Decoding the new economy

Connecting people to spaces

Smartphones, beacons and smart software are the key to future retail success believes Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell

Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

“With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

“It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

“You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

Adrift in the data lake

We’re awash with data and businesses have to figure out how not to drown in it

Last week Yahoo! closed down their directory pages ending one of the defining services of the 1990s internet and showing how the internet has changed since the first dot com boom.

The Yahoo! Directory was victim of a fundamental change in how we manage data as Google showed it wasn’t necessary to tag and label every piece of information before it could be used.

Yahoo!’s Directory was a classic case of applying old methods to new technologies – in this case carrying out a librarian’s function of cataloguing and categorising every web page.

One problem with that way of saving information is you need to know part of the answer before you can start searching; you need to have some idea of what category your query comes under or the name of the business or person you’re looking for.

That pan was exploited by the Yellow Pages where licensees around the world harvested a healthy cash flow from businesses forced to list under a dozen different categories to make sure prospective customers found them.

With the arrival of Google that way of structuring information came to an end as Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s smart algorithm showed it wasn’t necessary to pigeonhole information into highly structured databases.

Unstructured data

Rather than being structured, data is now becoming ‘unstructured’ and instead of employing an army of clerks to categorise information it’s now the job of computers to analyse that raw information and pick out what we need for our businesses and lives.

As information pours into companies from increasingly diverse sources, a flood that’s becoming so great it’s being referred to as the ‘data lake’, it’s become clear the battle to structure data is lost.

At the Splunk Conference in Las Vegas this week, the term ‘data lake’ is being used a lot as the company explains its technology for analysing business information.

Splunk, along with services like IBM’s Watson and Tableau Software, is one the companies capitalising on businesses’ need to manage unstructured data by giving customers the tools to analyse their information without having first to shoehorn it into a database.

“Thanks to Google we got to look at data a different way,” says Splunk’s CEO and Chairman Godfrey Sullivan. “You don’t have to know the question before you start the search.”

Diving into the data lake

It’s always dangerous applying simple labels to computing technologies but some terms, like ‘Cloud Computing’, don’t do a bad job of describing the principles involved and so it is with the ‘data lake’.

Rather than a nice, orderly world where everything can be pigeonholed, we know have a fluid environment where it wouldn’t be possible to label everything even if we wanted to. A lake is a good description of the mass of data pouring into our lives.

The web was an early example of having to manage that data lake and Google showed how it could be done. Now it’s the turn of other companies to apply the principles to business.

Google fatally damaged both Yahoo! and the Yellow Pages, other companies that are stuck in the age of structured data are going to find the future equally dismal. Don’t drown in that data lake.

Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Splunk

Building community knowledge

Google’s Waze is a good example of shared intelligence

One of the promises of big data and the internet of things is that local governments will be able to gather information about the state of their infrastructure.

A good working example of this is Google’s Waze, the Israeli traffic monitoring startup bought by the search engine giant two years ago.

Waze gathers information about traffic delays and transit times from users then aggregates them to give a picture of commuting times. It has always been a good example of how collaborative data can work.

This week Google announced the service will share its information with a handful of transit agencies and councils to improve their knowledge of the traffic choke points in their cities.

In return the agencies will give their transit information to Waze.

Waze’s story is a good example of how sensors and people, in this case smartphones and their users, are going to gather information on infrastructure and cities. The key is going to be in making sure that data isn’t locked into proprietory databases.

ABC Nightlife with Tony Delroy October 2014

Connected cars, smart watches, Microsoft and social media will be the topics of the next Nightlife with Tony Delroy technology segment.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, October 2 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

Update: If you missed the program you can listen to the podcast at the ABC site or stream it below.

For this month’s spot we’re looking at smartcars, smartwatches, the next version of Microsoft Windows and whether the new social media platform Ello can displace Facebook.

Some of the questions we’ll cover include;

What’s happening with connected car technologies?
Isn’t all this talk about smart cars another way ?
So how far are we off the driverless car?
Are our mobile phone choices going to dictate what brand car we buy?
How does the smart watch fit into how companies are trying to lock us into their software?
A new social media platform called Ello is taking off, what is it?
Do we really need another social media platform?
Microsoft have announced Windows 10, aren’t we only up to eight?
What’s different in Windows 10?
Has Windows 8 been a success?
When will Windows 10 be released on the market?

