Internet of Things | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Silos and security in the internet of things

Is vendor lock in a bigger risk than security in the internet of machines?

Last week Deloitte launched its list of 500 fastest growing Asia-Pacific Technology companies.

At the Australian media briefing on the list and the company’s predictions for the telecommunications market in 2014 Deloitte’s Jolyn Barker and Eric Openshaw discussed the some of the implications of the report.

During the briefing Openshaw was asked about the risks of vendors creating their own Internet of Things standards to lock customters into proprietary platforms.

Openshaw isn’t convinced, “over time when technologies develop out of significant players in an attempt to create or extend a vertical stack, over time the market tends to revolt against that.”

“There’s usually one or two forces working against that, either the market revolts against it and insists on a new standard or the stack is too successful and regulators will come in and say ‘we don’t like your stack, dismantle it’ .”

His view is that in the long term issues of vendor lock-in and proprietary platforms fix themselves. “One way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”

Where Openshaw does see risks with lying in the security of machine to machine technologies.

“The security aspect just can’t be overstated in terms of how important it is,” says Openshaw. “When we have demonstrations now of being able to hack a pacemaker, that’s a problem.”

“So the security issues on these networks is important.”

The interplay between the software, network protocols and security is going to be complex and may well be what makes or breaks some vendors products.

It’s still early days to fully appreciate all the risks with the internet of machines, but securing networks and devices will be one of the most important tasks ahead for the industry.

Discussing Cryptolocker and Internet of Things security on ABC Radio

This morning with Linda Mottram on ABC 702 I’ll be discussing Cryptolocker ransomware and the security of the Internet of Machines.

If you missed the program, you can listen to the segments through Soundcloud.

Tuesday morning with Linda Mottram on ABC 702 I’ll be discussing Cryptolocker ransomware, the security of the Internet of Machines and the tech industry’s call for less internet surveillance.

It’s only a short spot from 10.15am and I’m not sure we’ll have time for callers, but one of the big takeaways I’ll have for listeners is the importance of securing your systems against malware, there’s also some security ideas for business users as well.

We’ll probably get to mention the ACCC’s warnings on smartphone apps and the current TIFF bug in Windows as well.

If you’re in the Sydney area, we’ll be live on 702 from 10.15, otherwise you can stream it through the internet.

Where will the jobs come from in the internet of things?

The internet of things promises to make industry more efficient, but what will happen to employment?

One of the common worries about the internet of things and the automation of business processes is that many jobs are going to be lost as a consequence.

This is a fair concern however we need to keep in perspective just how radically employment has changed in the last century.

Concerns about technology displacing occupations is nothing new; in the eighteenth century the Luddite movement was a reaction to skilled workers being displaced by new innovations.

In an interview with GE’s Chief Economist Marco Annunziata, published in Business Spectator, we covered this topic and Marco had a valid point that the bulk of the Western world’s workforce was employed in agriculture a hundred years ago.

Today it’s less than two percent in most developed country as agriculture became heavily automated, yet most of those workers who would once have worked in the fields have productive jobs. “As an economist I look at this over a long term perspective and I’ve heard this concern about technology displacing jobs over and over again.”

Annunziata sees new roles being created, among them what he calls ‘mechanical-digital engineers’ who understand both how the actual machines work as well as the data and the software used to run and monitor them.

This isn’t to say there won’t be massive disruption – John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath described the massive dislocation that happened in the United States with the first wave of agricultural mechanisation in the 1920s and the decline in rural communities is due directly to modern farms not needing the large workforces that sustained many country towns.

We can’t see where the jobs of the future will be and just roles like as Search Engine Optimisation and ecommerce experts where unheard of twenty years ago, our kids will be working in occupations we haven’t contemplated.

It’s up to us to give our kids the skills and flexibility of thinking that will let them find opportunities in a very different workplace.

Abolishing the service visit

Will the internet of things change the way we service our cars and industrial equipment?

“Service used to be an act of damage control,” said Salesforce’s Peter Coffee at the recent Dreamforce conference. “You are bleeding brand equity until that problem is fixed.”

