Category: Internet of Things

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

When the connection drops out, will your iKettle work?

If the Internet of Things is to be trusted by households and industry, it’s essential that systems work when they’re disconnected.

During the dark days of the Tech Wreck, the poster product for the heady excesses of the Dot Com era was the connected fridge.

Today it could be the iKettle that marks the height of the Internet of Things craze, a kettle you can control from your smartphone.

While the app doesn’t automatically fill the kettle; it does allow you to turn it on, schedule times and control the water temperatures.

The problem though is what happens when your kettle or phone can’t connect to the internet?

Burning data centres

Over the weekend, Samsung customers learned what happens when a connected device can’t connect when a fire in a South Korean data centre triggered an outage that prevented the company’s smart TV, Blu-Ray player and phone customers from properly using their equipment.

It would be really irritating if you couldn’t boil a kettle because your internet was down, however the more serious question is what happens when your home’s smoke detectors can’t connect? Or when your smarthome or connected car can’t authenticate your identity and locks you out?

Securing the IoT supply chain

For industry, the problems are even more pressing; in the not too distant future a truck carrying perishable goods may well have its deliveries refused by a customer if the cargo has lost connectivity.

In life or mission critical applications, relying on connections that may not be dependable could have disastrous consequences.

While the iKettle might be a bit of gimmick, it raises some important issues of what happens should your internet connection go down.

If the Internet of Things is to be trusted by households and industry, it’s essential that systems are robust and maintain operations when they’re disconnected.

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Smarthomes come of age

The internet of things isn’t new, it’s just the technology has become more accessible

“After four decades the smartphone comes of age,” proclaims Micheal Wolf in Forbes Magazine.

Wolf is right to a point but he misses the key reason why the smarthome, or the entire internet of things, has become accessible – the technology has simply become affordable.

It was possible to build a smarthome two decades ago, but it was fiendishly expensive and only a few rich people could afford the technology. Today that technology is cheap and easy to install.

This is the common factor with all aspect of the Internet of Things, connecting devices has been possible since before the internet became common but it was expensive and cumbersome so only the highest value equipment – such as oil rigs – was connected.

Now it’s inexpensive and simple to connect things, people are doing it more and that is why there’s a range of security and privacy issues which weren’t so pressing when it was only a few obscure industrial devices that were wired up.

We aren’t inventing the wheel with technologies like the internet of things or big data, they already existed – they are just more accessible and that’s what’s changing business.

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Buying into the Internet of Things

Blackberry and Zebra Technologies buy into the Internet of Things as part of a push into a growing industry

Following Google’s acquisition of smarthome startup Nest in January, it was clear that 2014 was going to be the year that the Internet of Things dominated corporate takeovers.

This week has shown that with Blackberry announcing a stake in medical technology firm NantHealth, obstensibly as an Internet of Things play as CEO John Chen explains;

The NantHealth platform is installed at approximately 250 hospitals and connects more than 16,000 medical devices collecting more than 3 billion vital signs annually. Think about the possibilities when an enormous amount of data and computing power is accessible to doctors in the palm of their hands.

As Chen points out, the possibilities for this data are huge which raises questions about the privacy and security issues for patients along with the importance of having stable software and networks.

The other big Internet of Things acquisition yesterday was Zebra Technologies buying Motorola’s enterprise division for over three billion dollars, again the buyer cited the opportunities in connecting machines.

An interesting aspect is these acquisitions aren’t being made by the big players – Cisco, Google, Microsoft or Apple – but by smaller, but still substantial, players. It shows just how wide the Internet of Things’ applications are.

Blackberry and Zebra won’t be the only big acquisitions this year.

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Peak Wireless and the data paradox

Have we reached the limits of wireless internet?

Australia’s government research agency, the CSIRO, released a somewhat alarming media alert this morning warning that our cities are approaching Peak Data.

Peak Data, which borrows from the ‘Peak Oil’ term coined in the 1970s to describe the point where oil production reaches a maximum, is where we run out available bandwidth on our wireless networks.

The release is around the agency’s new report, A World Without Wires, where the agency lays out its view of the future of cellular and radio communications.

“In the future, how spectrum is allocated may change and we can expect innovation to find new ways to make it more efficient but the underlying position is that spectrum is an increasingly rare resource,” says  the CSIRO’s Director of Digital Productivity and Services Flagship Dr Ian Oppermann.

“With more and more essential services, including medical, education and government services, being delivered digitally and on mobile devices, finding a solution to “peak data” will become ever more important into the future.”

The wireless data paradox

It’s a paradox that just as we’re entering a world of unlimited data, we have limitations of what we can broadcast wirelessly as radio spectrum becomes scarce and contested.

