internet of everything | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Microsoft’s devices and services strategy starts taking shape with the Surface tablet

Does the Microsoft Surface show the company is starting to execute Steve Ballmer’s device and services strategy?

Microsoft’s latest version of their Surface tablet computer is the company’s first attempt at executing Steve Ballmer’s device and services strategy. If the company succeeds, there are some interesting implications for the tablet computer market.

Currently Microsoft is on a worldwide PR campaign to promote their latest range of Surface tablet computers. Last week during the Sydney leg of their tour I had the opportunity for a hands on demonstration of the new devices with Jack Cowett of the product’s marketing team.

The Surface itself is an interesting device with some major upgrades and changes as Microsoft begins to understand the tablet market with the device having more memory, better processors and battery life – although the lack of a cellular version is going to hinder its adoption by the consumer and small business markets.

Devices and services

It’s in the device’s integration with Microsoft’s cloud and communication services where the long term vision, and real story behind the Surface lies.

Most obvious is the bundling of services with purchasers of a Microsoft Surface 2 or Surface Pro getting 200Gb of Sky Drive storage and a year’s free international calls included with the device.

It’s an early taste of how Microsoft can combine services and devices that leverage off their existing position in the marketplace.

While these incentives may not be enough to convince customers that the Windows systems are a better buy than Android or Apple devices, integrating these cloud services makes the computers more powerful devices.

Keyboards as blades

Equally interesting with the Surface, is Microsoft’s devices play with the range of Surface covers that the company is informally calling ‘blades’ – an unfortunate choice of name which will confuse conversations with many IT managers.

Blade covers for Microsoft surface tablets

These covers dispense with the usual keyboard electronic layout with an underlying layout featuring a 1024 sensor pad that give the covers more potential than just being keyboards.

As part of the Microsoft marketing push to show this aspect off, the company has released a blade cover with a sound mixer layout and seeded the devices with various DJs under the banner of the Remix Project.

While the blade covers have applications as sound mixers and keyboards, the number and flexible nature of the 1080 built in sensors will see their application in other areas.

The way businesses have used tablet computers has taken manufacturers by surprise as Google’s Eric Schmidt told last week’s Gartner conference and Microsoft’s devices open up more industrial applications.

Already the medical industry is applying Windows based tablets as Microsoft are proud to show off.

Should third party developers be able to develop their own skins for Surface blade covers then Microsoft may have a killer industrial device that plugs into existing Windows based networks.

Added to Microsoft’s opportunity is the possibility of plugging Surface devices into the internet of everything giving business users direct access to the machines in their organisation.

Should Microsoft be able to capture a slice of these markets, it may well be a pointer for the company’s future in a post-PC world.

Regardless of how well Microsoft do with the internet of everything, the latest range of Surface tablets and accessories shows how the company is executing its strategy of becoming a devices and services company.

Building tomorrow’s markets

As technology evolves, it gets harder to predict what customers will want in the future.

“If I’d asked my customers we’d have built a faster horse,” is a quotation often attributed, probably incorrectly, to Henry Ford.

The point of the quote is that asking today’s customers about tomorrow’s market is pretty pointless when new products change consumer behaviour.

Just as the farmer of 1906 had no inkling of how the motor car, truck and tractor would change their business, the cellphone user of 2006 had no idea of how the iPhone would change the way they used a phone and communicated with the world.

Which brings us to Nokia.

The Sami Consulting blog discusses how Nokia lost their lead in the cellphone business as the market migrated the Apple and later Android smartphones.

Nokia’s problem was they spoke to their customers about their existing mobile phone use rather than considered how the technology might evolve.

When the inventors of the touchscreen approached Nokia, the company carefully evaluated the technology, consulted their customers and decided it wouldn’t work for their products.

What does this story tell about foresight? First, it shows that innovation creates futures that are fundamentally unpredictable. We do not have facts or data about things that do not exist yet. When a mobile phone becomes an internet device with sensors, touch screens, and broadband access, it becomes a new thing. If you ask your existing customers what they like, the answer will always be about incremental improvements. When you ask about the future, the answer will always be about history.

In many ways Nokia were the beneficiaries of a transition effect, they took advantage of a brief period of technological change and were caught flat footed when the technologies evolved further.