Coffee’s view is that the internet of things is an opportunity to delight the customer with proactive service that allows companies to fix customers’ problems before they happen.

Zero planned maintenance

Taking this idea further is GE’s Chief Economist, Marco Annunziata, who sees the internet of things as an opportunity to introduce the concept of Zero Planned Downtime where there is no need to stop machines for scheduled repairs and maintenance.

“A lot of the maintenance work is done on a fixed schedule,” Annunziata. “You end up wasting time and money servicing machines that are perfectly fine.”

“On the other hand you might miss that something is about to go wrong between two maintenance periods.”

“The idea of the industrial internet is that by gathering so much data from these machines themselves – plus having the software to analyse this data – you will have information that flags to you when intervention is needed.”

Annunziata’s view is that connected machines won’t need to have regular service intervals, instead of insisting a car has an inspection every ten thousand kilometers where the tyres are replaced and the oil changed, often unnecessarily, the vehicle need only be called in for maintenance when its sensors flag that a part or consumable needs attention.

Finding the benefits

While that can mean big savings for car owners, it’s in fields such as aviation, mining and logistics where the greatest benefits of Zero Planned Downtime would be found.

For businesses it’s another example of how they will fall behind if they don’t invest in modern technology as those who invest in newer, connected equipment will be able to reduce downtime and maintenance cost.

How achievable Zero Planned Downtime is in many fields remains to be seen, not least because of regulatory hurdles in sectors like aviation, however the idea does promise to change the business model of companies that depend upon service revenue.

Delighting the customer – the new business normal

Peter Coffee, Salesforce Vice President for Strategic Research discusses the new business normal where mobile services, collaboration, community and understanding your data are essential tasks for every manager.

Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Reserach, Peter Coffee joined the Decoding The New Economy channel at last week’s Dreamforce conference to discuss the new normal — delighting the customer.

Coffee’s role at Salesforce is to help the company’s potential clients understand the new normals of business life. “It’s a lot of listening,” he says.

In describing the new normal, Coffee is in tune with Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff in seeing mobile services as being one of the key parts of how business will look in the near future.

“The fundamental statement is your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

“Fundamentally people are mobile centric so we need to rethink our operations.”

Continuing the social journey

It’s not just mobile services that are changing the way we do, social media continues to be companies’ weak points in Coffee’s opinion.

“There’s research that’s come out of places like MIT that shows traditional print and broadcast media are still valuable for creating awareness of your brand but the final step of turning someone from knowing who you are into deciding to do business with you is now made today only when a trusted network confirms it.”

“People don’t make that final step of buying from you until they’ve consulted their trusted advisors.”

“Another fundamental change that’s happened is that the connectivity of the customer is such that if you have a customer that’s unhappy with you for even five or ten minutes there’s a tweet or a Facebook post or a LinkedIn update just begging to leak out and damage your brand,” says Coffee.

“The closer you can get to instantaneous resolution to the issue, the better.”

Internet of machines

With the internet of machines, the ability to resolve customers’ problems instantaneously becomes more more achievable in Coffee’s opinion.

“Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

“If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those productslong before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

“You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.'”

“Wow! That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation.”

Delighting the customers

All of these mobile, social and internet of things technologies will give businesses the tools to delight their customers and Coffee sees that as the great challenge in the new business normal.

While many businesses will meet the challenges presented by mobile customers and their connected machines Coffee warns those who don’t are in for a painful time.

“If you do not have delighted customers you have no market.” States Coffee, “the way that you delight customers is by making sure every interaction with you leaves them happier than they were before.”

“Traditional silos of sales, service, support and marketing must be dissolved into one new entity which is proactive customer connection.”

“Companies that neglect to adopt it will discover they have customers who are sensitive to nothing but price,” warns Coffee.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.

The real thing behind the internet of things

We need to think beyond technology to get value the real value from the internet of things says Alicia Asin, the CEO and co-founder of Spanish sensor company Libelium.

