Tag: internet of things

A tale of two telcos

The contrasting fortunes of Australia’s Telstra and China Telecom tell us much about the two nation’s economies

Last Thursday saw China Mobile and Australia’s Telstra release their annual results.

Both have impressive numbers that illustrate how the telco industry is changing along with some stark differences between the two nation’s business culture.

For both companies their results show how voice and SMS are declining as the ‘rivers of gold’ for telecoms operators around the world; China Mobile’s voice revenues are down 6% while  Telstra’s fixed line voice fell by a similar amount.

In Australia, the incumbent telco (which sometimes advertises on this blog) continued its dominant position in its market with net profit rising nearly 15% on the back of 6.1% increase in income.

teslstra-revenue-2014

Telstra’s results also showed how the Aussie telecommunications market is now primarily a mobile sector; while the advantages of being the incumbent are substantial the real growth and profits in the business are in it’s non traditional sectors. It’s little wonder the company is happy to give away its legacy copper systems to the government’s troubled National Broadband Network.

In the PRC, the news wasn’t so good with China Mobile’s net profit for the first half of the year falling  8.5 per cent as its traditional voice and messaging businesses faced continued pressure from social media firms, despite revenue being up nearly five percent.

China Telecom is under pressure from competitors while in Australia the incumbents are doing very well. This is true across much of the Aussie economy.

While China Mobile is staking its future on its 4G rollout, Telstra is seeing the Internet of Things and Machine to Machine (M2M) markets as being the key markets, despite Gartner flagging the IoT as being at peak of the Hype Cycle.

It may well turn out to be the other way round — Chinese businesses and governments are far quicker to embrace the IoT than their Australian equivalents while Telstra’s biggest competitive advantage against SingTel Optus and Vodafone is it’s far superior 4G network.

China Mobile’s and Telstra’s competing fortunes tell us much about each country’s telecommunications markets along with the direction of both nation’s economies.

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Stages of hype – the Gartner Hype Cycle turns twenty

The Gartner Hype Cycle turns twenty

Gartner’s Hype Cycle has been a favourite of this blog as it’s been pretty accurate at describing where various technologies are in the tech media’s eye.

This year is the twentieth edition and the most notable aspect is the Internet of Things is shown as being right on the peak of industry hype.

Other sectors struggling on the cycle are cloud computing, big data and machine-to-machine technologies; all of them are tumbling into the trough of disillusionment.

gartner-hype-cycle-2014

In itself this isn’t a bad thing for these technologies as the ‘trough of disillusionment’ is where the true business cases are found, certainly for the Internet of Things this will not be bad for a sector that’s clearly overhyped.

There’s also the thought that not all troughs of disillusionment are the same as some concepts – such as Big Data – are actually trends which means they aren’t subject to the whims of corporate marketing departments.

How the hype cycle will look in five years will be fascinating as things like brain-computing interfaces and the quantified self start to take form. When they reach the peak of the hype cycle we can expect many of today’s disillusioned technologies will be on the plateau of productivity.

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Reaching Peak Tablet as iPad and android sales begin to plateau

An electrical retailer’s financial results might mark turning points in two different economies.

Today Australian electronics retailer JB Hi Fi released its annual results. They confirm what’s been becoming apparent over the last year that tablet computer sales seem to have peaked.

A plateauing of tablet sales is bad news for retailers like JB whose stock price fell by 8% on the news.

It’s not surprising that tablet computer sales have peaked as the growth had been spectacular and, unlike PCs of a decade ago, there isn’t an obvious five year replacement cycle.

That the old PC industry business model doesn’t apply to tablets is why Apple is focusing on other revenue sources like the App Store and internet of things plays such as HomeKit and HealthKit.

Once again, the industry leaders are finding they have to pivot to stay up with a rapidly evolving market.

The other notable point from JB’s management was that Australian consumer confidence is tanking, which might indicate the economy is entering its first recession in twenty years.

If it is true that the Aussie economy is entering a recession, then it might be time for the adults to take charge in a very immature government. Some of the Liberal Party’s pampered princelings may have to start earning their salaries soon.

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Hacks on a plane

That avionic systems could be vulnerable to hacking is a wake up call for the internet of things industry.

One of the great concerns about the internet of things is what happens when older computer technology that was never designed to be connected to the net is exposed to the online world.

A presentation to the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas this Thursday by researcher Ruben Santamarta promises to show some of the vulnerabilities in aircraft avionic systems.

