For the November 2013 Nightlife, we look at the Internet of things and smart cities
Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November 2013 Nightlife spot we’ll be looking at the internet of everything.
The internet of everything is the next big thing in the tech industry, but what how is it any different from the web we know today that’s given us cute pictures of cats, Twitter and the end of newspapers? Some of the questions we’ll cover include;
what exactly is the internet of things?
how is it different from today’s internet?
is this just another tech industry slogan like big data or social media?
things like aircraft have been connected to the net for years, why is this suddenly news?
what sort of machines are we talking about connecting?
some industry pundits are saying this business could be worth $14 trillion dollars, where do they get this number from?
how are governments looking at using these technologies?
During the week it was reported Google have patented a tattoo with an embedded microphone.
so what happens when viruses get into our wearable technologies and connected fridge?
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What’s striking about talking with Antoni is how passionate he is about Barcelona’s future and the importance of the city building new industries around the digital economy.
Particularly notable is the administration’s vision for the city which combines Barcelona’s traditional industries, such as the port, with future technologies.
“Barcelona has to become a city of culture, creativity, knowledge but mainly fairness and well being,” says Antoni when asked on where he sees his city as being in ten years time. “I would love to see my city as a place where people live near where they work, I would love to see the city self sufficient in energy and it should be zero emission city.”
“Rather than having a pattern of PITO – ‘Product In, Trash Out’ we should move to what we call the DIDO model – ‘Data In Data Out’.”
It’s a broad view for the future which many other city and state governments will be watching closely.
A Spanish startup shows how the internet of machines is changing the business world having installed their sensors into everything from space ships to koala bears.
A Spanish startup shows how the internet of machines is changing the business world having installed their sensors into everything from space ships to koala bears.
“Libelium comes from Libelula which means dragonfly,” says Alicia Asin, of the sensor company she co-founded with David Gascón. “The company was named after a swarming insect.”
“We try to solve the problem of dealing with a lot of different sensors and a lot of different protocols and different information systems so we created a hardware platform that sends any information using any communication protocol to any computer system.”
Bootstrapping a global business
Particularly impressive about Libelium is the business has grown to a global brand employing 40 people since 2007 when Alicia and David founded their business on their meagre savings.
“We started with literally wïth nothing, just 3,000 euros which is all you have when you are twenty-four” says Alicia.
After raising funds through some grants and investors, the company got on with selling their products.
“We never wanted to be a company where it’s comfortable for three years without making money so we shipped a product in seven months.”
“We realise now how smart that was.”
Agriculture and smart cities
Connected cites and agriculture are the sectors Alicia sees as being the greatest opportunities for the company.
“I think that cities are very interesting, not because of the technology but what it really means,” says Alicia. “If you are able to have a dashboard of the city’s performance and governments are willing to apply open data then you are really promoting transparency.
“That’s the best legacy of the Internet of Things.”
In Agriculture Alicia sees opportunities in high value crops like vineyards, “we can reduce the amount of fertilisers, we can prevent illnesses in vines and you can even design the type of wine as you can control the amount of sugar in the grapes.”
For Spain, companies like Libelium represent the future of the nation’s industry. “We really need to re-invent the country,” says Alicia.
“I’m always saying that Spain is becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe when it comes to smart cities. Not only in Barcelona but you also have Santander, you have Malaga, Madrid and Zarazoga.”
So it may be that along with a swarm of Libelium sensors, Spain also has a swarm of smart cities. It may be enough to re-invent the country along with the agriculture industry and local governments.
With more bootstrapped startups like Libelium, Spain may even build its own version of Silicon Valley.
That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.
Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.
With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.
For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.
In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.
That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.
Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.
How Barcelona is using smart devices to make their city better.
Spain and Barcelona have faced challenges in recent years as the economy was hit hard by the 2008 crisis. Now the city is looking to the internet for the next wave of prosperity.
This quest for reinvention isn’t new for the city, “Barcelona used to be an industrial city, that was badly hit by the economic crisis of the seventies,” said Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives. “There were some guys in the city at the time that decided that we had to keep on being an important city.”
“There’s a new generation of politicians, civil servants, of thinkers and people committed to the city that ten years ago started to work on a new phase of what the city was to become.”
Antoni Vives – Deputy Mayor of Barcelona
“We decided that Barcelona had to become the edgiest city in the world related to the new revolution and the new revolution was this one — the technology related to mobility, devices and mainly the internet.”
That vision resulted in Barcelona starting to rewire the city which was one of the reasons for Cisco choosing the city as the venue for its inaugural Internet of Things World Forum.
As part of the event, the City took delegates on tours of some of the connected infrastructure the city has installed. Here’s what we learned on the press tour.
The digital bus stop
Digital bus stop
The digital bus stop is one of the prides of Barcelona, not only does it display digital advertising and real time bus schedules it also offers tourist information, USB charging sockets and acts as a free WiFi base station.
One of the barriers Barcelona has encountered has been the Spanish telecoms regulators objection to the city providing municipal WiFi so services are restricted to the city’s property, which happens to include bus stops.
