Category: Internet of Things

Posts relating to the internet of things, IoT and M2M technologies

Your TV is watching you. ABC Nightlife February 2015
Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife nationally from 10pm Australian Eastern time on Thursday, February 19 to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

If you missed the show, the program is available for download from the ABC site.

For the February 2015 program Tony and Paul look at robot driven hotels, the internet of rubbish bins and how your TV could be listening to you.

Last year a lawyer read the terms and conditions of his new Samsung TV and discovered that the company recommended people don’t discuss sensitive information around it. This has lead to widespread, and justified, concerns that all our smart devices – not just TVs but smartphones and connected homes – could be listening to us. What happens to this data and can we trust the people collecting it?

The internet of rubbish bins

It’s not only your TV or smartphone that could be watching you, in Western Australia Broome Shire Council is looking at tracking rubbish bins to make sure only council issued ones are emptied.

Shire of Broome waste coordinator Jeremy Hall told WA Today the council’s garbage truck drivers had noticed more bins than usual were getting emptied and a system needed to be put in place to identify “legitimate” bins.

While Australian councils are struggling with rubbish bins a hotel in Japan is looking to replace its staff with robots and room keys with face recognition software. The Hen-na Hotel is due to open later this year in Nagasaki Prefecture, the Japan Times reports.

Join us

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

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

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

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February 17, 2015
Connecting motor bikes to the IoT
One of the obvious applications for smart devices is in motorbike helmets; an article in Intel’s Free Press website describes how they may work in a prototype setup on a BMW BMW R1200GS bike.

The smart helmet, which uses an Intel Edison system, is different from current add on systems in that it directly communicates with the bike’s internal electronics giving a rider a deeper level of control.

“If you need directions, say ‘take me home’ and it’ll queue up directions and give them over audio. But if there isn’t enough gas, then it will redirect you to a gas station first because it can read the bike’s remaining fuel range,” explains Moyerman. “It will also do smart navigation, so if a blind turn is approaching, it’ll give you warning to slow down.”

Creating the prototype isn’t simple as each manufacturer has its own control language, a common problem in retrofitting Internet of Things functions onto devices not designed to connect to a network.

“Putting together a system like that is much more complicated than plug and play. Every vehicle maker has its own data language, which means that there’s no universal standard to interpret the data. The team at Intel worked with BMW’s Bay Area group to translate a R1200GS adventure motorcycle’s own language from the CAN bus (controller area network) to Edison, which then sends it to the smartphone via Bluetooth.”

The same challenge faces car manufacturers as well which increases the risks of vehicle owners being locked into a certain manufacturer’s ecosystem – for instance, buy a BMW and be locked into the Apple HomeKit system.

Regardless of the compatibility problems, we’re increasingly going to see these technologies included with common household items. That many of them are voice activated should give those concerned about the privacy of Samsung smart TVs some pause for thought.

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February 13, 2015
Dispelling the internet of snoops
Last October New York lawyer Michael Price bought a new TV and what he read in the accompanying paperwork disturbed him.

In “I’m terrified of my new TV: Why I’m scared to turn this thing on” Price described how Samsung’s privacy policy worried him, particularly the way the voice recognition data was handled, “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

Disgraced former CIA director David Petraeus told a venture capital conference in 2012 that security agencies will track people through their dishwashers and Price pointed out a smart TV listening to a room’s conversations fits Petraeus’ vision nicely.

At the time of its publication at the end of October Price’s story received some coverage among the information security, privacy and internet of things community then sank until last weekend when a tech site picked it up.

At that stage, the story took on a new life with media outlets around the world running stories on how Samsung TVs are spying on customers.

For Samsung the story is was major embarrassment and they were quick to point out they don’t actually collect data.

To be fair to Samsung, they aren’t alone in having products that can listen to their users; almost every voice activated device has this capability and we can expect everything from smartphones to TVs and connected cars to be able to record voice and, through cameras, our movements.

The marketing and social media industries, like General Petraeus, are enthusiastic about the surveillance opportunities of these devices; Facebook’s Share and Discover feature for instance opens the microphone when a user starts typing an update to determine what music is being played.

In the internet of things, it’s not just a smart TVs microphone that’s a potential problem as pretty much every connected device is generating information that can be used by government agencies, insurance companies and plaintiffs to track hapless users.

Collecting this data also presents a range of risks beyond subpoenas from government agencies and angry litigants, for the vendors of smart devices there is also the problem of complying with various privacy rules, securely storing customers data and ensuring their business partners also respect user information.

Samsung tried to manage this risk by adding a ‘don’t say stuff near our TV’ clause in the term and conditions, something that backfired dramatically and illustrates the impossibility of managing risk out of your business.

While companies will struggle with the legalities of capturing massive amounts of customer data, the public in general have to face the risks of allowing everything from their kettles to their cars collecting information on them.

The predicament for users is that turning off the ‘smart’ functions – assuming that is possible – remove much of the device’s functionality so the trade off between convenience, security will be a difficult compromise for many people.

For the Internet of Things industry the task now is to convince the public their devices are trustworthy, stories like the Samsung TV snooping on people isn’t going to help their efforts.

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February 11, 2015

Preparing for the mobile data explosion

Late last month Cisco Systems released its annual Visual Networking Index that tracks the company’s predictions for the growth of global network traffic over the upcoming five years.

