Internet of Things | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

When autonomous vehicles and humans collide

The interaction between humans and autonomous vehicles is not turning out well so far

With the rapid advances in driverless cars, it was only a matter of time before the question of what happens when people encounter them would be answered.

It turns out not too well for the autonomous vehicles reports Bloomberg citing a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute that found driverless cars have accident rates double those of normal vehicles.

As it turns out, those accidents are usually minor and are caused by humans colliding with the autonomous vehicles as the law abiding computers catch drivers unawares.

That people aren’t very good at driving cars isn’t a surprise but now we’re seeing what happens when distracted, mistake prone humans encounter cautious and usually correct computers.

We now have to start thinking about what happens when artificial intelligence encounters human frailty.

How social media drove the Internet of Things hype

Was social media responsible for the IoT hype?

In our recent interview with Kevin Ashton, the man who coined the Internet of Things term, he raised an interesting thought about why the IoT had become such a popular concept.

Ashton surmised there were two factors at work, the first being a younger generation of computer users who took networked devices for granted and the other being that the rise of social media – specifically Twitter – meant the #IoT hashtag was accessible and easy to use.

And they’ve never lived in a paradigm where computers don’t gather their own information. So it’s very…the internet of things idea is incredibly natural to them. People who were using computers, let’s say, in the 80s and the early 90s, pre-internet, it can be a little less intuitive. So that’s one thing, but the other thing is, just a complete coincidence, I think, is Twitter. On the internet of things community on Twitter we use the hashtag IOT.

Now, it just so happens, first of all, IoT is very Twitter-friendly because it’s very short. But by calling this thing the internet of things, I inadvertently happened upon a three letter acronym that was distinctive. There aren’t many of those in the world. But there isn’t anything IOT stands for.

Now, we never used the term IoT in the early days because it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody, right? But I happened upon this distinctive three-letter acronym, and then Twitter came along. And it made it very easy for all these kids that were kind of internet of things natives to find one another and communicate with one another, and that really helped. That really helped. So there was some coincidence in that realm.

There’s no doubt the two factors Ashton identifies were critical in the popularity of the term but we shouldn’t overlook the marketing efforts of established hardware and software companies to find ways to make money out of the Internet of Things, what Cisco President John Chambers calls “the greatest opportunity of my lifetime.”

Coupled with the marketing efforts of big IT companies is that the IoT is now coming into its own as adding communications and computing power to almost any device becomes almost trivial. Indeed, Cisco’s often touted statistic of 50 billion connected devices by 2020 is almost certainly an understatement as everything from barbie dolls to bees to locomotives start communicating.

While the IoT is a good label and a boon to desperate marketers trying to describe what would otherwise be a mundane subject of communication protocols and hardware, the bigger forces at work are that the technologies are accessible and affordable to most businesses and individuals.

As those billions of connected Barbie Dolls and tractors roll out there’s a huge number of benefits and risks involved in networking all these devices and managing the data they generate, luckily we at least have a good term to describe the general concept.

Putting the smart vision into smart cities

Smart cities need vision and a rethinking of design and contracts says Autodesk’s Terry Bennett

“Smart cities need smart visions,” states Terry Bennett, Autodesk’s lead strategist for the infrastructure industry.

Bennett was speaking to Decoding The New Economy about how cities will evolve with smart technologies however he believes that data is not the answer.

“Smart doesn’t mean putting sensors on everything and collecting terabytes of data,” he says. “Just putting sensors in the road doesn’t make it a smart city. To have a smart city you need smart people with a smart vision.”

S.M.A.R.T

“We see smart as more as an acronym. The ‘S’ is for setting science based targets for the data being collected,” he explains. Those targets could be financial, environmental or quality of life, “you have to set targets to see that your plan is being carried out.

The M is for measuring against those targets while the A is for absorbing or analysing that information and using it effectively.

R is for retrofitting, with Bennett seeing that valuable existing assets that still have long lives ahead of them being best refitted with smart technologies to get better information out of them.

