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.
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.
Cisco System’s search for an Internet of Everthing killer app may not be necessary.
Today was the opening of Cisco System’s Internet of Things conference in Barcelona, Spain and in the morning sessions there was constant question of what will be the killer app for this range of technologies.
A killer app is the application that drives adoption of a new technology – for the Personal Computer, it was spreadsheet programs that made systems attractive to company accountants and from there the PC made its way into the workplace.
Right now, you’d have to say parking systems are the great hope for the industry and this makes sense in that it’s an easy to explain to the general public and it helps solve an ongoing problem for local governments.
But does the Internet of Everything really need a killer app?
The Internet of everything is the coming together of various different technologies — cheap processors, pervasive internet, cloud computing and big data are all reasons why the concept has taken off.
In fact, many of the applications aren’t new, telemetry systems have been around since the early days of networks and even parking technologies like number plate recognition and space meters have become common over the last decade.
Across industries like logistics, mining and agriculture the Internet of Things or Machine to Machine (M2M) communications has been steadily growing with each new generation of connected equipment.
The difference with the next wave of technology is that devices are smarter and able to talk to each other which is where companies like Cisco see the opportunity of tapping into what they believe will be a 14 trillion dollar market by the end of the decade.
What concerns many in the industry is the risk of the technologies become proprietary islands where each major company has its own standards that don’t talk to the others.
The risk of vendor lock in is probably greater than the search for a killer app, indeed there’s no particular reason why anyone should be waiting for a compelling application to come along.
Instead of waiting for a killer app it’s probably better for industries to find their own uses for these technologies and steadily implement them.
While Cisco are almost certainly right about the impact of the Internet of Everything, it’s one of these pervasive technologies that changes everything in ways that aren’t immediately apparent like the motor car or the internet itself.
Crowdfunding is in its early days and Moore’s Cloud founder Mark Pesce explains some of the lessons we have to learn about this new way of raising capital.
“I’d rather eat a bullet than do a Kickstarter campaign again,” says Moore’s Cloud founder Mark Pesce in the latest Decoding The New Economy video when asked about crowdfunding his project.
Moore’s cloud is an internet of things company that focuses on lighting, “we think it’s interesting and something that expresses emotion” Mark says.
With their first project, Moore’s Cloud looked to raise $700,000 to build their first project but fell well short of their target.
Falling short lead to Mark and his team executing a classic business pivot from a static lights to Holiday, a system of intelligent fairy lights.
“We took exactly the same technology and put it into a different form factor,” said Mark. “It’s as if we took the light and unwound it.”
The failure of the Kickstarter campaign gave the Moore’s Cloud founders an education on how crowdfunding works.
Customer focused from day one
An important aspect of crowdfunding is it’s very customer focused. From day one of the campaign, the venture has to devote resources on relations with those who’ve pledged a contribution.
Most startups don’t have those resources, or the time and skills, to deal with those relations.
“People say it’s a better way of getting investors. I would have to say ‘it’s not better, it’s different.'” Mark says about crowdfunding.
The psychology of investors
One of the differences is the psychology of investors. Mark was urged by the CEO of Indiegogo, Slava Rubin, to set a low target as participants like to back successful campaigns.
“There’s a whole bunch of psychology I didn’t understand going in,” says Mark. “If we’d had a goal of $200,000 we probably would have filled it in the first two weeks.”
“Once a campaign is fully funded, it tends to get overfunded.”
A truism of business is that banks will only lend to you when you don’t need the money and it strangely appears the same thing applies to crowdfunding.
We’re in the early days of crowdfunding and there’s more to be learned about the way it works and for which ventures the fund raising technique works best.
The experience of campaigns like Moore’s Cloud are part of how we’ll discover the nuances of crowdfunding and the psychology of the crowds that contribute.
Fixing broken products was a profitable business for many companies, the Internet of Everything is changing that industry model.
One of the most profitable areas for many companies has been in fixing broken products, now the internet of everything promises to put an end to that business model.