To be fair, it’s hard to see that change when you’re focused on incremental improvements.

The motor car turned out to define the Twentieth Century – even Henry Ford couldn’t have foreseen how the automobile would change society and the design of our communities.

Both the motor industry and smartphone industries are going through major change, particularly as the internet of everything sees the two technologies coming together.

One thing is for sure, how we use our phones and cars over the next fifty years will be very different to how we use them today.

Exploring the internet of everything

What does the internet of everything mean for businesses? Cisco’s Ken Boal explains.

As part of the Decoding the New Economy video series, I had the opportunity of interviewing Ken Boal, the head of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, about the Internet of Everything and how it will change business.

“The internet of everything is about things, it’s about people, process and it’s about data,” says Ken. “Compounding together to create new capabilities and drive opportunities for nations, enterprises, government and right down to consumers.”

“It’s a huge transition in the internet’s evolution.”

Reducing the road toll

A previous Cisco presentation looked at some of the ways the internet of everything can reduce road deaths, Ken sees this both private and public sector benefits of the connected economy flowing to consumers and the community.

“When you think about things like traffic congestion, health care and how education is delivered we know there’s huge opportunities for greater efficiency,” says Ken.

“Just on road safety, when we’ve got all the vehicles and trucks connected, when the traffic lights and traffic control systems are all connected,” suggests Ken, “then consumers are going be better informed about what is the most efficient route to work.”

“Cars will be communicating with each other to reduce fatalities and collisions in the future as well.”

Bringing together industrial, consumer and public safety technologies creates a grid of connected devices, including cars, that improve public safety while making industries more efficient.

Of course these connected services come with risks to privacy, particularly when multiple points of data can triangulated despite each individual item being anonymous on their own.

What Ken finds is particularly important is the current value of these technologies with Cisco predicting $1.4 billion in productivity gains through the internet of everything this year, half of which are available for businesses.

A warning for Australia

For Australia, the concern is that business and the economy in general is falling behind, Cisco’s recent Internet of Everything Value Index rated Australia among the BRIC countries in adopting the new technologies.

“We’ve always counted Aussies as fairly innovative and leading edge,” says Ken. “Australia is ranked tenth out of the twelve largest economies in the adoption of internet of everything capablities.”

The countries leading – such as Japan, Germany and the United States – have had a solid record of investing in technology, “in Australia, we’ve had that in the past but we’ve lost our mojo.” Ken says, “IT has been viewed more as a problem – a cost to business – rather than a provider of productivity for the long term.”

How business can adapt

For businesses, the question is how can they take advantage of the internet of everything? “You don’t have to start from scratch,” says Ken. “There are a whole heap of use cases for every vertical.”

“Start to drive some innovation. Think about your business processes at the front end where you touch your customers, look at your supply chains and your back office arrangements driving workforce productivity and how fast can you deliver new innovations to the market.”

“Internet of everything themes can address a whole host of these different processes in different parts of your business.”

Bringing social networking to life

One startup project shows how different technologies are coming together to change our business world.

One of the highlights of the 2013 Australian Microsoft TechEd was a startup panel featuring local startups CoOpRating, Project Tripod and Nubis.

All three startups are interesting projects and Nubis in particular illustrated how various internet and smartphone technologies which are coming together.

Nubis is an Augmented Reality platform that projects social media onto the viewer of a smartphone’s camera. By pointing the camera at someone, the idea is a user can bring up details about a person.

“We’re bringing social networking to life,” says founder Uzi Bar-On.

As part of their Alphega project, Nubis has teamed with Glass Up, an Italian startup attempting to create a Google Glass competitor, the aim is to create a wearable computer that feeds social media information to the wearer.

While it’s not clear what the benefits will be of that – or whether Glass Up, Nubis or Alphega will be successful – the project is interesting as it brings together Augmented Reality, geolocation, wearable technologies and social media.

Over the next few years we’ll be seeing more products like Alphega tying together different technologies and using the Internet of Everything to talk to each other.

It’s these sort of projects that will show us how our businesses and lives are going to change over the next decade as smart people figure out the ways to mash together these technologies.