Shifting demographics and tastes

One of the challenges ahead for planners and designers are the changing demographics and usage patterns of cities as the next generation of workers promise to be far more mobile and not as fixed to central business districts.

An advantage for smarter cities is they have much more data available to make informed decisions and as patterns change, those municipalities can see the differences occurring sooner.

Coupled with newer construction methods that allow infrastructure to be built faster, cities are going to be able to quickly respond to changing usage and demands on services.

Contracting out innovation

Those fast construction methods create another need for change in contracting methods. “We have to start thinking more as manufacturing rather than construction,” he says. “We get bogged down a lot in the ‘contract’ part of contracting. We have contracts written in the 1950s that are today’s standard contracts.”

“You can’t build fast enough given the changes in demographics and technology using those older contracts. You basically contracting out innovation.”

For government this can be an opportunity, Bennett believes. If clients allow builders freedom in techniques and methods then costs can be reduced with more resilient results.

Ultimately it’s that resilience that matters with infrastructure being designed for decades, “if you’re designing for traffic patterns for today then you’re wrong.”

Paul travelled to Autodesk University in Los Vegas as a guest of Autodesk

The insecure internet of children’s toys

Security weaknesses in the Hello Barbie show safety is an afterthought rather than a fundamental part of designing tech products.

What could go wrong with an internet connected doll with artificial intelligence that can respond to children’s conversations?

A lot as it turns out.

The Washington Post reports the Hello Barbie has a range of vulnerabilities that could be used to eavesdrop on conversations and potentially carry out even more malicious acts.

Once again we see marketers and salespeople being ahead of the IT and security experts with the security of an Internet of Things device being seen as a bolt of afterthought rather than a basic design consideration.

Rewriting the IoT

Why big companies “suck” at innovating and CEOs have great hair

Last week I posted a long interview with Kevin Ashton, the man who coined the ‘Internet of Things’ tag, on startups, innovation and how the media manages to misreport technology. It was a good, but lengthy, interview.

The good folk at Smart Company have rewritten the piece into a much more readable story so if you thought the first post was tl;dr – too long; didn’t read – then you may find the edited version much more concise and useful.

Beyond the world of talking toasters

Inventor of the Internet of Things term Kevin Ashton speaks of his startup experiences, the future of work, skills needed for success and why the media is a doing a poor job on reporting technology.

Kevin Ashton is best known for coining the ‘Internet of Things’ term in 1999, however that’s just one part of a varied career that’s included building a number of tech startups, co-founding MIT’s Auto-ID Center and leading some of the early development work in RFID (radio frequency identification) networks, which led to the IoT label being born.

Since exiting his last business Ashton’s focus has been on consulting, mentoring some of the startups he’s invested in and writing with his last book “How To Fly A Horse, the secret history of creation, invention and discovery” released at the beginning of this year.

During his visit to Sydney last week, he spoke to Decoding The New Economy about his startup experiences, the future of work, skills needed for success and why the media is a doing a poor job on reporting technology.

Let’s kick off with your book, what was the motivation behind writing it?

In the late 1990s I started a lab at MIT and most of my talking was about the research we were doing. I’d talk and then they’d hear it. But occasionally someone would say, oh, but you’re leading a very innovative team, and we’re very interested in innovation. Can you talk about innovation and how things get created?

So I started giving talks about my experiences of driving an innovation and trying to be innovative, and so on. And that became more and more popular through the 2000s. Eventually I was giving a talk in Napa Valley, California, and a friend of mine came to watch, and at the end they were like, “Oh my God, that was amazing! You need to write a book.”

I started writing a book of the talk and it did very well. People really liked it. And it was weird because, I guess, you kind of get used to a way of thinking about things, and it seems you forget that to other people it might be insightful.

The book is really my experience and my strong belief that creating is not about magical flashes of inspiration and being a special kind of person, or being a genius, or whatever. It’s got a lot more to do with being willing to just keep going even when it’s not working, even when you can’t see a way forward.