‘Break-fix’ has always been a good profit earner with business ranging from construction companies to washing machine manufacturers making good money from fixing failed products.
Speaking at a lunch in Sydney earlier today GE’s CEO of Global Growth and Operations, John Rice, described how the Internet of Everything is changing in the industrial landscape.
One of the big business changes Rice sees is in the ‘break-fix’ model of many industrial suppliers.
“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”
“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.
Goodbye to the TV mechanic
This is true in many other industries as products become both more reliable and less economical to repair – the local TV repairman has largely vanished and the backyard computer support businesses are going the same way.
For many businesses, this means a change to how they service their customers and the nature of their operations. For many, it means close monitoring of their products will be essential to manage risk.
Rice also flagged how grid computing will improve the reliability of equipment and networks citing how giant wind turbine talk to each other.
“Every wind turbine has an anemometer on top that’s used to judge wind speed and direction,” says Rice. “If you had a problem with the anemometer the wind turbine shut down until someone could come out – maybe a week later – to climb to the top of the turbine, diagnose the problem and start the thing back up.”
“Today the technology is such that the wind turbines talk to each other so if you’re in a wind field of thirty turbines you don’t rely on one anemometer,” points out Rice. “This is a very simple example of machine to machine interface.”
Wind turbines and the road toll
Rice’s example of wind turbines talking to each other is similar to Cisco’s scenario of using the internet of everything to reduce the road toll where cars communicate with road signs, traffic lights and each other to monitor conditions on the highway ahead.
Those machines talking together also give early warnings of problems which reduces downtime and risk for industrial users, it also means less money for businesses who’ve made money from those problems.
Does the Microsoft Surface show the company is starting to execute Steve Ballmer’s device and services strategy?
Microsoft’s latest version of their Surface tablet computer is the company’s first attempt at executing Steve Ballmer’s device and services strategy. If the company succeeds, there are some interesting implications for the tablet computer market.
Currently Microsoft is on a worldwide PR campaign to promote their latest range of Surface tablet computers. Last week during the Sydney leg of their tour I had the opportunity for a hands on demonstration of the new devices with Jack Cowett of the product’s marketing team.
The Surface itself is an interesting device with some major upgrades and changes as Microsoft begins to understand the tablet market with the device having more memory, better processors and battery life – although the lack of a cellular version is going to hinder its adoption by the consumer and small business markets.
Devices and services
It’s in the device’s integration with Microsoft’s cloud and communication services where the long term vision, and real story behind the Surface lies.
Most obvious is the bundling of services with purchasers of a Microsoft Surface 2 or Surface Pro getting 200Gb of Sky Drive storage and a year’s free international calls included with the device.
It’s an early taste of how Microsoft can combine services and devices that leverage off their existing position in the marketplace.
While these incentives may not be enough to convince customers that the Windows systems are a better buy than Android or Apple devices, integrating these cloud services makes the computers more powerful devices.
Keyboards as blades
Equally interesting with the Surface, is Microsoft’s devices play with the range of Surface covers that the company is informally calling ‘blades’ – an unfortunate choice of name which will confuse conversations with many IT managers.
Blade covers for Microsoft surface tablets
These covers dispense with the usual keyboard electronic layout with an underlying layout featuring a 1024 sensor pad that give the covers more potential than just being keyboards.
As part of the Microsoft marketing push to show this aspect off, the company has released a blade cover with a sound mixer layout and seeded the devices with various DJs under the banner of the Remix Project.
While the blade covers have applications as sound mixers and keyboards, the number and flexible nature of the 1080 built in sensors will see their application in other areas.
Should third party developers be able to develop their own skins for Surface blade covers then Microsoft may have a killer industrial device that plugs into existing Windows based networks.
Added to Microsoft’s opportunity is the possibility of plugging Surface devices into the internet of everything giving business users direct access to the machines in their organisation.
Should Microsoft be able to capture a slice of these markets, it may well be a pointer for the company’s future in a post-PC world.
