Tag: Cisco

Diversifying South East Queensland

Is being designated a ‘smart region’ enough to diversify South East Queensland’s economy?

Australia is one of the world’s most urbanised countries with the bulk of the nation’s population clustering in half a dozen centres mainly strung along the east coast of the continent.

The northernmost of Australia’s population centres is South East Queensland, a sprawling collection of suburbs extending from the upper class enclave of Noosa Heads down to the Gold Coast and the New South Wales state border.

Cisco believe this sprawling region of three million people can become a ‘Smart Region’ with the use of technologies such as intelligent lighting and parking, citizen applications, and smart power metering could add up to 30,000 jobs and $10 billion of value to the community over coming years.

“The residents of South East Queensland told us they want to experience greater convenience and integration of public transport, greater digital engagement and intimacy in their cities, more reliable local government services, and new digital ways to further reduce the cost of red tape,” said Cisco Australia & New Zealand Vice President Ken Boal in releasing the South East Queensland: A Smart Region report.

Local civic leaders in the cities making up the South East Queensland conurbation see this as an opportunity to grow their economies.  “The future of cities and regions and their ability to create enduring employment opportunities are entirely linked to their digital capabilities,” says Sunshine Coast Mayor Cr Mark Jamieson while Ipswich Mayor Paul Pisasale said Ipswich was already preparing for a strong future as a digital city.

“We have recognized that building and taking advantage of digital highways now will set Ipswich on a secure and successful path to capitalise on the ballooning digital economy,” said Cr Pisasale.

For South East Queensland, the challenge in creating new industries and jobs is becoming acute. The Australian miracle economy has left the region – like most of the nation – hopelessly uncompetitive and the bulk of employment is in domestically facing service industries underpinned by property prices.

In fact, the residential construction industry has been the mainstay of the SE Queensland economy and the region remains probably the most economically volatile of the Australian conurbations given its high dependence upon the building sector.

The digital economy does hold out hope for diversifying South East Queensland’s economy from building and domestic tourism, but the work is just beginning. Cisco’s smart region initiative is a first step, but there’s much more work to be done by business and civic leaders.

Brisbane image, “Brisbane CBDandSB” by Stuart Edwards. – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brisbane_CBDandSB.jpg#/media/File:Brisbane_CBDandSB.jpg

Similar posts:

Towards the zero defect economy

The Internet of Things promises to eliminate defects which is good news for most, but not all, industries

At 2.03 in the morning of July 11, 2012, a Norfolk Southern Railway Company freight train derailed just inside the city limits of Columbus, Ohio.

The resulting crash and fire caused over a hundred people to be evacuated, resulted in over a million dollars in damages and created massive disruption throughout the US rail network.

Could accidents like this be avoided by the Internet of Things? Sham Chotai, the Chief Technical Officer of GE Software, believes applying sensor technology to locomotives can detect conditions like defective rails and save US railway operators around a billion dollars a year in costs.

“We decided to put the technology directly on the locomotive,” says Chotai in describing the problem facing railroad operators in scheduling track inspections. “We found we were mapping the entire railway network, and we were mapping anything that touched the track such as insulated joins and wayside equipment.”

This improvement in reliability and its benefits to business is something flagged by then Salesforce Vice President Peter Coffee in an interview with Decoding the New Economy in 2013.

“You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.'”

“That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation,” Coffee says.

Reducing defects isn’t just good for brands, it also promises to save lives as Cisco illustrated at an Australian event focused on road safety.

Transport for New South Wales engineer John Wall explained how smarter car technologies, intelligent user interfaces and roadside communications all bring the potential of dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, the road toll.

Should it turn out the IoT can radically reduce defects and accidents it won’t be good news for all industries as John Rice, GE’s Global Head of Operations, pointed out last year in observing how intelligent machines will eliminate the break-fix model of business.

“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

A zero defect economy is good news for customers and people, but for suppliers and service industries based upon fixing problems it means a massive change to business.

Similar posts:

  • No Related Posts

Cisco expands its innovation centre network to Australia

Cisco opens its latest innovation centre in Perth to focus on the oil and gas industries

Today Cisco launched their latest Internet of Everything Innovation Centre in Perth, Western Australia. The facility joins the seven existing centres around the globe which includes Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Songdo, Berlin, Barcelona, Tokyo and London.