And it’s also not an individual thing. It’s very much about building on the work of other people. Creating itself is very individual, which turned out to be a controversial point as well, that you’re always part of a community of people you know, people you don’t know, people that are still alive, people that died years ago. You’re making these incremental steps, building on the work of others. So that was always my thought, and that’s the book that I wrote. And I’m lucky. People seem to really like it.

What’s your thoughts on the current startup mania?

I think, by and large, big companies suck at doing new things, and the reason is structural. Every big company was a small company at some point. Someone was doing a new thing. And eventually they happened upon something that worked.

The first thing you tried doesn’t work, the second thing you tried doesn’t work, and accidentally you stumble across something that does work and starts making money. Maybe those people move on, maybe they stay, but it’s easy to become addicted to the comfort and safety of the thing that works.

And the money that flows from the thing that works, it’s easy to believe that that thing will continue to work. Or you make a slight change. You only had a red one, and now you’ve got an orange one, and you feel like you’ve been profoundly innovative.

So if you really want to do something new, you probably need to be in a small, passionate group of people. Now it is possible for a big company to take a small, passionate group of people and sort of stick then in an airlock somewhere and leave them alone. Theoretically, that’s possible. It seldom happens, and particularly because most of innovating is failing.

I’ve seen time and again is the people who rise to the top of big companies are often people who are very good at avoiding failure, or the appearance of failure. Very good at taking credit for other people’s success. They’re often from a privileged class. It’s typically white men. The typical CEO is a tallish white man with a full head of hair and a deep voice. I see that all the time. Failing is not good for your career. Ironically, because it is good for creating.

So, I think startups, meaning small companies, small groups of passionate people who are either not scared of failing or don’t have any choice but to keep failing until they succeed because there’s nowhere else to go, are always going to be the engines of innovation and creating.

Now, I will qualify that. There is also a class of privileged white men called venture capitalists who like to make you think that unless they’re allowed to give you some money that you can’t succeed and that you’re not a credible startup unless somebody blessed you with some venture capital or something. And I think, frankly, that’s all bullshit.

The last thing you want to do as an entrepreneur is, and I’ve done it. I’ve started companies without venture capital, and then taken some eventually. My my most successful company never took on any money from anybody else. There was kind of in the middle somewhere.

Not only is venture capital and outside investment not a prerequisite for having a successful startup, it’s really a last resort. Because what comes with that money is loss of control and people who don’t…You know, you start to get some of the problems that come with a big company. Venture capitalists who hear this will just throw up their hands and hate it when they get called out on their shit, but that’s true.

And by the way, a lot of very successful companies that…take Microsoft, or Amazon, or whatever…had a very slight relationship with venture capital. So it’s entirely possible to build a large, successful, high-tech company, without venture money.

The discipline that comes from living hand to mouth and trying to find a customer and trying to make a profit and not wasting your money on bean bags and air hockey or whatever, that’s a good thing. So, I’m all for people of all genders, colors, sexualities, shapes and sizes trying to do something by themselves. I think you can be successful. I don’t think you need anybody’s permission.

Which was your most successful company?

Zensi was a company I started with some academic friends, and it was a very smart way to identify how people were consuming electricity and water. I was very into knowing things relatively. In the case of water, for example, we put a very simple sensor that you could screw under the kitchen sink. It was just a little diaphragm. But every time you use water anywhere in your home, the pressure in your water system changes.

So you turn on the shower upstairs, and throughout your water system, there’s a pressure drop, and then a pressure stabilization as the system gets back to its regular pressure. And what we found was, you could analyze that pressure change and determine someone had just taken a shower, for example.

It’s a very simple sensor connected to the internet, a bunch of algorithms in the cloud. And you could identify leaks, you could tell people where they were wasting water. So, we started that company, basically, with cash of our own and that was in January, February 2009. So that was the depths of the recession. When nobody was starting anything, by the way.