Join us

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 inclusive cities

Barcelona’s success in the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge show the human side of smart cities.

Yesterday Barcelona won the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge — a ideas competition for European cities.

Barcelona’s winning idea was collaborative care networks for older citizens. In Barcelona’s case one in five residents is over 65 and by 2o40 seniors will make up a quarter of the city’s population.

The approach Barcelona’s council has proposed is a combination of high tech and the community working together.

Barcelona will use digital and low-tech strategies to create a network of family members, friends, neighbors, social workers, and volunteers who together make up a “trust network” for each at-risk elderly resident.

Last year I had the opportunity to interview the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Vives, on how the city was using the internet of things to improve citizens’ lives.

In that interview Vives spoke on how important was that these technologies improved the lives of all citizens, not just the young and the rich. Today’s prize illustrates how the city is applying that philosophy.

For technologists, one of the tasks ahead is to show how today’s inventions are more than the toys of rich men, but are things that genuinely improve society’s well being.

Apple and the long game

Apple’s real game is in controlling a large part of the payments industry and the internet of things. The iPhone6 and watch are key steps in that strategy.

As expected, Apple announced their new range of iPhones and a smart watch today with many digital trees being felled as the tech media falls over to describe all the shiny features of the new devices.

Buried in Apple’s announcements though are the company’s real long game in payments and the Internet of Things.

For the IoT, the various ‘kits’ Apple have announced in the last year — HomeKit, HealthKit and now CloudKit — are the serious plays in this space as they bundle together programs, devices and data streams across health and smarthome applications.

CloudKit moves Apple onto another level as it makes it easier for developers to build back end applications that tie into smart devices; even if someone isn’t using Apple equipment they still may find themselves firmly in the walled garden of Cuptertino.

The long awaiting release of Apple Pay leverages iTunes’ strength as a payment platform, bundling a secure chip into the new iPhone adds to the company’s pitch of being a trusted partner to merchants and payments processors.

What today’s announcements of new hardware, software and APIs indicate is Apple’s shoring up the perimeters of its walled garden.

For it’s competitors, this raises the ante; Google Wallet has nothing like the market penetration or customer acceptance that iTunes has and earlier this week Amazon effectively admitted the Fire smartphone has been a failure by slashing prices. Facebook has made promising noises about payments but still remains locked in an advertising driven business model.

While there’s no doubt the new iPhone will be a success, although the jury is out on the smart watch, Apple’s real game is in controlling a large part of the payments industry and the internet of things. Today’s announcements are a key step in that strategy.

Skipping the trough of disillusionment

Will the IoT have a smooth transition from the top of Gartner’s hype cycle to general acceptance?

When consulting group Gartner placed the Internet of Things at the peak of their hype cycle last month it raised concerns that the technologies might be about to take a tumble.

Speaking to Networked Globe this week in San Jose; Maciej Kranz, VP and GM of Cisco’s technology group described how he believes the IoT’s evolution from the top of the hype cycle to the plateau of acceptance will be quick.

“We’re happy that Gartner put IoT on top as it means there’s awareness,” said Kranz. “We hope to prove Gartner wrong, that in IoT we don’t go through the classic hype cycle we go from hype into reality.”

Kranz’s reasoning while the IoT will suffer a short spell, if any at all, in Gartner’s ‘trough of disillusionment’ is because the major industry players are working closely together to build the sector and its standards.

“Where we think it’s a little bit different from some of the other hype cycles than some of the other hype cycles is that we continue to work very close at the industry,” Kranz explained.

“Because we’re all working as an industry to make it real it will go through the disillusionment and quickly into a reality.”

This may well turn out to be true if the big players like Cisco and GE in the industrial space along with companies such as Google and Apple in the consumer sector stay committed to the concept. If the major vendors stay the course, then it’s likely IoT technologies won’t suffer much at all.

Another aspect in the IoT’s favour is that it isn’t really a specific technology or product at all, instead being more of a concept bought about by various technologies such as home automation, industrial controls and cloud computing all reaching maturity.

Rather than one separate item on the Gartner hype cycle, the IoT is really made of dozens of different technologies that are mostly on the ‘plateau of acceptance’ themselves.

Kranz sees Gartner’s listing of the company as being on the top of the hype cycle as being a vindication for how the IoT has been adopted by industry and the community, “it is remarkable how we’ve gone in the last nine months from people saying it’s a vision to n

Category: Internet of Things

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