Libelium and its CEO Alicia Asin has been covered previously on this blog and we had the opportunity to record an interview with Alicia at the 2013 Dreamforce conference.

Alicia told us about her vision for how she sees cities and governments evolving in an era of real time accessible information, in many ways it’s similar to where the Deputy Lord Mayor of Barcelona sees his city being at the end of this decade.

“I would say the biggest legacy the internet of things can bring is transparency,” says Alicia. “In the smart cities movement the IoT gives an opportunity for have a dashboard for cities.”

“You can see the investment made for reducing traffic investment downtown, the carbon footprint reduced and the return on investment,” says Alicia. “You can have very objective facts to supply to the citizens and they can make better decisions.”

For this vision to become true, it means government data has to open to the community which is something that challenges many administrations, however Alicia also told the story of how her company supplied Geiger counters to volunteers monitoring the radiation fallout around the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan.

“We made a project in Fukushima when the nuclear accident happened where we sent some Geiger counters to the hacker space,” says Alicia. “Suddenly all the people with the Geiger counters started to publish the data onto the internet.”

“They were keeping a totally independent radiation map made by the activist citizens.”

Alicia raises an important point of how citizens can be using technology independently of governments. This was most notable in the Occupy movements across the United States that sprung up in late 2011 where hackers set up independent communications networks and recorded events outside the control of mainstream media and government agencies.

While citizens can use these tools to get around official restrictions, governments play an important role in developing new industries around these technologies, Alicia sees the smart city investments made by Spanish cities as creating the start of a Spanish Silicon Valley.

“Despite the economy, we are seeing a number of projects in Spain around smart cities,” Alicia observes. “In fact, I’m saying Spain is becoming the Silicon Valley for smart cities.”

“In terms of attracting big companies to look at what’s going on in Spain and to build a bigger brand around the Internet of Things, I think that really helps.”

With government and citizens working together, Alicia sees the Internet of Things delivering great changes to society as it enables citizens and makes governments more accountable.

“It’s the real thing, it’s beyond technology.”

Have we over-consumerised IT?

One of the phenomenons of the modern technology industry is the ‘consumerisation of IT’, but have we taken that trend too far?

I’ve spent today at the opening of the 2013 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco talking to various people about where the IT industry is going.

The dominant thing at this year’s conference is the “internet of things” or, as Salesforce are marketing it, “the internet of customers.”

What’s notable in this view is the marketing and consumer centric view of the IT world, something not surprising given Salesforce’s roots as a sales and marketing service, despite last year showing off the social media connected jet engine at last year’s conference.

Salesforce aren’t alone in this view, most conversations about the tech industry revolve around marketing and advertising. Last week’s Telstra’s Digital Summit was notable for focusing almost exclusively on brands and social media while missing the point that digital business is far more than just adopting online marketing channels.

For most industries, the marketing and direct consumer connection is only a small part of how technology, not least the internet of machines, is transforming business with manufacturing and supply chain management two areas that are being totally changed with high stakes and big money involved.

Cracking the enterprise market is hard, which is why most startup tech businesses focus on the customer market and the relatively easy, albeit cash poor, advertising and premium revenue streams.

While the focus is often on the consumer and mass-market side of the web and internet of machines, the real money, and change is in the business sector. This is exactly how most of today’s tech giants — Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce to name a few — came to be where they are today.

There’s no doubt the consumerisation of IT was a real phenomenon, but it may be that it’s currently being overplayed. We need to think beyond marketing when considering how technology is changing our businesses.

The ghost in the internet of machines

What happens when your internet connected egg tray gets a virus?

A funny thing happened two hours out of Auckland, the cabin crew on the Air New Zealand flight to San Francisco announced the inflight entertainment system had to be rebooted.

In the thirty minutes it took for the system to reset and reload, various in-seat functions such as the cabin call button and light switch froze, it was a basic example of how complex systems interact with each other.

The benefits of a connected egg tray involve the device telling us when more eggs are needed, but what happens when the thing tries to tell your online shopping service that you need 200 dozen?