What do they say? They say buy low and sell high. Well, guess what? When you can buy low, nobody’s buying. They’re scared, right?

So we started it 2009, and about 10 months later we had a couple of people trying to acquire it for a lot of money. The best answer you can ever give somebody when they want to acquire your company is, we’re not for sale, because then the price just keeps going up. You have to mean it, right?

Eventually, we got an offer we really couldn’t refuse. At the same time, we were thinking about trying to raise venture money, and so on. It wasn’t like a deliberate strategy to never do it. But the acquisition deal was just so much more valuable. And the beauty of that is, you’re not sharing the money with anybody else.

Today you’re an author and speaker?

Author, speaker. I’ve got some investments in some Austin-based startups. I do a little bit of consulting here and there. So, companies I’m interested in. I have done the MIT thing. And then three startups. And I’m actually enjoying not having a very formal schedule. It gives me a chance to write, which I love. It gives me a chance to come here and do this. I’ve never been very successful in companies that I was not in charge of.

I find that a lot of the kind of mansplaining and bullshit and endless PowerPoint and people wanting to have nothing but meetings and, you know, a lot of posturing and politics and stuff. I mean, like a lot of people who are interested in innovation and passionate about creating new things, I have a very low tolerance for that crap. I’m very bad at it. So, I love my life right now, because I really choose. I’m very much the master of my own destiny, and I don’t have to…I’m not obliged to deal with too many idiots. Which is good for me, because I’m not good at it.

So onto that inevitable question that you’re going to get about the Internet of Things. Do you regret coming up with that tag?

No.

No?

No, I joked one time that I should have called it the internet for things, and people took that a bit too seriously. I mean, I had no idea that it was going to have a life outside of the PowerPoint presentation that I was working on at the time, but it has a poetry to it. It’s specific enough that when people ask what it is, I think you can give a good explanation. It’s general enough that it’s not limiting itself to one application, or something.

The other thing I think is really curious to me is…so the internet of things was something I talked about a lot between ’99 and 2005 or something. And it was reasonably well known in the fairly small community of people who are interested in ubiquitous computing and embedded computing.

And then it took on a life of its own in the late 2000s and sort of the last few years. And I think there’s a couple of reasons why. Right? One is that there are a lot of people graduating right now who are really internet natives.

So the idea of things not being networked, or of things being wirelessly networked, the idea of computers only getting information via keyboard, that’s not a paradigm they’ve ever lived in. And they are…I think I got that slightly wrong, that sentence, so let me rephrase it for you. But there are a group of internet natives graduating right now who have never lived in the paradigm where computers are not connected.

And they’ve never lived in a paradigm where computers don’t gather their own information. So it’s very…the internet of things idea is incredibly natural to them. People who were using computers, let’s say, in the 80s and the early 90s, pre-internet, it can be a little less intuitive. So that’s one thing, but the other thing is, just a complete coincidence, I think, is Twitter. On the internet of things community on Twitter we use the hashtag IOT.

Now, it just so happens, first of all, IoT is very Twitter-friendly because it’s very short. But by calling this thing the internet of things, I inadvertently happened upon a three letter acronym that was distinctive. There aren’t many of those in the world. But there isn’t anything IOT stands for. Now, we never used the term IoT in the early days because it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody, right? But I happened upon this distinctive three-letter acronym, and then Twitter came along. And it made it very easy for all these kids that were kind of internet of things natives to find one another and communicate with one another, and that really helped. That really helped. So there was some coincidence in that realm.

In the presentation that preceded this interview you were quite scathing about some of the more trivial commercial consumer IoT examples.

Oh, stupid. Yeah.

I couldn’t help but think of Marc Benioff a couple of years back, waving his connected toothbrush around at Dreamforce.

People will do everything. If you’ve been in tech for a while, people have been doing that for years. It’s bullshit. I mean, the…So you must live in a super smart home. Not really, no. And they’re like, what have you got?

