internet of everything | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

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.

The IoT undergoes a restructure

Quirky’s restructure shows the IoT isn’t the easy road to riches, regardless of how well funded a business is.

Quirky, the well funded Internet of Things startup that came to attention for its connected egg holder, announces a restructure.

It looks like the IoT isn’t the easy road to riches, regardless of how well funded a business is.

Can the Internet of Things survive a tumble?

Can the Internet of Things survive a fall into the trough of disillusionment?

That the Internet of Things is posed to fall into the depths of the trough of disillusionment according to Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle should come as no surprise to those following the industry.

For the industry, such a fall might not be a bad thing. During the upswing to the Peak of Heightened Expectations technologies attract the hot, dumb money along with the motley collection of shysters and opportunists a gold rush always lured in by the prospect of easy returns.

When a product, technology or industry falls into what Gartner calls the trough of disillusionment it’s usually the time when its real value is discovered. Without the distractions of hype or dumb money distorting the market, the industry finds a way of using a product that’s become somewhat passe.

For the Internet of Things, it won’t be a bad thing if the sector tumbles into the abyss. The sooner it happens, the faster industry will figure out where the real value and benefits lie.

The only damage might be to some of the more prominent boosters’ egos and the hip pockets of some of the more over eager investors.

Microsoft and the Internet of Your Things

Microsoft has come the IoT party with the ‘Internet of Your Things’ tagline

Microsoft has come late to the Internet of Things party, but it is has a good angle with it’s ‘Internet of Your Things’ tagline.

General Manager of Microsoft’s embedded systems division, Barb Edson, spoke with Decoding The New Economy about the company’s strategy with the Internet of Things.

For Microsoft, the emphasis is on the enterprise side of the business with Edson describing their strategy of “B2B2C” where the value in the IoT lies in managing the data for the businesses providing consumer services.

Most notable is the company’s IoT tagline, as Edson says; “from Microsoft’s perspective we view the Internet of Things as ‘the internet of your things.”

“Lots of companies out there talking about the Internet of Everything that there’s 212 billion devices, why do you care as business executive. You care about your things.”

Microsoft’s strategy is based on leveraging their own assets such as Azure cloud services, SQL Server and Dynamics along their customers’ existing infrastructure.

This retrofitting the internet of things to existing infrastructure is illustrated by Microsoft’s using the London Underground as its main reference site.

Connecting all 270 stations of London’s 150 year old Tube network to the IoT is a massive undertaking and one that can only be done by retrofitting existing monitoring and SCADA systems.

Interestingly the case study only look at Phase One of what appears to be pilot project in selected locations, the Microsoft spokespeople were a little unclear on this when asked.

The London Underground is only one example of millions of organisations that will grapple with adding existing equipment to the internet of things in coming years; it’s an opportunity that Microsoft has been smart to identify.

Edson however is clear on how Microsoft intends to help companies deal with the information overload facing managers, “I think the most exciting thing is we’re seeing real business problems being solved.”

Tomorrow Starts Here

Managing big data is one of the future skills of business.

Today was the main day of the Melbourne Cisco Live Conference; the company’s annual Australian event.

Much of the talk was around the Internet of Everything — which will be the basis of subsequent posts — with a constant theme around the explosion of data.

A favourite statistic was that of Cisco’s Executive Vice President who pointed out that US Department store Walmart collects 2.5 Petabytes of customers data every hour.

The reason for this was pointed out by GE’s Australia and New Zealand CIO, Mark Sheppard, who pointed out that twenty years ago jet engines had few sensors while today they have hundreds, a point also made by Team Lotus’ Engineering Director Nick Chester to Networked Globe.

Chester observes that when he started in Formula One racing two decades ago, there were four or five sensors on a racing car; today Lotus’ vehicles have over two hundred.

All of these sensors are creating massive amounts of data and the big challenge for businesses is to manage all of this information, something we’ll be exploring over the next few weeks.

Could the Internet of Things grow by fifty times?

Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index forecasts M2M data traffic will grow fifty fold in the next four years.

One of the annual events in the tech world is Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the company’s survey of internet traffic trends.

The numbers, as always, are staggering and this year Cisco are forecasting that global internet traffic will grow by a factor of eleven over the next four years to 190 exabytes – that’s 190,000,000,000,000Mb or the equivalent of 19o billion hard drives.

What’s particularly fascinating about this year’s index Cisco forecast that by 2018 there will be more mobile devices on the planet than people.

Many of those devices will be the sensors and equipment that makes up the Internet of Things (IoT), or Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies and Cisco expects the internet traffic in this area to surge fifty-fold over the next four years.

This is remarkable as most of the M2M devices don’t use much data as the vast majority only need to send out the odd short signal – as opposed to smartphones that download megabytes of information each day.Cisco’s predictions underscore just how pervasive this technology is going to become in the next few years, the challenge for us is to understand how to use and protect the masses of data these systems are going to generate.