Regardless of how well Microsoft do with the internet of everything, the latest range of Surface tablets and accessories shows how the company is executing its strategy of becoming a devices and services company.
What does the internet of everything mean for businesses? Cisco’s Ken Boal explains.
As part of the Decoding the New Economy video series, I had the opportunity of interviewing Ken Boal, the head of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, about the Internet of Everything and how it will change business.
“The internet of everything is about things, it’s about people, process and it’s about data,” says Ken. “Compounding together to create new capabilities and drive opportunities for nations, enterprises, government and right down to consumers.”
“It’s a huge transition in the internet’s evolution.”
Reducing the road toll
A previous Cisco presentation looked at some of the ways the internet of everything can reduce road deaths, Ken sees this both private and public sector benefits of the connected economy flowing to consumers and the community.
“When you think about things like traffic congestion, health care and how education is delivered we know there’s huge opportunities for greater efficiency,” says Ken.
“Just on road safety, when we’ve got all the vehicles and trucks connected, when the traffic lights and traffic control systems are all connected,” suggests Ken, “then consumers are going be better informed about what is the most efficient route to work.”
“Cars will be communicating with each other to reduce fatalities and collisions in the future as well.”
Bringing together industrial, consumer and public safety technologies creates a grid of connected devices, including cars, that improve public safety while making industries more efficient.
Of course these connected services come with risks to privacy, particularly when multiple points of data can triangulated despite each individual item being anonymous on their own.
What Ken finds is particularly important is the current value of these technologies with Cisco predicting $1.4 billion in productivity gains through the internet of everything this year, half of which are available for businesses.
A warning for Australia
For Australia, the concern is that business and the economy in general is falling behind, Cisco’s recent Internet of Everything Value Index rated Australia among the BRIC countries in adopting the new technologies.
“We’ve always counted Aussies as fairly innovative and leading edge,” says Ken. “Australia is ranked tenth out of the twelve largest economies in the adoption of internet of everything capablities.”
The countries leading – such as Japan, Germany and the United States – have had a solid record of investing in technology, “in Australia, we’ve had that in the past but we’ve lost our mojo.” Ken says, “IT has been viewed more as a problem – a cost to business – rather than a provider of productivity for the long term.”
How business can adapt
For businesses, the question is how can they take advantage of the internet of everything? “You don’t have to start from scratch,” says Ken. “There are a whole heap of use cases for every vertical.”
“Start to drive some innovation. Think about your business processes at the front end where you touch your customers, look at your supply chains and your back office arrangements driving workforce productivity and how fast can you deliver new innovations to the market.”
“Internet of everything themes can address a whole host of these different processes in different parts of your business.”
Like all similar stories, the Foscam monitors’ weaknesses are born out of good intentions, the idea is parents can keep an eye on their children across the internet.
The problem, as always, is convenience and ease of use trumped security with Foscam making it easy for parents to by having trivial, if any, security on their devices.
It’s a lesson that should have been learned a million times, yet manufacturers continue to disregard the risks of poor security on internet connected devices.
As these internet connected devices become critical to business and public safety, this lack of security won’t be acceptable.
Slowly, companies like Foscam are being forced to take security seriously — hopefully consumers will accelerate the process by voting with their wallets.
In the meantime, it might be a good idea to make sure your home or business router has a good firewall before setting up internet connected devices.
John’s presentation comes from personal experience, having being a volunteer for nearly thirty years at his local State Emergency Service brigade where he was often among the first responders to local vehicle accidents.
Some of the improvements in technology see the road toll falling as people travel less because of remote working, teleconference and business automation. Many of the applications though are built into the vehicles, street signs and the roads themselves.
Finding the safest route
John’s first suggestion for improving driver safety is having navigation systems sourcing traffic, weather and other information to suggest the best route for the driver. An intelligent system may also modify the recommended journey based on the experience of the driver and state of the vehicle, such as the tyre conditions.
Watching the eyes
Fatigue kills and all of us have driven when we were really too tired to be behind the wheel.
