Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Internet of Things

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

  • Revitalising the telco smartcity party

    Revitalising the telco smartcity party

    AT&T is expected to announce a new smartcity strategy at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

    Three years ago we interviewed Barcelona’s deputy mayor Antoni Vives about the possibilities of the smart city. What was notable about his views was the emphasis on the social and ecological benefits of these technologies.

    “Barcelona has to become a city of culture, creativity, knowledge but mainly fairness and well being,” Vives said. “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.”

    Vives’ point is essential in the smart cities discussion. While the gadgets and data analytics aspects are important, it’s the benefits to government and the city’s inhabitants that are essential.

    Which is a problem for telecommunication providers and tech vendors looking to find new, high margin, markets as most of the products they are touting are the classic ‘solution looking for a problem’ that has been a future of the computer industry for decades.

    Telcos are in a more difficult position as many of the smart cities are deploying their own wireless networks which compete with their own often expensive solutions, particularly M2M services that rely on devices having costly SIM cards fitted.

    It’s hard not to think AT&T’s move is one of a desperate late comer to a party that’s already not living up to expectations, it will be interesting to see if their CES announcement sparks some life back into the smartcity discussion.

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  • When autonomous vehicles and humans collide

    When autonomous vehicles and humans collide

    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.

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  • How social media drove the Internet of Things hype

    How social media drove the Internet of Things 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.

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  • Putting the smart vision into smart cities

    Putting the smart vision into smart cities

    “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

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  • The insecure internet of children’s toys

    The insecure internet of children’s toys

    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.

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