LG and the smart vacuum cleaner

The LG Home-Bot Square is the first in a wave of connected smarthome devices we will see in 2014

The theme for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas appears to be the internet of things as vendors start peppering journalists with media releases showcasing the of the smart devices they’ll be showing off at the event.

One of the early starter is appliance manufacturer LG showing off their range of smart appliances that are controlled though the Line messaging app that’s best known for its manga like emoticons.

LG are particularly proud of their robot vacuum cleaner, the somewhat clunkily named Home-Bot Square that has a form factor similar to the Chinese made Win-Bot window washer.

Through the Line app, the Home Bot Square and other LG smart devices can be programmed with natural language, initially Korean and English, commands.

Ahead of the CES show on January 7, the next few weeks will see more announcements like LG’s. There’s going to be no shortage of smart home devices to write about over the next few months.

Britain’s smart cities agenda

Can Britain’s national innovation strategy give the UK leadership in the smart city movement?

Yesterday the UK government held its first Smart Cities Forum on what it sees are the economic opportunities for the British economy and its cities.

The Smart Cities Forum is part of the British government’s innovation policy that’s seen £50 million allocated to smart city projects including £24 million for Glasgow’s Future City showcase.

While the British government sees this as being an investment in grabbing the nation a share of what they believe to be a £400 billion global market, it’s also an opportunity to rejuvenate the county’s cities, as this video clip explaining what being a smart city has to offer Birmingham.

Like Barcelona and San Francisco tech and smart city policies, the UK initiative was born out of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis which forced the British political and business establishment to rethink the nation’s economic position and policies.

A key part of that rethink is how infrastructure spending can be co-ordinated with new technologies and this is something Barcelona is doing with its own smart city project in rolling out fiber networks as part of scheduled maintenance around the town.

The Glasgow pilot project is probably one of the more ambitious smart city projects, as the UK’s Technology Strategy Board says in its media release;

The Glasgow Future Cities Demonstrator aims to address some of the city’s most pressing energy and health needs. For example, developing systems to help tackle fuel poverty and to look at long-standing health issues such as low life expectancy.

Glasgow’s objectives go beyond the usual open data and parking spot strategies and attacking low life expectancy and poverty are strong social challenges.

With buy-in from the national government, the UK is making a strong big to lead the smart city industries. The challenge now is for British businesses to step up and find the commercial opportunities.

Silos and security in the internet of things

Is vendor lock in a bigger risk than security in the internet of machines?

Last week Deloitte launched its list of 500 fastest growing Asia-Pacific Technology companies.

At the Australian media briefing on the list and the company’s predictions for the telecommunications market in 2014 Deloitte’s Jolyn Barker and Eric Openshaw discussed the some of the implications of the report.

During the briefing Openshaw was asked about the risks of vendors creating their own Internet of Things standards to lock customters into proprietary platforms.

Openshaw isn’t convinced, “over time when technologies develop out of significant players in an attempt to create or extend a vertical stack, over time the market tends to revolt against that.”

“There’s usually one or two forces working against that, either the market revolts against it and insists on a new standard or the stack is too successful and regulators will come in and say ‘we don’t like your stack, dismantle it’ .”

His view is that in the long term issues of vendor lock-in and proprietary platforms fix themselves. “One way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”

Where Openshaw does see risks with lying in the security of machine to machine technologies.

“The security aspect just can’t be overstated in terms of how important it is,” says Openshaw. “When we have demonstrations now of being able to hack a pacemaker, that’s a problem.”

“So the security issues on these networks is important.”

The interplay between the software, network protocols and security is going to be complex and may well be what makes or breaks some vendors products.

It’s still early days to fully appreciate all the risks with the internet of machines, but securing networks and devices will be one of the most important tasks ahead for the industry.

Where will the jobs come from in the internet of things?

The internet of things promises to make industry more efficient, but what will happen to employment?

One of the common worries about the internet of things and the automation of business processes is that many jobs are going to be lost as a consequence.

This is a fair concern however we need to keep in perspective just how radically employment has changed in the last century.

Concerns about technology displacing occupations is nothing new; in the eighteenth century the Luddite movement was a reaction to skilled workers being displaced by new innovations.

In an interview with GE’s Chief Economist Marco Annunziata, published in Business Spectator, we covered this topic and Marco had a valid point that the bulk of the Western world’s workforce was employed in agriculture a hundred years ago.

Today it’s less than two percent in most developed country as agriculture became heavily automated, yet most of those workers who would once have worked in the fields have productive jobs. “As an economist I look at this over a long term perspective and I’ve heard this concern about technology displacing jobs over and over again.”

Annunziata sees new roles being created, among them what he calls ‘mechanical-digital engineers’ who understand both how the actual machines work as well as the data and the software used to run and monitor them.