As a joint venture with resources company Woodside and Curtin University, the centre will initially focus on the gas industry and will include a state-of-the-art laboratory, a technological collaboration area, and a dedicated space to show the Internet of Things in action.

Oil and Gas is one of the key sectors for targeted by Cisco in their Internet of Everything push with Brad Bechtold, the company’s Energy Lead, telling Decoding the New Economy earlier this year how the IoT is expected to deliver an eleven percent reduction of costs for the $1.5 trillion dollar a year industry.

Bechtold believes remote sensing and operations will be the driver of many of the cost reductions along with detailed analytics enabling more efficient operations.

Many of these technologies will be tested as part of Woodside’s Plant of the Future gas project with CEO Peter Coleman saying the scheme will link company’s knowledge base with artificial intelligence, data analytics, and advanced sensors and control systems.

“We are taking a collaborative approach to enhancing our operations as part of our digital transformation journey. This partnership will create a globally competitive centre for excellence that could be leveraged in our LNG operations, as we progress our remote operations capabilities,” Coleman said.

 

The Perth centre intends to bring together start-up companies, industry experts, developers, researchers and academics in an open collaboration environment to create a “connected community” focused on cloud, analytics, cyber security and IoT network platforms.

The Australian Commonwealth Science, Innovation and Research Organisation (CSIRO) has also flagged it intend to join the hub as part of its Square Kilometer Array deep space mapping project.

Another branch of the Australian hub is expected to open in Sydney later this year.

 

 

Similar posts:

Cisco and the connected stadium

Cisco’s Mike Caponigro explains the company’s smart stadium strategy

One of the challenges facing sports administrators and leagues around the world is that the quality of broadcast coverage has become so good it’s become increasingly harder to get fans out to the games.

Coupled with the constantly improving television coverage, fans are also expecting more as they go to games with their smartphones and tablets. Part of the solution for venue managers is to roll out smart stadium facilities that enhance spectators’ experience at the games.

Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment, sees the smart stadium as complementing the ground experience and Cisco are working with over three hundred venues in thirty countries around the world.

Improving the live experience

“Live is always going to be best,” states Caponigro. “You can’t replace that tribal passion of the crowd. No matter how excited I get in my living room or with some friends in a pub you’re never going recreate that enthusiasm.”

However the expectations of sports fans are changing Caponigro points out citing how HD television and the internet is changing the experience for spectators outside the stadium, “fans don’t want to be removed from that action.”

Cisco started their Connected Stadium program when the Oakland Athletics were looking at moving home stadiums seven years ago. While Oakland decided to remain at their existing stadium the company realised the market for connected stadiums was potentially huge, “it really pushed our thinking on how could we service an industry sector that hadn’t been well served.”

Accelerating innovation

“Arguable you’ve seen more innovation in that last seven years in the sports and live entertainment field than in the five decades prior to that,” says Caponigro who attributes the rate of change to consumer adoption of smartphones. “Now we’re working with three hundred properties in thirty countries around the world.”

“What fans are saying is that in order to continue to go to events there are things that need to be tweaked around the experience,” Caponigro states. “We did a study two or three years ago that found seventy-five percent of fans bring a smartphone to the venue. In the latest studies we’re finding ninety percent.”

Those fans are expecting a reliable signal to share information and access data. At last year’s Superbowl the crowd consumed 6Tb of data, half of which was outward traffic. “That just reinforces that fans aren’t just consuming services but it’s also become an increasingly social environment.”

Improving revenues

One of the areas Caponigro sees as an opportunity for connected stadium administrators is in seat management citing the Golden State Warriors NBA team that have used BlueTooth beacons to drive their seat upgrade application to generate $300,000 in additional revenue.

Fans have two frustrations with attending live games says Caponigro, is the convenience of getting to and from the game and not getting a good view of the play from their seats.

The ‘single seat experience’ as Caponigro describes it, uses the stadium’s smart vision TVs and the apps on spectators’ phones to give fans the same access to replays and stats that viewers watching the game on TV or the internet can access.

Making transport easier

Getting to and from the game is another advantage the smart stadium technologies offer both spectators and stadium administrators, by giving real time information on parking and public transport status crowds can be better managed and fans can have a smoother experience travelling into and away from the event.