They think I’m going to have Roombas talking to light bulbs or some bullshit. But the one thing of those consumer products I found useful is my bathroom scale is on WiFi. It’s crazy expensive, but it means that I can never lie to myself about whether or not I’m losing or gaining weight, because it’s like, there’s something on the web, it’s keeping a record. That’s useful. But I think…one of the things that’s kind of curious to me. I talk about it a little bit in my book actually is, there seems to be this obsession with consumer applications in technology.

Which is coupled with a complete lack of curiosity, particularly with respect to you, on the part of journalists and editors and people like that, about how the world actually works. Right. The manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, agriculture, the history of technology. They don’t want to know. It’s like, what is it? And this is a thing. Journalists are the only people who their life is writing about stuff, and then they go out into their kitchen, which is why…they don’t really seem to care about how stuff gets to their kitchen.

It’s like, tell me what it means for my toaster. But there’s so much more to the world than freaking kitchen appliances, you know? And I’m sure there’s something interesting you might to do with a kitchen appliance, but I can’t really think of it. And I don’t see why I have to.

Look at Uber, the interesting thing about it is, people think I’m cheating. I’m like, so, you’ve got GPS, right? Yeah. Well, that’s a sensor. It’s network connected. That’s part of the internet of things. Oh, yeah, okay, like, not really. I’m like, yes, really. That really is. Right? And it’s the same with…so, oh, I’ve got a smart watch now, and I’m measuring how many steps I take, or something. Great. If you’re doing that, that’s internet of things, right?

And on and on it goes. So there’s a real ignorance among a certain class of people, a kind of communicating class, about how the world works, how things are made, how complicated and miraculous that is. And also there’s kind of an anthropomorphic tendency they have that, when you point out that a phone has a camera and a camera is a sensor, that’s kind of confusing, because unless it’s a human-like sense, it kind of doesn’t count, right? Well, we don’t have GPS, but GPS is still location-sensing.

So I think all this is part of paradigm shift, as well. So it’s not that surprising to the internet of things generation, which is really people, for one, like, I don’t know, after 1990 or something. It’s fairly obvious to them, but to older people it’s like, oh, what does the fridge say to the toaster?

I’ve encountered that myself where producers or editors aren’t interested yet the audience enjoys the discussion or topic.

I mean, that’s the thing, and that’s why I made that joke on the stage. It’s like, I don’t actually agree with these filters. My audience isn’t interested in this because I speak to thousands of people a month, and they’re all interested in it.

So supply chain, it’s amazing to me that there’s a couple hundred eight meter high freaking self-driving trucks in the Pilbara but because people don’t care about, well, what is a strip mine, and what the hell are they strip mining?

What is it that Rio Tinto do anyway? It looks kind of dusty, and the things are big and yellow, and not quite black and shiny, or whatever, so we don’t care. That’s amazing technology. And we depend on the minerals those guys are mining, and they can’t necessarily afford to pay 200,000 Australian dollars a year for someone to drive that truck because nobody wants to live there.

I get that a $200,000 a year job is nice, but living in that place probably isn’t, right? So there’s a dehumanizing thing about that kind of work, as well. Mining is horrible. The fewer people that have to do mining…we need mining. The less manual it is, the better. Dangerous, nasty, it’s bad for your health. So that’s really cool, in turn things technology. But you’re right, try pitch it to an editor.

This touches on a constant theme with the IoT and automation. Where do you see the job coming from?

We have to be real careful when we talk about jobs, because there’s a hard piece to this which is on the individual level, it can be quite devastating. Okay? If you made a living as a cab driver, for example, in some license-regulated monopoly city taxi service, Uber is a threat to your livelihood, and there’s no getting away from that. So on the individual level, new technology can be very disruptive, and I don’t want to trivialize that at all.

However, there were people asked that question, they’re generally asking on a macro level. And on a macro level, what we see all the time is that technology tends to humanize the workforce. You are replacing…what technology can do compared to what humans can do is relatively basic. Again, I talk about this in the book. But a thousand years ago or something in the textile industry, there were people whose job was to stomp up and down on wet cloth all the time, right?

