insurance companies, marketers and government agencies.
As Business Insider points out, Google already holds a massive amount of data on us all with Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft not far behind.
One of the key questions of the next decade is ‘do we we want our smart smoke detectors spying on us?’ and, if so, do we want it giving that data straight to the insurance company?
Will an Amazon phone succeed in tethering customers to the company?
Today Amazon is expected to launch a smartphone which the New York Times suggests will tether consumers to the company.
With 240,0000 apps in its Kindle store, Amazon will be formidable competitor to Google Android devices and Apple. Like iTunes, Amazon also have a strength in already knowing the customer’s credit card details.
The question is can Amazon be trusted? As we see with the Hachette book publishers dispute, Amazon is a company that’s ruthless in bullying suppliers and has a mandate to do so from its shareholders.
With the smartphone becoming the centre of the connected lifestyle, the stakes are high as whoever controls the customer’s pocket controls the customer’s smarthome, smartcar, retail and health applications.
Of course whoever wins this battle, they’ll still have to pay Microsoft for patents.
Proving that incumbents can strike back, Honeywell takes on Google’s Nest smart thermostat
Last week Apple sent a big message to the smarthome industry with their announcement of the Homekit, this week industrial control giant Honeywell has released its answer to the Google owned Nest smart thermostat with the Lyric.
The Lyric smart thermostat system is quite an impressive package; along with the smart thermostat, it includes a smartphone app and cloud service that lets users control their home heating remotely.
Other features are maintenance alerts, personalised heating settings and geolocation services for turning systems off and on when occupants are approaching or leaving home. To boot, Honeywell claim the Lyric can save households $200 a year.
It’s a strong push into the smarthome market which Honeywell has been part of since the concept began thirty years ago and it shows incumbents don’t always sit back and wait for disrupters to steal their markets.
The Lyric’s strength is Honeywell’s massive installed base and its army of experienced contractors; the likely way the smarthome market will evolve is that most installations are going to be carried out while homes are being built or refurbished which gives the incumbents even more strength.
What’s missing in the media releases and review is whether the Lyric’s cloud services will offer open APIs to other developers and what format household data will be available in. If it’s a relatively open system then it will have a big advantage over Google’s Nest which all indications show is going to be closed to other providers.
No doubt we’ll also be seeing compatible air conditioning units and heaters entering the market soon as well which will drive a standard of some sort to develop in the HVAC field, again the question of how open those protocols will be remains to be seen.
The next move is Google’s, it will be interesting to see how the company will react to the incumbents fighting back and Apple’s strong positioning to dominate the market.
A slideshow on how Barcelona is using the Internet of Things to build a smartcity.
Last year I posted the Geek’s Tour of Barcelona, looking at the town’s smartcity initiatives after visiting the city for Cisco’s Internet of Things World Forum.
At the Australian Internet of Things Forum in Newcastle last month I cobbled together a quick presentation around the topic to illustrate what smartcities can deliver.
This was particularly topical for Newcastle as the New Lunaticks and the local business community are supporting the Kaooma project run by Vimoc Technologies in one of the city’s entertainment districts.
Kaooma – which is an entrant in Cisco’s IoT Innovation Grand Challenge – is particularly interesting because it’s a wholly private project with little, if any, formal government support as opposed to London’s Regent Street Internet of Things initiative that’s part of a billion pound regeneration of the precinct.
Australia’s Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port, has a number of challenges itself as the country’s once in a century mining boom unwinds and city deals with a neglected downtown in the face of a rapidly changing economy.
While the Barcelona project is in early days, the presentation shows how cities are using the Internet of Things today and gives us some hints on how those uses will evolve over time.
Paul travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Cisco Systems
Apple’s gets its message out about wearable technology
“You’re more powerful than you think” is the message of Apple’s current iPhone advertising campaign.
Their latest advert in the campaign features joggers, gymnasts, swimmers and golfers all using iPhone apps to connect with their wearable technologies.
It didn’t take long after Monday’s World Wide Developer Conference announcement of Apple’s Healthkit for the company to get its message out about wearable technology.
Undoubtedly we can look forward to soon seeing the Homekit smarthome campaign showing how Apple’s products make life easy in the smarthome.