Paul travelled to Microsoft TechEd 2013 courtesy of Microsoft Australia

How Google Glass can change business and industries

Wearable technologies are more than just consumer devices and promise to change the workplace.

When we talk about new technologies we often focus on the consumer aspects, in many ways the business and industrial applications are far more exciting with a potential to save lives and change workplaces.

This week on my regular tech spot with Ed Cowlishaw on ABC Riverland we explained Google Glass and speculated on what some of the applications for listeners could be.

During the discussion we ranged across the uses we might see for wearable technologies like glasses watches, jeans or even embeddable, vibrating tattoos. With electronics smaller and cheaper than ever, we’re at the stage where putting computers into almost anything is feasible.

Most of the focus around these technologies has been on the consumer aspects, but wearable technologies like Google Glass probably have more immediate uses in industrial applications ranging from transport and medicine across to farming and emergency services.

Emergency services

For emergency services devices like Google glass can be the difference between life and death, first responders at a road accident can quickly evaluate damage and the best course of action for rescuing survivors.

In firefighting, these technologies become incredibly valuable with protective suits being able to warn when conditions are becoming dangerous or the presence of hazardous materials and heads-up displays – which could be a Google Glass type device or a projection onto a firefighters visor – can be monitoring weather conditions, the safety of buildings or the state of supplies.

Police forces are already some way down the path of using these technologies with patrol cars and roadside detectors already monitoring number plates for unregistered and uninsured vehicles. Devices like Google Glass are going to help law enforcement use those technologies, particularly when coupled with facial and voice recognition.

Medicine

The use of wearable technologies in the medical industry is fascinating. We’re already seeing smart dressings that alert nurses and doctors to critical conditions and the increased network of devices is making it easier to monitor patients.

With a Google Glass type device, surgeons and physicians can be receiving real time information on their patients while carrying out procedures and recognition software can help doctors identify the nature of a symptom such as a rash or swelling much earlier. At a hospital triage this can help nurses make quick, life saving decisions as people arrive.

Farming

One of the big frontiers of the internet of machines is the agriculture industry. With projects like Tasmania’s Sense-T monitoring natural resources and smart farm equipment reporting the state of soil and crops, a Google Glass type device gives farmers much more information about the paddock or cattle they are looking at.

Farming is also a hazardous occupation and wearable technologies can also warn agricultural workers of hazards as well as alert family, colleagues or emergency services when a farm worker is in trouble. Occupational health and safety is going to be one of the driving forces for the adoption of these devices.

Transport

Safety is one of the key factors of technology adoption in the transport industry and it’s interesting how quickly transportation agencies and police forces have started discussing banning Google Glass.

While checking your twitter feed or surfing for LOLCats while driving is undoubtedly dangerous, having a heads up display could actually improve the safety of truckers, taxi operators and other professional drivers as they aren’t being distracted from the road by dispatch messages, GPS directions and vehicle warnings.

As monitoring devices, wearable technologies could also help warn drivers or their employer about looming fatigue or illness.

In the logistics field, it’s not hard to see warehouse workers using wearable devices to warn them where robots are or to find stock items deep in the shelves.

Like the tablet computer, it’s easy just to think of Google Glass and other wearable technologies as being solely consumer devices without considering how these devices will change the workplace.

As the internet of everything and easily accessible broadband – both wireless and wired – becomes pervasive we’ll see most industries adopting these technologies making business more efficient and the workplace safer for the workers.

Reducing the road toll through the internet of everything

How can the internet of everything reduce the road toll?

How can modern computer technology cut the road toll?

Transport for NSW’s John Wall spoke last week at Cisco’s Internet of Everything presentation in Sydney about some of the ways the connected motor car can reduce accidents.

John’s presentation comes from personal experience, having being a volunteer for nearly thirty years at his local State Emergency Service brigade where he was often among the first responders to local vehicle accidents.

Some of the improvements in technology see the road toll falling as people travel less because of remote working, teleconference and business automation. Many of the applications though are built into the vehicles, street signs and the roads themselves.

Finding the safest route

John’s first suggestion for improving driver safety is having navigation systems sourcing traffic, weather and other information to suggest the best route for the driver. An intelligent system may also modify the recommended journey based on the experience of the driver and state of the vehicle, such as the tyre conditions.