To prepare the fibre for weaving, manual weaving, or whatever. And they got replaced by water mills and wind mills. And then you had apprenticeships, right? So people learned to weave as apprentices, and that predates the education system. So, instead of it being enough for you there to stomp up and down in time to some song people were singing, you got trained in a skill. You became more valuable. I think that’s a more fulfilling life.

Then weavers got replaced by automated looms. But that created a volume of sophisticated new textiles that required management jobs, and so people were taught to read. I’m simplifying slightly, but the macro trend is very obvious. As technology replaces menial and manual labor, we need more skilled workers, we need more educated workers, and that’s why we can all read.

Our three times great grandparents or something were probably illiterate. As were all our ancestors before that. Reading is a very recent skill, and now it’s public education, and it’s considered elementary. That’s why it’s called elementary education. It never used to be. So, in terms of where the jobs come from in the internet of things age, I think the internet of things generates efficiencies that allow us to produce more things and allows to give people longer, better lives, and managing that production and that productivity requires skills. It’s really that simple.

I remember trying to explain to some friend’s mother, old mother or something one time, what I did, when I was just in a marketing job at Procter and Gamble. And she was like, oh, so you don’t really do anything. And she was very explicit. But it’s like, no, I don’t really do any…I don’t do any manual labor. I’m a knowledge worker.

I think that comes from something Drucker said in the 1960s. But that’s what happens. And the more we move to a knowledge economy, the less your job is a health risk, and the higher your quality of life, and the higher standard of education your nation is going to want to give you.

I don’t want to be too cynical about it, but countries don’t invest in public education for your sake. A lot of the time, they do it for the sake of the economy. I was just talking to some lady about why Australian school kids need to code. That’s a great question. That’s an important thing. And it’s not coding that matters. It’s advanced mathematics, advanced critical thinking skills.

And by the way, as we end up with a more informed population, a more informed electorate, we end up with a more enlightened society, because it’s harder for some guy on a pulpit or something to talk about brimstone and hire and spew hatred. And that’s another…there’s these huge social trends that we see that come partly from the more educated workforce you need in a more high-tech society. All interconnected.

So what skills do you see being in demand?

I think coding is a little bit…you’ve got to understand, coding is a little bit yesterday’s skill, actually. I did want to say that to the coding lady. But the thing I mentioned to the panelist today, but the thing that’s more important than coding now is data science.

And data science is not coding. Data science is understanding statistics and maths and modeling in a way that means you can write an algorithm which you or somebody else then turns into a piece of computer code.

But basic mathematical equation, that can separate the wheat from the chafe in a big pile of numbers, and identify what’s interesting and what’s not. It’s a little bit like solving a puzzle, and it’s really quite cool. Auto-correct is an example of it, and Netflix recommendation algorithms is an example of it.

It’s a wild and interesting frontier, particularly for mathematically-inclined kids, or puzzle-solving, chess-playing kind of kids. And there’s a huge skills gap. Huge. And these guys are making a fortune coming out of school. They’ve got 20 job offers. And that will be true 10 years from now.

I’m trying to push my kids into doing statistics and data science. It’s a hard sell.

Yeah, I get that it’s not for everybody, but the kind of kid that might get directed toward coding is probably the kind of kid that could also be directed towards data science. And you know, they’re not mutually exclusive, but that’s the bias that I like to lean people towards, because technology is changing very rapidly.

We have to think about what’s going to be needed 5 to 10 years from now and not what’s needed today. You don’t want your 12-year-old to be learning a thing they need to know today, that the workforce needs to know today, that’s not going to be relevant in 10 years from now.

Who is investing in the Internet of Things?

Who is making the big investment bets on the IoT?

Investment in Internet of Things companies has doubled in the past five years reports CB Insights from from $768 million in 2010 to over $1.9 billion in 2014.