What’s absolutely clear is Apple’s determination to be the hub of the domestic internet of things, whether the vendors of those fitness and smarthome devices want to be locked into the world of Apple remains to be seen.
Apple’s iOS8 and OS X Yosemite announcements are part of the company’s attempt to dominate parts of the internet of things.
As usual, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco yesterday concentrated the attention of the tech world.
This year’s was a little more subdued than usual with the key announcement being around Apple’s new Yosemite OSX operating system, iOS8 and the new developer Software Developer Kit (SDK).
While a little underwhelming after all the speculation about smartwatches and fitness devices, these announcements mark a clear strategy for Apple to lock customers into their products through the cloud, smarthomes and wearable devices.
Normally discussion about an SDK makes most people’s eyes glaze over, but Apple’s announcement marks a change in the company’s strategy in making over 4,000 APIs – Application Program Interfaces – open for developers to connect their programs into iOS8.
This marks a change for the company in allowing programs to easily hook into Apple’s mobile operating system and while it looks like a move to openness, the ease of making fitness applications, home automation and smart car services actually helps lock users into the Apple ecosystem.
Key to the ecosystem lock-in strategy are the Healthkit and Homekit services offering connections to health and home automation applications which are part of Apple’s Internet of things play, by offering easy access into the iPhone and iPad the company hopes to lock users of third party devices into the iOS world.
Similarly, the cloud services included with Yosemite and iOS8 increase that lock-in making it harder for users to step outside that ecosystem. It’s notable there’s no Android app version of the cloud service which indicates how Google is now Apple’s number one enemy.
Apple’s announcement today shows how the company is positioning itself to lock users into their services as the internet of things rolls into businesses, cars and homes.
It’s an indication the internet of things may well become a world of closed silos and it will be interesting to see how competitors react to Apple’s attempts to be the biggest walled garden.
Allegations of Bitcoin market manipulation are a reminder of the risks in blindly trusting data.
For two years we were captivated by spectacular rise of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Allegations those gains were a result of market fixing raise important questions about the integrity of our data networks.
The Coin Desk website discusses how the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange was being ramped by computer bot network nicknamed Willy.
Rampant market ramping – where stock prices are pushed up to attract suckers before those in know sell at a profit – has a proud financial market history; during the 1920s US stock boom, fortunes were made by inside players before the crash and its subsequent banning in 1934.
So it wouldn’t be a surprise that some smart players would try to ramp the Bitcoin market to make a buck and using a botnet – a network of infected computers – to run the trades is a good technological twist.
The Willy botnet though is a worry for those of us watching the connected economy as it shows a number of weaknesses in a world where data is blindly trusted.
As Quinn Norton writes on Medium, everything in the software industry is broken and blindly trusting the data pouring into servers could be a risky move.
The internet of things is based upon the idea of sensors gathering data for smart services to make decisions – one of those decisions is buying and selling securities.
It’s not too hard to see a scenario where a compromised service feeds false data such as steel shipments, pork belly consumption or energy usage to manipulate market prices or to damage a competitor’s business.
Real world ramifications of bad data could see not only honest investors out of pocket but also steel workers out work, abattoirs sitting on onsold stocks of pig carcasses or blackouts as energy companies miscalculate demand.
The latter has happened before, with Enron manipulating the Californian electricity market in the late 1990s.
When your supply chain depends upon connected devices reporting accurate information then the integrity of data becomes critical.
Like much in the computer world, the world of big data and the internet of things is based up trust, the Mt Gox Bitcoin manipulation reminds us that we can’t always trust the data we receive.
The future of design and 4D printing are the topics of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram
I’ll be on ABC Sydney this morning discussing 4D printing and the future of design as the Sydney Vivid Festival swings into gear.
Some of the areas we’ll be looking at in the spot that should start around 10.20am is what exactly is 4D printing, how can materials build themselves and how designers are creating more sustainable devices like Google’s Project Ara.
One particularly interesting Vivid session is the Electric Dreams to Reality session that will feature local entrepreneurs and makers explaining how they are using the internet of things and new design.
We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.
If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.