The first in car technology John discussed is facial recognition technology that detects when drivers are fatigued. Tying this feature into the vehicle’s entertainment system with a stern aviation style “PULL OVER – YOU ARE TIRED” warning could well save hundreds of lives a year on his own.
Connected road signs
One of the underpinning factors of the internet of everything is cheap computers and transmitters embedded into almost anything. Road signs and sensors talking to cars could help reduce driver errors such as entering curves too fast.
Those signs can also be plugged into weather conditions so if there’s ice, fog or rain then the car can be told of the hazards ahead.
Going on the grid
Signs are not the only devices that could be talking to each other, vehicles themselves could be talking to each other. Should one car hit a slippery or soft patch on the road, it could tell following vehicles that there’s a problem ahead and respond accordingly.
That technology too could help traffic planners and road authorities, as data on traffic speeds and road conditions feed into their databases it becomes easier to identify black spots or road design problems before lives are lost.
Helping the first responders
A wrecked car or roadside sensor can also help those first responders attending an accident. The vehicle itself could transmit the damage and give rescuers valuable, time saving information, on the state of the occupants.
Similarly, the system could also warn emergency services such as hospitals and ambulances of the injuries likely and what’s needed to treat the injuries on site, in transit and at the casualty ward.
Importantly, a smart vehicle can also warn those first responders of potential risks such as live air bag gas cylinders, car body reinforcements or high voltage cables as they attempt to free trapped occupant from a wreck.
The rescuers themselves may be wearing technologies like Google Glass that help them see this information in real time.
By the end of this decade that we will all be relying on these technologies to help us drive. Which means we might find our licenses start to be endorsed for the level of technology in our vehicles, just as we used to have to get qualified to drive a car with a manual transmission.
Concluding his presentation, John Wall told the story of Jason, a cyclist from his town who was killed in a road accident and left a young family. In his slide he showed Harry, Jason’s young son, playing with the flowers on his father’s memorial.
“I hope for Harry is that when Harry learns to drive that things will be different on our roads and things will be different because we are all connected,” said John.
It’s a strong reminder of the real human opportunities and costs when we adopt new technologies.
How will businesses benefit from the internet of everything?
How much opportunity does connecting all our machines to the internet really offer businesses and society?
Cisco’s Internet of Everything index released last week looks at one of the great opportunities facing today’s managers in realising business value in these new technologies .
On Cisco’s calculations, the internet of everything is worth over $14.4 trillion to the world economy and nearly half the business benefits are going wasted.
Germany and Japan lead the pack and, as discussed yesterday, Australia wallows between China and Russia.
Cisco comparison of countries
Despite German businesses being the leaders, Cisco estimates $33bn, or nearly 40% of the potential gains, isn’t being realised even in that country.
How different industries are using the internet of machines is notable as well, with Cisco claiming the biggest benefits currently being realised by the IT industry while the greatest potential lies in the service, logistics and manufacturing industries.
Internet of everything value by industry
If anything, these projections could be on the conservative side with Cisco estimating fifty billion devices connected to the net by 2020. Given the rate of smartphone being sold and everything from vending machines to clothing being online, it may well be ten or even a hundred times that number.
The real challenge for businesses in all these projections is how individual organisations can realise this value in their operations.
For some businesses, there’s plenty of existing opportunities with well established services in areas like field services and logistics tracking the locations of staff and packages. These are relatively simple to incorporate into existing operations.
In other applications, businesses will find things more complex as the connected devices will tie into analytics and Big Data plays. These won’t be simple.
One particularly important area for the workforce as a whole in business process automation where many tasks currently done by humans can be carried out by machines talking to each other.
This is already happening in fields like fast moving consumer goods and hospitality where stock levels can be automatically monitored and replacement stock ordered in without staff being involved. As the technology becomes more widespread this will threaten the roles of many previously well paid managers.
Many of those managers though will be challenged anyway unless they’re prepared to deal with the changes that internet of things is bringing to their businesses.
How do you think the internet of everything will change your business?