Watching the eyes

Fatigue kills and all of us have driven when we were really too tired to be behind the wheel.

The first in car technology John discussed is facial recognition technology that detects when drivers are fatigued. Tying this feature into the vehicle’s entertainment system with a stern aviation style “PULL OVER – YOU ARE TIRED” warning could well save hundreds of lives a year on his own.

Connected road signs

One of the underpinning factors of the internet of everything is cheap computers and transmitters embedded into almost anything. Road signs and sensors talking to cars could help reduce driver errors such as entering curves too fast.

Those signs can also be plugged into weather conditions so if there’s ice, fog or rain then the car can be told of the hazards ahead.

Going on the grid

Signs are not the only devices that could be talking to each other, vehicles themselves could be talking to each other. Should one car hit a slippery or soft patch on the road, it could tell following vehicles that there’s a problem ahead and respond accordingly.

That technology too could help traffic planners and road authorities, as data on traffic speeds and road conditions feed into their databases it becomes easier to identify black spots or road design problems before lives are lost.

Helping the first responders

A wrecked car or roadside sensor can also help those first responders attending an accident. The vehicle itself could transmit the damage and give rescuers valuable, time saving information, on the state of the occupants.

Similarly, the system could also warn emergency services such as hospitals and ambulances of the injuries likely and what’s needed to treat the injuries on site, in transit and at the casualty ward.

Importantly, a smart vehicle can also warn those first responders of potential risks such as live air bag gas cylinders, car body reinforcements or high voltage cables as they attempt to free trapped occupant from a wreck.

The rescuers themselves may be wearing technologies like Google Glass that help them see this information in real time.

Bringing together the technology

As Kate Carruthers points out, the internet of everything is the bringing together of many different technologies – wireless internet, cloud computing, grid networks and embedded devices all come together to create a virtual safety net for drivers.

By the end of this decade that we will all be relying on these technologies to help us drive. Which means we might find our licenses start to be endorsed for the level of technology in our vehicles, just as we used to have to get qualified to drive a car with a manual transmission.

Concluding his presentation, John Wall told the story of Jason, a cyclist from his town who was killed in a road accident and left a young family. In his slide he showed Harry, Jason’s young son, playing with the flowers on his father’s memorial.

“I hope for Harry is that when Harry learns to drive that things will be different on our roads and things will be different because we are all connected,” said John.

It’s a strong reminder of the real human opportunities and costs when we adopt new technologies.

Car crash image courtesy of jazz111 through SXC.HU

Realising value from the internet of everything

How will businesses benefit from the internet of everything?

How much opportunity does connecting all our machines to the internet really offer businesses and society?

Cisco’s Internet of Everything index released last week looks at one of the great opportunities facing today’s managers in realising business value in these new technologies .

On Cisco’s calculations, the internet of everything is worth over $14.4 trillion to the world economy and nearly half the business benefits are going wasted.

Germany and Japan lead the pack and, as discussed yesterday, Australia wallows between China and Russia.

Despite German businesses being the leaders, Cisco estimates $33bn, or nearly 40% of the potential gains, isn’t being realised even in that country.

How different industries are using the internet of machines is notable as well, with Cisco claiming the biggest benefits currently being realised by the IT industry while the greatest potential lies in the service, logistics and manufacturing industries.

cisco-internet-of-everything-value-index-by-industry — Internet of everything value by industry

If anything, these projections could be on the conservative side with Cisco estimating fifty billion devices connected to the net by 2020. Given the rate of smartphone being sold and everything from vending machines to clothing being online, it may well be ten or even a hundred times that number.

The real challenge for businesses in all these projections is how individual organisations can realise this value in their operations.

For some businesses, there’s plenty of existing opportunities with well established services in areas like field services and logistics tracking the locations of staff and packages. These are relatively simple to incorporate into existing operations.

In other applications, businesses will find things more complex as the connected devices will tie into analytics and Big Data plays. These won’t be simple.

One particularly important area for the workforce as a whole in business process automation where many tasks currently done by humans can be carried out by machines talking to each other.

This is already happening in fields like fast moving consumer goods and hospitality where stock levels can be automatically monitored and replacement stock ordered in without staff being involved. As the technology becomes more widespread this will threaten the roles of many previously well paid managers.