In the future, Caponigro sees the next wave of innovation integrating back of house services into the connected stadium giving administrators greater understanding of concession sales and crowd movement.

Another opportunity lies in bringing player biometrics to the spectators, “you might find out if Ronaldo is really as cool as he looks when he takes a penalty” grins Capringo.

While it’s still early days for the connected stadium, like many Internet of Things applications businesses are exploring the limits. For sports fans, they can expect a richer experience being delivered to their smartphones and seats.

Similar posts:

  • No Related Posts

How to make the IoT pay

Keeping things simple for the home and selling efficiencies to big business are the way to make money from the IoT

How do companies sell the internet of things to consumers? This was the question at the opening panel of the Internet of Things World conference in San Francisco this morning.

Belkin’s Chief Technology Officer Brian van Harlingen took the lead in the panel stating that the opportunity lies in making sense out of the IoT’s complexity. “With data comes complexity, we have to make it simple for the end user,” said Van Harlingen

Van Harlingen’s view was backed up by Verizon’s Chief Data Scientist, Ashok Srivastava, who understandably sees the challenge of managing the information generated by masses of devices as being an opportunity for his company and data scientists in general.

That masses of data is being generated isn’t surprising seeing the other member of the morning’s panel was Jason Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of  smart lock maker August. That the ordinary door lock may be generating masses of data indicates just how much information might be churning around the average smart home in the near future.

Cut out the complexity

It may well be that all of this data and complexity isn’t necessary as Joe Dada, the CEO and founder of smarthome company Insteon, point out. “Leave the network as quiet as you can,” is his advice. “People over-estimate the amount of data that needs to be pushed across the network.”

Dada, a twenty-five year veteran of the smarthome industry, sees the over-complication of the IoT as being a weakness in many of the products and business models being touted today with his company selling their products on being convenient, safe and fun.

While Dada has a successful business model, many of the other business don’t and exactly how to make money from the IoT wasn’t really answered by the panel.

Capturing efficiencies

It may well be that for many the answer lies in making existing products better, in talking to Cisco’s Brad Bechtold who runs the networking giant’s Oil and Gas Industry Transformation division estimates that there could be operational savings of up to 11% for the sector through implementing IoT technologies.

With estimates of the oil and gas industry’s size being around four trillion dollars a year, that represents an opportunity of over a hundred billion dollars a year in the one sector alone.

Selling the IoT

So it may be that the way to sell the Internet of Things into the industrial sector is to point out the operational savings available. Should the promise of substantial cost reductions be realised then it may even trigger a new wave of capital investment as businesses decide it’s easier to upgrade equipment than retrofit it.

The analytics and management aspect will turn out to be lucrative for many businesses as well, however the key to success is going to be demonstrating how these services add value for customers.

For the consumer market however the key probably lies in Joe Dada’s advice – keep it easy, convenient, safe and fun.

Similar posts:

  • No Related Posts

Big sports data – how tech is changing the playing field

The internet of things is dramatically changing the world of sports

“When you’re playing, it’s all about the winning but when you retire you realise there’s a lot more to the game,” says former cricketer Adam Gilchrist.

Gilchrist was speaking at an event organised by software giant SAP ahead of a Cricket World Cup quarter final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground yesterday.

SAP were using their sponsorship of the event to demonstrate their big data analytics capabilities and how they are applied to sports and the internet of things.

Like most industries, the sports world is being radically affected by digitalisation as new technologies change everything from coaching and player welfare through to stadium management and fans’ experience.

Enhancing the fan experience

Two days earlier rival Melbourne stadium Etihad in the city’s Docklands district showed off their new connected ground where spectators will get hi-definition video and internet services through a partnership between Telstra and Cisco.

While Etihad’s demonstration was specifically about ‘fan experience’, the use of the internet of things and pervasive wireless access in a stadium can range from paperless ticketing to managing the food and drink franchises.

In the United States, the leader in rolling out connected stadiums, venues are increasingly rolling out beacon technologies allowing spectators to order deliveries to their seats and push special offers during the game.

While neither of the two major Melbourne stadiums offer beacon services at present, the Cisco devices around the Etihad have the facility to add Bluetooth capabilities when the ground managements decide to roll them out.

