Category: Internet of Things

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

Moving from an industrial era to a data age

Cisco Vice President Wim Efrink describes the opportunities with the internet of everything

The last two weeks have been pretty hectic with Cisco, Salesforce and Microsoft events in Melbourne, as a result there’s a huge backlog of posts to put up.

One of the interviews that has worked out is with Cisco’s Vice President for Globalisation, Wim Elfrink, which is up on the Decoding the New Economy YouTube channel.

In it Wim covers how the next wave of upcoming nations, the TIPSS – Turkey, Indonesia, Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Africa – threaten to leapfrog the developed world and the opportunities for businesses in a world where everything is connected.

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Garbage In and Garbage Out

The success of using Big Data depends upon the quality of both the data and the algorithm

UK tech site The Register reports that Google Flu Trends has been dismal failure with the service over-reporting the incidence of influenza by a factor of nearly 12.

The reason for this problem is the algorithm used to determine the existence of a flue outbreak is that it relies on people searching for the terms ‘flu’ or ‘influenza’ and it turns out we tend to over-react to a dose of the sniffles.

Google Flu Trends’ failure illustrates two important things about big data – the veracity of the data coming into the system and the validity of the assumptions underlying the algorithms processing the information.

In the case of Google Flu Trends both were flawed; the algorithm was based on incorrect assumptions  while the incoming data was at best dubious.

The latter point is an important factor for the Internet of Machines. Instead of humans entering search terms, millions of sensors are pumping data into system so bad data from one sensor can have catastrophic effects on the rest of the network.

As managing data becomes a greater task for businesses and governments, making sure that data is trustworthy will be essential and the rules that govern how the information is used will have to be robust.

Hopefully the lessons of Google Flu Trends will save us from more serious mistakes as we come to depend on what algorithms tell us about the data.

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Apple’s long game

Apple are playing the long game with their internet of things strategy so they aren’t panicking into a smart watch

It’s always risky to make predictions about Apple, particularly when they are silly. The company plays a long game and isn’t known for panicked releases of me-too products.

Time is ticking for Apple to announce an iWatch, say analysts is a good example of a silly prediction about Apple’s future products and something that’s quite rightly criticised by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.

As I’ve pointed out before, the watch market is tiny compared to the smartphone with the entire global wristwatch industry’s sales making up only one-seventh of Apple’s iPhone sales.

Part of the problem with stories like CNBC’s is the tech media’s focus on consumer goods, particularly in the internet of things and wearable technology markets.

Analysts like those quoted in CNBC’s story fall for this fallacy and overlook that the IoT market profits are going to come from the backend, B2B applications of the technologies.

With Apple we’re already seeing this with iBeacon being deployed in sports stadiums and shopping centres – Apple’s recent partnership with United Airlines to provide inflight entertainment is another step towards locking up business deals.

There’s no doubt those business deals will flow into the consumer market and an iWatch may well be part of Apple’s longer plan to lock customers into their products.

However claiming Apple have 60 days to launch an iWatch is plain silly, particularly when you have a company with a track record of not being panicked into launching me-too products and playing the long game.

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Can the community secure the Internet of Things?

Can the community secure the internet of things? Cisco’s Christopher Young believes so.

As more devices become connected Cisco Systems hopes the security issues can be addressed by the developer community.

“The Internet of Everything is not only turn every company into a technology company but its going to force every company to truly become a company that delivers security,” says Christopher Young, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Security Business Group.

Speaking at the Australian Cisco Live! Conference in Melbourne today, Young described how business is going to have to change the way it treats the data it collects from sensors.

“Not just in consumer security,” continues Young. “If I’m using technology or I’m delivering a service that’s leveraging technologies like cloud or connected devices and creating information about individuals or organisations through these connected devices then a consumer or enterprise is going to expect a level of security.”

Young sees three major ways that security is becoming more challenging for organisations; changing business models, a dynamic threat landscape and increasing complexity.

The latter point is the area that focuses many executive’s attention in Young’s experience with audiences he speaks to nominating complexity and fragmentation as their greatest concern.

“They get so many products and so many devices and so many tools and so much complexity they really don’t know, in so many cases, where to focus their efforts.”

Young cites Cisco’s Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, that the most fundamental security defence is getting the basics right.

Earlier this year at the release of the company’s 2014 security report, Stewart spoke to Networked Globe on how businesses are struggling with the complexity they face.

“Even the most sophisticated and well funded security teams are struggling to keep on top of what’s happening,” Stewart said.

This problem ties into the other areas that Young identifies, particularly the ‘industrialisation’ of the malware world.

“We have more well funded, more innovated, more determined adversaries than we’ve ever had as an industry.

“It used to be some high school kid in his room trying to infect a bunch of machines with viruses or some guy from Nigeria sending you an email asking you for a hundred bucks and he’ll give you a thousand bucks later.

“The world we live in today has nation states and criminal syndicates and very well funded, very sophisticated attackers so hacking has become an industrialised activity.” Young says, “here’s supply chains involved, there’s support agreements written; the bad guys will even sell each other a contract.”

Young’s views echo those of Sophos Labs’ Vice President Simon Reed who said last year that “now there’s money involved, there’s serious effort, the quality of malware has gone up.”

Part of the solution Young sees involves getting the community involved which is the motivation behind the Cisco Security Challenge announced last week.

“You can only just guess and imagine what all the different security challenges will look like in a world that’s just starting to get formed.”

“Let’s get the community involved in trying to solve some of the problems that we know are going to be inherently introduced by IoE.”

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Tomorrow Starts Here

Managing big data is one of the future skills of business.

Today was the main day of the Melbourne Cisco Live Conference; the company’s annual Australian event.

Much of the talk was around the Internet of Everything — which will be the basis of subsequent  posts — with a constant theme around the explosion of data.