The bus stops themselves are connected to the city’s fibre network that runs most of the backhaul and connects many of the fixed devices.
Smart parking spots
Smart parking space
Connected to the city’s WiFi network are these smart parking spaces that detect the presence of cars through a combination of light and metal detectors.
The city’s plan is that payment and monitoring of the smart parking spots will happen online and with smartphone apps.
Powering the dot, which is a fairly dumb device, is a battery with an expected five to seven year lifespan. Interestingly, the dots don’t work with motorcycles.
One of the reporters on the tour questioned the durability of these devices given Barcelona doesn’t get extreme temperatures, the response from the Cisco and city staff indicates that ice or hot weather may shorten the lifespan of these devices.
Smart lighting and monitoring
Smart lights and monitors
In the square outside the Born Cultural Centre, the city has installed a row of streetlights with multiple features including CCTV, air monitoring and Wifi. All of these lights are connected to the city’s 500Km long undeground fibre network.
The fibre network itself is being installed progressively as the city carries out routine maintenance to roads and other underground services. By co-ordinating the work with other trades it reduces the installation cost dramatically.
Smart censors in the street lights
Smart rubbish bins
Smart rubbish bins in Barcelona
The connected garbage bins are one of the showpieces of the city’s services. By monitoring trash levels, the council’s sanitation team can plot the optimal routes for collection services.
Smart rubbish bins sensor
Again the sensors on the bins are fairly dumb devices that connect wirelessly to a base station, shown on the pole above the bins in the earlier photo, these track rubbish levels and later versions are expected to detect the presence of obnoxious or hazardous materials that might be dumped in the bin.
Single person operation of the connected garbage truck
Operators of the garbage trucks get real time updates to their routes which optimises their productivity. It’s cost savings in the city’s operations which is one of the key drivers for the city’s investment in these technologies.
Power savings
Smart lighting systems
One of the major cost savings identified by the Barcelona Council is in energy costs. Along with the expense of running garbage trucks unnecessarily are power bills.
Part of the smart lighting system is that it will dim when there’s no motion detected in the streets and lighten when pedestrians are around. This is intended to save money and help the city meet it’s zero carbon emission targets.
Barcelona and the future
Every single one of the technologies being shown today in Barcelona will be commonplace in most developed cities in the near future.
The problem for adopting these systems is going to be connectivity, in places where there aren’t the fibre optic services or easily deployed WiFi it will be difficult to install smart devices and monitor them.
Every major city is going to be facing the question of how they deploy these devices over the next decade as their residents expect better and more efficient service. Barcelona has taken the first steps that most others will follow.
Cisco Systems is making big bets on the internet of everything
“You might call us naïve, but we’re looking at changing the world,” Cisco CEO John Chambers told journalists at the Internet of Things World Forum in Barcelona yesterday.
That’s a big, hairy audacious goal which sounds feasible when the company estimates 50 billion devices will be connected to the net by the end of the decade in an industry worth 14 trillion dollars.
Given the size of the market there’s a concern that different standards will affect the industry.
One objective of Cisco holding its event in Barcelona was to start the process of creating standards around the connected devices as the company’s futurist, Dave Evans, pointed out that getting WiFi standards agreed early meant the technology was quickly accepted as users could be confident of their systems talking to each other.
Regardless of the standards adopted, the Internet of Things is already growing with industries from mining to logistics connecting their equipment. This is improving productivity and speeding up the supply chain.
The effects on industries promise to be huge.
Chambers’ message to CEOs was blunt, “by the time it’s obvious you have to move, it’s too late. Have the courage to think big. Have the courage to take risks.”
For Cisco the Internet of Things is probably not a risk at all, as the company that dominates the market for the equipment that is the plumbing of the net will almost certainly profit greatly from the adoption of connected equipment.
Other businesses won’t be in such a good position as their industries change and it’s worthwhile listening to Chambers’ advice.
This is an interesting, and somewhat provocative, idea. While there’s no doubt ubiquitous internet is an essential service in an advanced economy and increasingly critical to most industries, calling it a basic human right is a big call.
Perhaps we need to consider there is a kind of technological order of services, something similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.
In the tech sector the most basic is electricity as without power all this technology is useless.
Sitting above this are the core infrastructure like the cables, ducts, telegraph poles and subsea cables.
Then perhaps there is the internet itself including the routers, switches and base stations which keep the internet running.
Above those are the connected devices — the smartphones, the robot mining equipment and the internet fridge.
Processing all the data these devices generate is the job of the data centres and cloud computing services which make the internet of everything work.
So perhaps to describe broadband as a fundamental human right is overstating things when a large proportion of humanity doesn’t have access to reliable electricity or drinking water.
What’s interesting watching John Chambers talk is how passionate he is about the Internet of Everything, so much so he’s betting the company on it.
It’s understandable that John Chambers and Cisco would consider broadband internet to be one of life’s essentials as it is critical for the company’s growth and survival but for humanity we should remember that some technologies and services are more essential than others.