But who is doing the investing? CB Insights research finds Intel Capital is the biggest player in the space with Qualcomm coming in second.

That two hardware vendors are the biggest investors in the field tells us much about how the tech industry is seeing the IoT as being a key part of the sector’s future.

Navigating the Internet of Things

The navigating the Internet of Things forum promised much, it didn’t really deliver

The Navigating the Internet of Things Forum held in Sydney earlier today promised how businesses can navigate the technologies that promise to change society and – more specifically how can Australian enterprises use the IoT – sadly it didn’t quite deliver.

On the panel, sponsored by Telstra and held in the telco’s Sydney Experience Centre were the Australian Computer Society’s CEO, Andrew Johnson; Uber’s Sydney’s city lead, Glenn O’Sullivan; ZappQ founder Naomi Henn and the man responsible for the entire Internet of Things label and creator of WeMo, Kevin Ashton.

To start with the panel was very much consumer focused with talk around connected fish tanks, spa baths and discussion around the now defunct home automation service Ninja Blocks. It wasn’t until Ashton mentioned the use of autonomous vehicles in Rio Tinto’s Australian mines that the discussion of industrial uses really came into play.

“The most powerful applications in the IoT are in manufacturing and logistics”, said Ashton who also noted during the privacy discussion how “government are conflicted when it comes to protecting our data.”

Ashton’s point was well made given the audience questions were also largely about the privacy and security aspects of the IoT, an important issue highlighted by a story today on how police wearable cameras are being shipped with known spyware installed.

One other key aspect was the skills shortage. Ashton noted that data scientists are going to be the profession most in demand in an age where almost every device is collecting information with the ACS’s Johnson flagged how it will be the consultants and IT support industry that will have the task of rolling out the IoT to the small business community.

Ultimately though the Navigating The Internet of Things forum didn’t really hit its mark. Any manager or company owner hoping to understand how the IoT would help their business would have left the room as uncertain how these technologies were going to affect them as how they would have started the day.

One of the things that’s missing at events like this are people actually using these services or supplying the products. During the introduction to the event, Telstra manager Mark Chapman described how Adelaide City Council is piloting the company’s Cumulocity platform using Libelium sensors.

Libelium is one of the good stories on how the IoT is changing cities and businesses, something that founder Alicia Asin described to Decoding the New Economy three years ago.

Describing how the Internet of Things will change businesses requires hearing more from people like Asin and those delivering the products and services driving the evolutions in today’s society.

Sadly, those voices were missing on today’s panel. If the opportunities presented by the internet of things are going to be realised, then the people finding real results with the technologies today need to be heard.

Designing and the IoT

The Internet of Things promises to change the world of design

A piece I wrote for IoT hub looks at how the design industry is changing as every day devices, even clothes, can start communicating with the world.

In researching the piece, it was interesting just how broad the possibilities are, particularly when we start considering main devices will be able to change their roles depending on the commands they receive or the environment they detect.

What’s clear is the design industry is facing a world of opportunities, and challenges, as not only do objects start talking to each other, but also new materials and manufacturing processes start changing how we think ordinary items should be made and used.

Designing a secure IoT ecosystem

Ensuring the next generation of IoT devices is secure will be one of the challenges facing the next generations of designers.

Ensuring the next generation of IoT devices is secure and a good citizen of the wider ecosystem will be one of the challenges facing the next generations of designers.

Diego Tamburini, Manufacturing Industry Strategist of design software company Autodesk, spoke to Decoding The New Economy about how the IoT will change the design industry. “We’ve been designing equipment to connect to the internet for a generation,” he said. “What’s changing is that now the addition of software, electronics, networking and communication is breeding into objects that were purely mechanical.”

Melding the physical and software worlds doesn’t come without risks however, something that worries Internet pioneer Vint Cerf who foresees headlines like ‘100,000 fridges hack the Bank of America’ in an interview with Matthew Braga of Motherboard Canada.