Many of those managers though will be challenged anyway unless they’re prepared to deal with the changes that internet of things is bringing to their businesses.

How do you think the internet of everything will change your business?

Is Australia falling behind on the internet of everything?

Australian businesses are falling behind the rest of the world in using the Internet of machines says Cisco

Last Friday Cisco Systems presented their Internet of Everything index in Sydney looking at how connected machines are changing business and society.

Cisco Australia CEO Ken Boal gave the company’s vision of how a connected society might work in the near future with alarm clocks synchronising with calendars, traffic lights adapting to weather and road conditions while the local coffee shop has your favourite brew waiting for as the barista knows exactly when you will arrive.

While that vision is somewhat spooky, Boal had some important points for business, primarily that in Cisco’s view there is $14 trillion dollars in value to be realised from utilising the internet of machines.

Much of that value is “being left on the table” in Boal’s words with nearly 50% of businesses not taking advantage of the new technologies.

Boal was particularly worried about Australian businesses with Cisco lumping the country into ‘beginner’ status in adopting internet of everything technologies along with Mexico and Russia, with all three lagging far behind Germany, Japan and France.

In Boal’s view, Australian management’s failure is due to “the focus on streamlining costs has come at the cost of innovation.”

This something worth thinking about; in a business environment where most industries only have two dominant players and the corporate mindset is focused on maximising profits and staying a percentage point or two ahead of the other incumbent, being an innovator itsn’t a priority – it might even be a disadvantage.

For Australian business, and society, that complacency is a threat which leaves the nation exposed to the massive changes our world is undergoing.

What happens when the power goes out?

How would you cope if the electricity was turned off?

Cisco gave a media and analyst briefing earlier today on the Internet of everything looking at how various technologies can help with tasks ranging from reducing traffic accidents to improving productivity which I’ll write up later.

One of the analyst’s questions though is worth pondering – “what happens when the power goes out?”

For most of the industrial processes discussed by Cisco and the panellists, this would be a hassle but most of the systems would, or should, be designed to fall back to a default position should the power fail.

On a much bigger scale though this is something we don’t really think through.

In modern Western societyour affluent lifestyle is based upon complex supply chains that get the food to our supermarkets, fuel to our petrol pumps, water to our taps and electricity to our homes.

Those chains are far more fragile than we think and few of us give any thought to how we’d survive if the power was off for more than a few hours or if the shop didn’t have any milk and bread for days.

It’s one of the fascinating thing with the end of the world movies. When the meteorite hits or aliens take over then our power and food supplies probably have only 72 hours before they dry up.

After that, you’ve probably got more to worry about your neighbours trying to steal your hoard than being ripped to pieces by zombies.

Most of us probably wouldn’t cope without the safe, comfortable certainties which we’ve become used to.

One thing is for sure — if the power does fail, then most of us will have more to worry about than whether our smartphones are working or whether our geolocating, internet connected fridge is tweeting our wine consumption.

Coming to your city – the internet of machines

A chart by sensor manufacturer Libelium illustrates how the internet of machines is growing

An intriguing infographic from Spanish sensor manufacturer Libelium – which to Australian ears sounds like a new age defamation law firm – illustrates how the internet of things is being used in all walks of life from shipping containers to park benches.

The notable thing about the diagram is pretty well all of the sensor applications have been available for years – in some cases decades – and its only with the arrival of cheap sensors and pervasive internet access that widespread monitoring has becoming possible.

With affordable, even disposible, sensors coupled with internet projects like Google Loon and Australia’s National Broadband Network, these networks are now possible at a price that won’t sink a government’s budget.

In fact these sensor networks will probably improve councils’ and governments’ budgets as they promise to improve the efficiency of services like rubbish collection and street repairs.

The real challenge is managing all the data this equipment gathers, that’s going to be one of the big jobs of the next decade.

Take ten engineers and the internet of everything

LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon sees the future of his business in the internet of machines

It seems a far jump from running a gaming platform to a remote access software company with a focus on the internet of machines, but that’s the journey remote access company LogMeIn and its CEO Michael Simon has travelled.

