Decoding the new economy

Apple goes for the wearable market

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 grab for the home internet of things

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.

Open, but closed

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.

Increasing vendor lock-in

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.

A bot named Willy and the risk of trusting data

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.

Blindly trusting data

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.

Feeding false information

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.

4D printing and the next generation of design – ABC Sydney

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.

The race to build smartcities

The race to build smart cities is important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

For the last decade city administrations have been jostling for the title of being a ‘smartcity’ – a metropolis that brings together technology, creativity and business to grow their local economy. Now the competition is getting fierce.

While the concept has been around since British Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase the Great White Heat of Technology fifty years ago, the arrival of the Internet of Things, cheap sensors and accessible wireless broadband have made wiring up a city far more easier than a decade ago.

So now we’re seeing a race to set up smartcities with just the last week seeing Kansas City join the Cisco Connected Communities program, a consortium of UK technology groups announced Milton Keynes will be wired up and French machine to machine (M2M) network provider Sigfox launched its plan to add San Francisco to the cities it’s covering.

Kansas City is a particularly interesting location being the first town to recieve Google Fiber and its designated Innovation Precinct along the new street car route the city is building. The Connected Cities scheme will cover that corridor.

Kansas City’s Innovation Corridor isn’t a new idea, it’s not dissimilar to the Digital Sydney project I put together a few years ago. The difference is it has both government commitment to it and a business community energised around the possiblities. Whether that’s enough to make it a success remains to be seen.

What is clear though is that today’s technologies are changing cities, just as roads and electricity did in the Twentieth Century and steam traction, railways and town water did in the Nineteenth.

That’s why the race to build smart cities is so important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

Microsoft and home automation

Microsoft play catch up in the home automation market with their Insteon partnership

An major Internet of Things story this week was Microsoft’s partnership with home automation vendor Insteon.

This is a fascinating development for Microsoft, particularly given the lukewarm market adoption of Windows tablets and phones.

While Microsoft have some substantial advantages with their internet of things offering for the industrial and commercial markets, home automation is a crowded field where the company is playing catch up.

For Insteon, a partnership with Microsoft doesn’t matter while they have open standards along with support for both iOS and Android, for Microsoft though they have a lot way to go to make a dent in a market that a decade ago many thought they would have dominated.

The Australian Internet of Things Forum

The first Australian Internet of Things Forum is launched

The first Australian Internet of Things was held in Newcastle today which I MC’d and managed to give a quick presentation on my Geek’s Tour of Barcelona.

Big Data was the big message from all the day’s sessions with every speaker touching on the challenge of understanding and securing the vast amounts of data collected.

It’s interesting how the technologists — and most of the material was quite high level — have identified this as the main problem facing management with the Internet of Things.

A key take away from the forum is that the clear opportunity for entrepreneurs with the IoT lies in giving businesses the tools to understand the data.

One of the reasons for the event was to launch the Kaooma Project that aims to link local businesses to the Internet of Things. The local business angle is something that needs to be explored in more depth.

Category: Internet of Things

Apple goes for the wearable market

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