With fixed line communications, particularly fibre optics, available spectrum can be relatively simply increased by laying down more cables – wireless only has one environment to broadcast in –  so finding ways of pushing more data through the airways is what much of the CSIRO’s paper addresses.

For telecommunications companies, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity; the challenge being squeezing more data into limited spectrum while the opportunity lies in charging more for guaranteed connectivity.

The latter raises questions about network neutrality and the question of whether different types of traffic across wireless networks can be charged differently or given differing levels of priority.

Distributing the load

This also gives credence to the distributed processing strategies like Cisco’s Fog Computing idea that takes the load off public networks and can potentially hand traffic over to fixed networks or point to point microwave services.

While M2M data is tiny compared to voice and domestic user needs, it does mean business critical services will have to compete with other users, both in the private Wi-Fi frequencies or the public mobile networks spectrum.

Overall though, the situation isn’t quite as dire as it seems; technological advances are going to figure out new ways of stuffing data into the available spectrum and aggressively priced data plans are going to discourage customers from using data intensive applications.

A key lesson from this though is those designing, M2M, Internet of Things or smart city applications can’t assume that bandwidth will always be available to communicate to their devices.

For the Internet of Things, robust design will require considering security, latency and quality of service.

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Evangelism and the makers’ movement

Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg talks tech Evangelism, the Internet of Things and the Makers’ Movement

The latest Decoding the New Economy interview is with Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg.

During the interview with Reid we cover how the Internet of Things and big data is changing business and society along with the journey to becoming a software company’s evangelist.

Reid has a fascinating story to tell about how the makers’ movement is evolving as big data and the internet of things develops.

The interview is an insight into a winding career path and how Big Data and the Internet of Things is changing business and society.

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Kickstarter and ownership

Has Kickstarter funded startup Oculus discredited crowdfunding with its sale to Facebook?

The purchase of virtual reality headset designer Oculus by Facebook has raised some interesting questions about crowdfunding sites.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, many of those who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that Oculus ran now feel betrayed by the company selling out to the social media giant.

Founder Palmer Luckey explained the companies sale to the WSJ as a quest for more funds; “a lot of people don’t understand how much money it takes to build things — especially to build hardware.”

Crowdfunding is tough

That ties into what founders have told Decoding the New Economy about crowdfunding startups; it’s tough and it easy to underestimate the capital required to launch a project.

Ninja Blocks’ Daniel Friedman told Decoding the New Economy last February that the main thing the company had learned from its successful Kickstarter campaign is that crowdfunding is a good way to raise funds for specific projects but a lousy way to fund a business.

Moore’s Cloud wasn’t as successful as Ninja Blocks and in his Decoding the New Economy interview, founder Mark Pesce described how he’d “rather eat bullets” than crowdfund a hardware startup again.

Startups are always hard, but it’s difficult not see how the high moral purpose often citing from Kickstarter project founders clashes with the ruthless moneymaking of Silicon Valley.

Discrediting crowdfunding

The criticism of Oculus also illustrates how crowdfunding lies between traditional investment and sales; those contributing to crowdfunding projects are true believers, not just customers and certainly not investors in a legal sense.

In recent times Kickstarter has been discouraging hardware startups from using their service; mainly because of the high risk of failure and disaffected contributors. The unhappiness with Oculus vindicates that move.

Oculus’ sale to Facebook may make many Kickstarter contributors doubly wary of Silicon Valley style startups trying to raise funds through crowdsourcing campaigns.

Lords of the Digital Manor

Looking at Oculus’ move, it’s hard not to conclude we’re seeing another cynical version of the Lords of the Digital Manor business model where enthusiasts are exploited by entrepreneurs looking for the big Silicon Valley pay off.

For Kickstarter and the other crowdfunding platforms, this is a problem as cynicism about the motives of those posting projects is probably a greater risk than the fear of being ripped off.

It may well be that Oculus marks a big change in the types of projects that get successfully funded, certainly the next hot hardware startup that tries crowdfunding is going to find things much harder.

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Sense-T and the Tasmanian economy

Tasmania’s Sense-T is a brave project to reinvigorate the state’s economy through the internet of things

On Networked Globe I have an interview with Sense-T’s director, Ros Harvey.

Sense-T is a project to connect the entire state to the internet of things using a sensor network monitoring soil, water and other environmental conditions to help the state’s agriculture and business communities.

Harvey’s ambitions for the project are high where she sees Sense-T even having the potential of rekindling the interest of the state’s students in science and technology courses.

It’s a brave project that means a lot to a state that’s doing it tough.

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