Apart from the fact it could be a hundred million, Cerf has good reason to be worried. Most consumer IoT devices are hopelessly insecure and the recent stories of hacked cars only emphasises the weaknesses with connected household items.

Cerf and Braga make the point the ‘I Love You’ worm of the year 2000 became a crisis because the world had reached the point where personal computers were ubiquitous. A similar piece of malware in a world where everything from kettles to wristwatches are vulnerable would be exponentially worse.

These risks put a great onus on product designers, even more so given much of the functionality is based upon those devices communicating with others across the internet and cloud services, something that Tamburini emphasised.

“One important thing that is happening with thing being connected is we are not just designing things that function in a vacuum, we’re increasingly designing members of a larger ecosystem.” Tamburini states, “now we have to think of how the product will have to connect to other products and how they will collectively perform a function.”

Part of that risk is that should those devices malfunction, either deliberately as part of a botnet or malware attack, or accidentally as we saw with the connected home being disabled due to a defective smart lightbulb flooding the network with error messages, then the wider community may be affected in ways we may not expect.

Cerf believes it’s going to take a big, catastrophic hack on a grand, connected scale before a shift in security begins to happen, and before people begin to even consider that such a vulnerabilities even exist.

If that’s the case, it will be that society has ignored the clear warning signs we’ve seen from events like the Jeep hack and the Stuxnet worm, not to mention the massive privacy breaches at Target and Sony. For designers of these systems hardening them is going to be an essential part of making them fit for today and the future.

A kid in a telco candy store

It’s a great time to be a telco CTO says Telstra’s Vish Nandlall

“It’s a kid in a candy store opportunity,” says Telstra CTO Vish Nandlall on being asked what excites him about the telecommunications industry.

Nandlall was talking to Decoding the New Economy about the challenges facing telcos in an industry facing massive change as the once immensely profitable voice and text services are being displaced by less lucrative data products.

Previously we’ve spoken to Nandlall about the future of Australia’s incumbent telco in a competitive market and this interview was an opportunity to explore some of the broader opportunities in a radically changing market.

A data business

“While our business sounds complicated, we actually only do three things.” Nandlall observes about telecommunications companies, “we move data, we store data and we compete on data.”

“In the course of my lifetime in telecoms any two of those coming together meant a major shift. Today all three are converging.”

That convergence creates a range of challenges and opportunities, Nandlall believes. “When I look at what we see on the consumer side, I see the Internet of Things which really does promise a golden age of convenience.”

“Underpinning it all is going to be a massive transformation around data, the data insights suddenly become the thing that we’re going to need to differentiate our businesses from competitors in the industry.”

Differentiation through data

The differentiation of telecoms companies is going to lie in the software and data services being offered, Nandlall believes. “I don’t think telcos need to replicate Over The Top services,” he says in reference to services like Facebook or WhatsApp or Skype.

Nandlall sees the value for telcos in providing the next level of services in areas such as API management, content delivery and security. “We need to have new digital delivery systems,” he says, flagging software defined systems as being key to delivering to the new generation of telco services, “we can’t be restricted to fixed lines.”

Facing the skills shortage

The challenge facing telcos and all businesses is finding skilled workers, Nandlall observes. “Because change has been so rapid there has been a pipeline of students or workers being readily available.”

Nandlall sees initiatives like Cloud Foundry and Hadoop offering a means to address the skills shortage by standardising processes, reducing complexity and automating many of the tasks occupying today’s developers and technology workers.

This change also promises to speed up business as well and, combined with cloud services, changing the operating models of entire industries.

A new competitive advantage

For businesses without the scale of Telstra Nandlall has an important message, “I think we’ve hit a point in industry is where the competitive advantage is not just through some sustained differentiation,” he observes. “Today it’s about your ability to rapidly adopt new things.”

That rapid adoption is only going to accelerate, Nandlall believes, as the Internet of Things and wearable devices bring a whole new range of ways to collect and display information. For a kid fascinated with data, that’s a big candy store.