A favourite statistic was that of Cisco’s Executive Vice President who pointed out that US Department store Walmart collects 2.5 Petabytes of customers data every hour.

The reason for this was pointed out by GE’s Australia and New Zealand CIO, Mark Sheppard, who pointed out that twenty years ago jet engines had few sensors while today they have hundreds, a point also made by Team Lotus’ Engineering Director Nick Chester to Networked Globe.

Chester observes that when he started in Formula One racing two decades ago, there were four or five sensors on a racing car; today Lotus’ vehicles have over two hundred.

All of these sensors are creating massive amounts of data and the big challenge for businesses is to manage all of this information, something we’ll be exploring over the next few weeks.

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Eliminating the donkey work

Ross Mason, founder of Mulesoft, sees Big Data as one of the challenges facing business

Mulesoft founder and CTO Ross Mason worries about how companies are going to manage the data generated by the Internet of Things.

“I don’t think we’re ready for the amount of data that these devices are designed to build up,” Ross observes in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

Ross’ aim in founding Mulesoft was to eliminate the donkey work in connecting IT systems and he sees the data moving between enterprise applications being a challenge for organisations

“We have energy companies that have connected their smart grid systems to their back end systems and most of them delete almost all the data because of the cost of storing that much data without doing anything with it.”

“Big data is still in the realm of we’re figuring out the questions to ask.” Ross states, in echoing the views expressed by Tableau Software founder Pat Hanrahan a few weeks ago.

“There’s a little bit of hype around big data right now, but it’s a very real trend;” Hanrahan said. “Just look at the increase in the amount of data that’s been going up exponentially and that’s just the natural result of technology; we have more sensors, we collect more data, we have faster computer and bigger disks.”

The interview with Ross covers his journey from setting up Mulesoft to the future of big data and software. It was recorded a few days before the company announced a major capital raising.

Mulesoft’s elimination of software ‘donkey work’ is another example of how the IT industry is changing as much of the inefficiencies are being worked out of the way developers and programmers work.

In many ways, Ross Mason’s story illustrates how the software industry itself is being disrupted as much as any other sector.

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The Internet of Racing Machines

Formula One racing gives us a glimpse of the technologies that will be commonplace in businesses in the near future.

For the Formula One racing circuit, the financial crisis of six years ago was an opportunity to reinvent the sport; today the teams use a combination of technologies to gain an advantage over their competitors.

“A few years ago you wouldn’t have been here today,” Francois Puentes, Head Of Account Management at Team Lotus told a group of journalists ahead of this week’s Melbourne Grand Prix. “F1 was a completely different sport.”

The 2009 financial crisis was the catalyst for the changes Puentes says; “we all sat down as teams at the same table to make the sport more sustainable, this obliged us to run the sport as a business.”

“Before we didn’t know what the unit cost was for a part. We would very often produce two of the same parts without even knowing what was going on.”

To tighten their management systems, Lotus bought in a range of cloud based business software such as Microsoft Dynamics and also accelerated its adoption of computerised manufacturing techniques.

Speeding up development

Lotus employs over 500 people to keep its two cars on the road and most of the vehicles parts are designed and manufactured at its headquarters in Oxford, England. During the season the team’s workshop may produce up to five hundred replacement or redesigned components each week.

This brings together a number of technologies including Computer Aided Design, 3D Printing and cloud computing.

The internet of racing machines

Massive rule changes have also accelerated Formula One’s adoption of in car technology with information being gathered from sensors throughout the vehicles.

During races data is transferred from the vehicles’ sensors by radio for the teams’ crews to analyse performance. This includes information like gear box temperature, tyre condition, and aerodynamic performance data.

Following the race larger volumes of data are downloaded from the vehicle for engineers to tune the car for the next event.

While Lotus has teamed with technology companies like Microsoft and EMC, rival team Caterham partnered with GE whose Global Research team worked to integrate the technologies demanded by the new F1 rules.

Global technology

Caterham’s cars use intercoolers developed in Germany, carbon fibre composites and fibre optic sensors from the United States, and big data analysis techniques developed in India.

Key to gathering that data are sensors throughout the vehicle that capture a constant stream of data about forces acting on the car during the race, transmitting this information in a far more efficient way than traditional methods which relied on load sensors attached to the suspension.

The result is massive volumes of raw data. On the track, Caterham cars generate 1,000 points of data a second from more than 2,000 data channels. Up to 500 different sensors constantly capture and relay data back to the team’s command centre for urgent analysis.

Learning from Big Data

By applying what the company has learned from its Industrial Internet projects, GE was able to help Caterham cut its data processing time in half, leaving the team in a stronger strategic and tactical position.

Thanks to these analysis techniques, the Caterham team can look at slices of its data across an entire season, pinpoint setups that were particularly effective, and identify reliability issues earlier.

Inside the vehicle, GE has also found a way to replace metal pipes with carbon fibre, reducing the overall weight of the vehicle.

These technology developments will continue to find applications beyond the 2014 Grand Prix season.

Carbon composites are being used extensively in the aviation industry and big data analysis is playing an important role in the renewable energy sector.

Lewis Butler, Caterham’s chief designer, says working with GE is helping the team deepen its skills base.

“GE are working with Caterham to help with the manufacturing process and knowledge transfer, and giving Caterham F1 Team the capability to manufacture its own parts,” he says.

All the Formula One teams are using Internet of Things technologies to gather information on their vehicles, Big Data tools to manage that information along 3D printing to accelerate their research and manufacturing processes.

The Formula One world is a glimpse into the future of business as various technologies come together to change the way industries operate.

Paul travelled to the Melbourne Grand Prix as a guest of Microsoft and Team Lotus.

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