It’s no surprise this year’s report predicts global data traffic will grow at over fifty percent compounded each year with Cisco expecting 24.3 exabytes to be pushed around the world’s networks each month by 2019.

Most of that network traffic will come from tablet and smartphones with Cisco predicting data use will grow by up to a factor of five on those devices with devices like wearables growing fourfold.

This growth creates a challenge for telcos as they invest in capacity to deal with the increased traffic and Cisco sees half of all smartphone connections will be handed off to WiFi networks by the decade’s end.

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month

Device Type	2014	2019
Nonsmartphone	22 MB/month	105 MB/month
M2M Module	70 MB/month	366 MB/month
Wearable Device	141 MB/month	479 MB/month
Smartphone	819 MB/month	3,981 MB/month
4G Smartphone	2,000 MB/month	5,458 MB/month
Tablet	2,076 MB/month	10,767 MB/month
4G Tablet	2,913 MB/month	12,314 MB/month
Laptop	2,641 MB/month	5,589 MB/month

Source: Cisco VNI Mobile, 2015

Handing half the growth in mobile traffic over to Wi-Fi connections, most of which will be connected to fiber or ADSL services will provide challenges for fixed line operators as well who will see the demand for capacity also explode over the rest of the decade.

Much of this explains the moves by companies like Telstra to roll out public Wi-Fi services to start locking users into their services. It also gives them, and consumers, an opportunity to understand how networks that mix both cellular and Wi-Fi behave.

Another aspect of the Cisco VNI survey is the Internet of Things which is going to see exponential growth as industrial and household devices start being connected either directly through the telco networks, across unlicensed radio spectrum or over private Wi-Fi systems.

While Cisco predicts the bulk of that traffic as being generated by smartphones, the company sees connected devices as growing by 45% per year over the next five years with 3.2 billion sensors connected to the internet by the end of the decade.

Notable in the prediction that Low Powered Wide Area (LPWA) networks – non cellular systems mostly operating in the unlicensed spectrum used by Wi-Fi networks – will provide nearly a third of the connections by 2019. At the same time we can expect many M2M deployments to consolidate traffic locally with much of the data processing down locally before the residual information being passed up the network.

As usual the Cisco VNI report underscores, and possibly understates, the growth in mobile data usage we’re going to see over the rest of the decade. For businesses, it’s time to plan for managing both the flow and application that smart devices are going to generate in our daily operations.

Samsung needs a win with the Galaxy 6 smartphone

Having seen its dominance of the smartphone market eroded by a resurgent Apple and a range of upstart Chinese vendors, Samsung has announced it will launch its Galaxy 6 smartphone on March 1 reports the Sammobile website.

The new phone is reported to boast a curved screen measuring somewhere between 5.1 and 5.3-inches a fingerprint sensor and a 20 mega-pixel camera, which compares well to the iPhone 6’s eight mega-pixel camera.

While the proposed specs are impressive, the company has a challenge ahead as consulting firm IDC reported its smartphone shipments dropped 11% year on year last quarter in an market that grew by quarter.

Top Five Smartphone Vendors, Shipments, Market Share and Year-Over-Year Growth, Q4 2014 Preliminary Data (Units in Millions) source IDC Research

Vendor	4Q14 Shipment Volumes	4Q14 Market Share	4Q13 Shipment Volumes	4Q13 Market Share	Year-Over-Year Change
1. Samsung	75.1	20.01%	84.4	28.83%	-11.0%
2. Apple	74.5	19.85%	51.0	17.43%	46.0%
3. *Lenovo	24.7	6.59%	13.9	4.75%	77.9%
4. Huawei	23.5	6.25%	16.6	5.66%	41.7%
5. Xiaomi	16.6	4.42%	5.9	2.03%	178.6%
Others	160.9	42.9%	120.9	41.31%	33.1%
Total	375.2	100.0%	292.7	100.0%	28.2%

*Lenovo + Motorola	24.7	6.6%	19.5	6.7%	26.4%

While the numbers for the Chinese manufacturers are impressive, Apple’s shipments should also worry Samsung given the two companies are fighting for the top end consumers in the European and North America markets.

For Samsung its smartphones form a central part of its Internet of Things strategy so the success of the Galaxy 6 is critical to the company’s future plans, particularly given the lukewarm reception to the Tizen based Z1 phone on the Indian market last month.

Samsung’s China Crisis

With Samsung struggling with both its high end Android smartphones and its lower priced Tizen devices as Chinese manufacturers like Lenovo, Xiaomi and Huawei steal market share, the company desperately needs to hit the mark with the Galaxy 6.

Google as well has a stake in Samsung’s success as the Chinese manufacturers are increasingly turning to open source versions of Android for their smartphone systems. A flagship device for Android to counter the iPhone 6 is desperately needed to keep consumer and developer interest in the Google Play store and for Google’s consumer IoT ambitions.

The stakes are high for both Google and Samsung, the South Korean giant getting a mis-step with the Galaxy 6 could see it following the faded fortunes of its Japanese competitors.

Category: Internet of Things

Your TV is watching you. ABC Nightlife February 2015

The internet of rubbish bins

Join us

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Connecting motor bikes to the IoT

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Dispelling the internet of snoops

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Preparing for the mobile data explosion

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month

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Samsung needs a win with the Galaxy 6 smartphone

Samsung’s China Crisis

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