“Anything that could be connected will be connected in the next decade.” Micheal told me in Sydney last week and it’s where he sees the next step for the company he has led since its founding in 2003.

LogMeIn grew out of a team that formerly worked for uproar.com, an online gaming company sold to a division of Vivendi Universal for $140 million in 2001.

Two years after the sale Michael, who had been CEO of Uproar, and a team of ten engineers who formerly worked for the company thought they could solve the complexities of accessing computers remotely.

For geeks and big business, accessing your computer across the internet in 2003 wasn’t much a problem however it involved configuring software, punching holes in firewalls and configuring routers.

The LogMeIn team wanted to find a way to make this technology cheap and easy for small businesses and homes to use.

A decade later they employ 650 staff, half of whom are engineers, and have twenty million users of their product.

Building the freemium model

The vast majority of those users are using LogMeIn’s free services – Simon estimates that over 95% of users are using the free version.

In this, LogMeIn is one of the leading examples of the freemium business model – offering a free version of a software product and premium paid for edition with more advanced features.

One leader of the freemium movement was the Zone Alarm firewall, a product which earned its stripes in the early 2000s at the peak of the Windows malware epidemic.

Today one of Zone Alarm’s veterans, Irfan Salim, sits on the LogMeIn board along with two former executives of Symantec, the company whose PC Anywhere and Norton Internet Security products competed with both Zone Alarm and LogMeIn.

While LogMeIn has done well over the last ten years, the market today is very different to that of a decade ago with cloud computing technologies taking much of the need for remote access software

Mike Simon sees these changes as an opportunity with the computer industry having gone through three phases – the PC centric era, the mobile wave and now we’re entering the internet of things.

To cater for the mobile wave LogMeIn has released Cubby, a cloud based storage system that competes with Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s Skydrive, but Simon has his eye on the next major shift.

Controlling the internet of machines

The internet of things is a crowded market, but Simon believes companies like LogMeIn have an advantage over the telco and networking vendors as businesses with freemium and startup cultures look for ‘pennies per year’ rather than the ‘dollars per device’ larger corporation hope to make.

It’s a big brave call, but with the market promises to be huge – General Electric claimed last year nearly half the global economy or $32.3 trillion in global output can benefit from the Industrial Internet.

That’s a pretty big ticket to clip.

Whether Michael Simon and LogMeIn can achieve their vision of being integral part of the Internet of things remains to be seen, but so far they do have success on their side.

Connecting the household to the internet of everything

The Internet of things comes alive with Australian startup Moore’s Cloud

The development of intelligent household appliances like lights is changing our lives in subtle ways, Australian startup Moore’s Cloud is a good example of how cheap computing, accessible internet and open applications are coming together.

One of the frontiers of technology right now is the internet of things, where machines connect directly to each other, cutting out the requirement for people to monitor them.

Good examples of these devices is the internet connected fridge – which was the poster child for pointless connectivity during tech wreck in the early 2000s but is now standard equipment in hotels, restaurants and hospitals where monitoring stock levels has become wholly automated.

Cheap hardware has driven this trend, as processor prices have tumbled it’s become cost effective to incorporate intelligent systems into almost every household device. Everything from the kettle to the washing machine now has some sort of CPU in it.

Moore’s Cloud is a good example of how the internet of machines is coming together. A simple cube shaped device has the electronic smarts to connect with other lights and be controlled by software apps.

Being able to create is important as the software interfaces – the APIs – are open which people to write programs that take advantage of the light’s features. A video from the Moore’s Cloud builders showcases twelve of the apps which have been developed so far which include weather forecasting, night lights and changing moods.

Having an ‘ecosystem’ of apps is now driving innovation in consumer electronics. The iPhone started the app revolution and now everything from stereo systems to lights are being controlled by them. Devices that don’t have open APIs are at risk of being left behind.

With systems being open to interested designers, anybody can create their own way of controlling device which opens the way for some innovative, left of field ideas.

In many respects, Moore’s Cloud is one of the early wave of smart features we’re going to see in the next generation of household appliances that will change how we use these tools.

The team behind Moore’s Cloud is still raising money for the project through Kickstarter, their campaign finishes this Friday. Hopefully they’ll meet their targets and take the project further.