As the internet of things develops and business systems become more automated, complexity is going to become greater and more subtle. Understanding and managing the risks that extend from that is going to be essential for both public safety and the economy.

“The Internet of Things creates a whole new range of attack surfaces” Cisco Systems’ Enterprise Group Vice President Rod Soderbery told the Internet of Things conference in Barcelona last month.

One of those many ‘attack surfaces’ identified by Fraser Howard, Principle Researcher of Sophos Labs are the dozens of household devices from smart TVs to internet connected egg holders that are beginning to appear in homes.

Almost all these devices will have flaws in their firmware and yet almost no vendor has an interest in maintaining or patching the firmware of this equipment.

“Consumers have no way of managing this problem” says Fraser as it’s almost impossible for householders to upgrade their systems and consumer electronics manufacturers have a poor track security track record.

“There’s a long history of companies with mass market items which deal with things like important items like credentials where they have not had a single thought about security,” says Fraser.

Security is one the many challenges facing the internet of things along with to manage rogue devices in grid networks. There’s a lot of work to be done in ensuring systems aren’t disrupted by an outlier sensor or critical information disclosed by a poorly secured or out of date smart device.

As connected egg trays start talking to the supermarket, we have to be confident that we aren’t going to come home to find our connected device hasn’t delivered a pallet load of fresh eggs or that it hasn’t given away our banking details to an organised crime ring.

Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

Online security problems are chronic and costing our economies billions claim researchers.

“No country is cyber-ready” warns Melissa Hathaway, author the Cyber-Readiness Report.

Hathaway’s warning is that the economic benefits of the internet are being lost to the various vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure.

Dutch research company TNO claims that the Netherlands lost up to 2% of their GDP to cybercrime in 2010 and Hathaway claims similar losses are being incurred in other developed countries.

Supporting Hathaway’s views at a function in Sydney today, Cisco System’s Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, made a frightening observation about corporate networks.

“Every single customer we have checked with, and these are the Fortune 2000, has high threat malware operating in their environment – every single one of them.”

So the bad guys are in our networks and causing real economic damage. The question for businesses and governments is how do we manage this threat and mitigate any losses?

On our more intimate level, how do we manage our own systems and online behaviour to limit our personal or business losses?

Hathaway makes the point that the internet was never intended to do the job we now expect it to do and as consequence security was never built into the net’s design.

Today, we rely upon the internet regardless of its lack of inbuilt security. With everyone from governments through to organised crime and petty scammers wanting to peek at our data, we have to start taking security far more seriously.

ABC Nightlife Computers – explaining the internet of things

For the November 2013 Nightlife, we look at the Internet of things and smart cities

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November 2013 Nightlife spot we’ll be looking at the internet of everything.

If you missed the show, you can listen to the recording at the Nightlife website.

The internet of everything is the next big thing in the tech industry, but what how is it any different from the web we know today that’s given us cute pictures of cats, Twitter and the end of newspapers? Some of the questions we’ll cover include;

what exactly is the internet of things?
how is it different from today’s internet?
is this just another tech industry slogan like big data or social media?
things like aircraft have been connected to the net for years, why is this suddenly news?
what sort of machines are we talking about connecting?
some industry pundits are saying this business could be worth $14 trillion dollars, where do they get this number from?
how are governments looking at using these technologies?
During the week it was reported Google have patented a tattoo with an embedded microphone.
so what happens when viruses get into our wearable technologies and connected fridge?

Part of the show will cover the geek’s tour of Barcelona and the interview with Antoni Vires, Deputy Mayor of the city on how the Spanish industrial centre sees it’s role as a connected city.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Building smart cities

Barcelona has a big vision for the city’s future as Deputy Mayor Antoni Vires describes.

What will the connected cities of the 21st Century look like and how will they provide service for even their most disadvantaged residents?

The latest Decoding the New Economy Video features an interview with Antoni Vives, Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, about his community’s journey to become a smart city.

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 swarm of electronic dragonflies

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.