Society and business in the 21st Century
Posts relating to the internet of things, IoT and M2M technologies
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday I had my first piece in Diginomica about the threat Amazon Web Service’s new business analytics service creates for ‘old school’ companies such as Oracle and IBM as well as the up and coming firms such as Qlik and Tableau.
Diginomica’s Dennis Howlett followed that piece with one of his own flagging consulting services and systems integrators are under threat from AWS’s new partnership with consulting firm Accenture which also further puts the screws on IBM.
Today, AWS’s announcements of new Internet of Things services threatens a range of businesses creating data connectors and management software for connected devices.
Historically Amazon has been a fierce and brutal competitor and there’s little indication things will be different with the new web services.
Things could be about to get tough for a lot of sectors in the computer industry as Amazon expands its services and territory.
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.
“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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.
The Volkswagen emissions scandal has rocked the company and cost its CEO his job, but the implications of the company falsifying data to past regulators’ test has serious implications for the Internet of Things.
As the Los Angeles Times explains, Volkswagen designed software to detect when its cars were being tested. During test the software would modify the car’s performance to give a false result.
This is similar to the Stuxnet worm which sent Iranian operators false information indicating the uranium enrichment centrifuges were operating normally when in truth they were running at speeds well outside their design.
Both the Volkswagen fraud and the Stuxnet worm show how software can be used to tell lies about data. For processes and businesses relying on that data, it’s critical to know that information is reliable and correct.
Data is the raw material of the internet of things and all the value derived comes from analysing that information. If the information is false, then there’s no value in the IoT. Designing systems that guarantee the integrity of data is going to be essential as devices become more connected.