This isn’t to say there won’t be massive disruption – John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath described the massive dislocation that happened in the United States with the first wave of agricultural mechanisation in the 1920s and the decline in rural communities is due directly to modern farms not needing the large workforces that sustained many country towns.

We can’t see where the jobs of the future will be and just roles like as Search Engine Optimisation and ecommerce experts where unheard of twenty years ago, our kids will be working in occupations we haven’t contemplated.

It’s up to us to give our kids the skills and flexibility of thinking that will let them find opportunities in a very different workplace.

Delighting the customer – the new business normal

Peter Coffee, Salesforce Vice President for Strategic Research discusses the new business normal where mobile services, collaboration, community and understanding your data are essential tasks for every manager.

Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Reserach, Peter Coffee joined the Decoding The New Economy channel at last week’s Dreamforce conference to discuss the new normal — delighting the customer.

Coffee’s role at Salesforce is to help the company’s potential clients understand the new normals of business life. “It’s a lot of listening,” he says.

In describing the new normal, Coffee is in tune with Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff in seeing mobile services as being one of the key parts of how business will look in the near future.

“The fundamental statement is your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

“Fundamentally people are mobile centric so we need to rethink our operations.”

Continuing the social journey

It’s not just mobile services that are changing the way we do, social media continues to be companies’ weak points in Coffee’s opinion.

“There’s research that’s come out of places like MIT that shows traditional print and broadcast media are still valuable for creating awareness of your brand but the final step of turning someone from knowing who you are into deciding to do business with you is now made today only when a trusted network confirms it.”

“People don’t make that final step of buying from you until they’ve consulted their trusted advisors.”

“Another fundamental change that’s happened is that the connectivity of the customer is such that if you have a customer that’s unhappy with you for even five or ten minutes there’s a tweet or a Facebook post or a LinkedIn update just begging to leak out and damage your brand,” says Coffee.

“The closer you can get to instantaneous resolution to the issue, the better.”

Internet of machines

With the internet of machines, the ability to resolve customers’ problems instantaneously becomes more more achievable in Coffee’s opinion.

“Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

“If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those productslong before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

“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.'”

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

Delighting the customers

All of these mobile, social and internet of things technologies will give businesses the tools to delight their customers and Coffee sees that as the great challenge in the new business normal.

While many businesses will meet the challenges presented by mobile customers and their connected machines Coffee warns those who don’t are in for a painful time.

“If you do not have delighted customers you have no market.” States Coffee, “the way that you delight customers is by making sure every interaction with you leaves them happier than they were before.”

“Traditional silos of sales, service, support and marketing must be dissolved into one new entity which is proactive customer connection.”

“Companies that neglect to adopt it will discover they have customers who are sensitive to nothing but price,” warns Coffee.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.

The real thing behind the internet of things

We need to think beyond technology to get value the real value from the internet of things says Alicia Asin, the CEO and co-founder of Spanish sensor company Libelium.

Libelium and its CEO Alicia Asin has been covered previously on this blog and we had the opportunity to record an interview with Alicia at the 2013 Dreamforce conference.

Alicia told us about her vision for how she sees cities and governments evolving in an era of real time accessible information, in many ways it’s similar to where the Deputy Lord Mayor of Barcelona sees his city being at the end of this decade.

“I would say the biggest legacy the internet of things can bring is transparency,” says Alicia. “In the smart cities movement the IoT gives an opportunity for have a dashboard for cities.”

“You can see the investment made for reducing traffic investment downtown, the carbon footprint reduced and the return on investment,” says Alicia. “You can have very objective facts to supply to the citizens and they can make better decisions.”

For this vision to become true, it means government data has to open to the community which is something that challenges many administrations, however Alicia also told the story of how her company supplied Geiger counters to volunteers monitoring the radiation fallout around the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan.

“We made a project in Fukushima when the nuclear accident happened where we sent some Geiger counters to the hacker space,” says Alicia. “Suddenly all the people with the Geiger counters started to publish the data onto the internet.”

“They were keeping a totally independent radiation map made by the activist citizens.”

Alicia raises an important point of how citizens can be using technology independently of governments. This was most notable in the Occupy movements across the United States that sprung up in late 2011 where hackers set up independent communications networks and recorded events outside the control of mainstream media and government agencies.

While citizens can use these tools to get around official restrictions, governments play an important role in developing new industries around these technologies, Alicia sees the smart city investments made by Spanish cities as creating the start of a Spanish Silicon Valley.

“Despite the economy, we are seeing a number of projects in Spain around smart cities,” Alicia observes. “In fact, I’m saying Spain is becoming the Silicon Valley for smart cities.”

“In terms of attracting big companies to look at what’s going on in Spain and to build a bigger brand around the Internet of Things, I think that really helps.”

With government and citizens working together, Alicia sees the Internet of Things delivering great changes to society as it enables citizens and makes governments more accountable.

“It’s the real thing, it’s beyond technology.”