Looking after players

Probably the greatest impact of technology in sport is with player welfare; while coaches and clubs have been enthusiastic adopters of video and tracking technologies for two decades, the rate of change is accelerating as wearable devices are changing game day tactics and how injuries are managed.

One of the companies leading this has been Melbourne business Catapult Sports which has been placing tracking devices on Australian Rules football players and other codes for a decade.

For coaches this data has been a boon as it’s allowed staff to monitor on field performance and tightly manage players’ health and fitness.

Professional sports in general have been early adopters of new technologies as a small increase in performance can have immediate and lucrative benefits on the field. Over the last thirty years clubs have adopted the latest in video and data technology to help coaches and players.

As the technology develops this adoption is accelerating, administrators are looking at placing tracking devices within the balls, goals and boundary lines to give even more information about what’s happening on the field.

Managing the data flow

The challenge for sports organisations, as with every other industry, is in managing all the data being generated.

In sports managing that data has a number of unique imperatives; gamblers getting access to sensitive data, broadcast rights holders wanting access to game statistics and stadium managers gathering their own data all raise challenges for administrators.

There’s also the question of who owns the data; the players themselves have a claim to their own personal performance data and there could potentially be conflicts when a competitor transfers between clubs.

As the sports industry explores the limits of what they can do with data, the world is changing for players, coaches, administrators and supporters.

Gilchrist’s observation that there’s a lot more to professional sports than just what happens on the field is going to become even more true as data science assumes an even greater role in the management of teams, clubs and stadiums.

Paul travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Cisco and SAP.

Similar posts:

  • No Related Posts

Preparing for the mobile data explosion

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts massive growth for mobile data use as smartphone use and the internet of things grows.

Late last month Cisco Systems released its annual Visual Networking Index that tracks the company’s predictions for the growth of global network traffic over the upcoming five years.

It’s no surprise this year’s report predicts global data traffic will grow at over fifty percent compounded each year with Cisco expecting 24.3 exabytes to be pushed around the world’s networks each month by 2019.

Most of that network traffic will come from tablet and smartphones with Cisco predicting data use will grow by up to a factor of five on those devices with devices like wearables growing fourfold.

This growth creates a challenge for telcos as they invest in capacity to deal with the increased traffic and Cisco sees half of all smartphone connections will be handed off to WiFi networks by the decade’s end.

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month

Device Type

2014

2019

Nonsmartphone

22 MB/month

105 MB/month

M2M Module

70 MB/month

366 MB/month

Wearable Device

141 MB/month

479 MB/month

Smartphone

819 MB/month

3,981 MB/month

4G Smartphone

2,000 MB/month

5,458 MB/month

Tablet

2,076 MB/month

10,767 MB/month

4G Tablet

2,913 MB/month

12,314 MB/month

Laptop

2,641 MB/month

5,589 MB/month

Source: Cisco VNI Mobile, 2015

Handing half the growth in mobile traffic over to Wi-Fi connections, most of which will be connected to fiber or ADSL services will provide challenges for fixed line operators as well who will see the demand for capacity also explode over the rest of the decade.

Much of this explains the moves by companies like Telstra to roll out public Wi-Fi services to start locking users into their services. It also gives them, and consumers, an opportunity to understand how networks that mix both cellular and Wi-Fi behave.

Cisco_M2M_connections_to_2019

Another aspect of the Cisco VNI survey is the Internet of Things which is going to see exponential growth as industrial and household devices start being connected either directly through the telco networks, across unlicensed radio spectrum or over private Wi-Fi systems.

While Cisco predicts the bulk of that traffic as being generated by smartphones, the company sees connected devices as growing by 45% per year over the next five years with 3.2 billion sensors connected to the internet by the end of the decade.

Cisco-2015-VNI-M2M-connections

Notable in the prediction that Low Powered Wide Area (LPWA) networks – non cellular systems mostly operating in the unlicensed spectrum used by Wi-Fi networks – will provide nearly a third of the connections by 2019. At the same time we can expect many M2M deployments to consolidate traffic locally with much of the data processing down locally before the residual information being passed up the network.

As usual the Cisco VNI report underscores, and possibly understates, the growth in mobile data usage we’re going to see over the rest of the decade. For businesses, it’s time to plan for managing both the flow and application that smart devices are going to generate in our daily operations.

Similar posts:

  • No Related Posts