Today’s aircraft are extremely smart devices with the downsides shown in the tragedy of AF447 where an Air France jet plunged into the Atlantic Ocean when two undertrained pilots didn’t understand what their plane was doing as it encountered severe ice conditions in a storm.

With aircrew increasingly dependent upon computers to help them fly planes, the risks of bugs or security weaknesses in aircraft systems is a serious issue and with the continued mystery of MH370’s fate adds an element of speculation that a glitch of some form was responsible for its disappearance.

It wouldn’t be the first time a passenger plane came to grief because of a computer error; most notably Air New Zealand flight 901 crashed into Antarctica’s Mount Erebus during a 1979 sightseeing trip due to wrong information being loaded into the navigation system.

The internet adds numerous risk factors to aircraft – Santamarta’s hack allegedly works through in plane WiFi systems – particularly given these avionics systems haven’t been designed to deal with unauthorised access into their networks.

Should Santamarta’s demonstration prove feasible, it will be an important warning to the aviation industry and the broader Internet of Things community that security is a pressing issue in a world where critical equipment is connected.

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Blackberry’s quest for its future

BlackBerry stakes its future on increased enterprise security concerns and the internet of things

This is the unedited, submitted version of ‘is BlackBerry ripe for a comeback‘ that appeared in Technology Spectator on 30 July, 2014.

“What do we well?” is the question Blackberry CEO John Chen asked when he took the reigns of the Canadian communication company last November.

Chen was speaking on Tuesday at Blackberry’s Security Summit in New York where he and his executive team laid out the company’s roadmap back to profitability.

Since the arrival of the iPhone and Android smartphones, times have been tough for the once iconic business phone vendor as enterprise users deserted Blackberry’s handsets and the company struggled to find a new direction under former CEO Thorsten Heins.

Back to BlackBerry’s secure roots

In Chen’s view, the company’s future lies in its roots of providing secure communications for large organisations, “It became obvious to us that security, productivity and collaboration have to be it.”

“This is not to say we are not interested in the consumer, but we have to anchor ourselves around the enterprise.” Chen said in a clear move distancing himself from his predecessor and products like the ill fated Blackberry Playbook

An early step in this process of focusing on enterprise security concerns is the acquisition of German voice security company Secusmart which was the cornerstone of Chen’s New York keynote.

Blackberry’s acquisition of the company is a logical move says the CEO of Secusmart, Dr Hans-Christoph Quelle, who points out the two organisations have been working closely together for several years.

“It fits perfectly,” says Quelle. “We are not strangers having worked together since 2009,” in describing how Secusmart technology has been increasingly incorporated into Blackberry’s devices.

Secusmart’s key selling point has been its adoption by NATO and European government agencies; the Snowden revelations on the US bugging of Angela Merkel coupled with the Russian FSB leaking intercepted US state department conversations along with the release of Ukrainian separatist conversations after the shooting down of MH17 has focused the European view on the security of voice communications.

Launching new services

Along with the acquisition of Secusmart, Blackberry will also be launching an new enterprise service in November, the new Passport handset in December along with a range of security applications including BlackBerry Guardian, a new service that will scan Android apps for malicious software.

Blackberry’s executives were at pains to emphasise their products aren’t focused on any single smartphone operating system and not dependent on customers buying their smartphones although to get the maximum security benefits.

“We will provide the best level of security possible to as many target devices out there as possible,” said Dan Dodge who heads Blackberry’s QNX embedded devices division.

Longer term plans

In the longer term, Blackberry sees QNX division as being one of the major drivers of future revenues as the Internet of Things is rolled out across industries.

QNX was acquired by Blackberry in 2010 to broadband the communication company’s product range, now it is one of the pillars of the organisation’s future as Chen and his team see that connected devices will need secure and reliable software.

Dodge says: “With the internet of things, you can have devices that can change your world.”

While QNX is best known for its smartcar operating system – it underpins Apple’s CarPlay system being rolled out for BMW as well as its own system deployed in Audis – the company’s products are used for industrial applications ranging from wind turbines to manufacturing plants.

Despite Blackberry’s announcements in New York, the company still facing challenges in the marketplace with the Ford Motor Company announcing earlier this week it will drop the Blackberry for its employees by the end of the year and replace them with iPhones.

Chen’s though is dismissive about Apple’s and IBM’s moves into Blackberry’s enterprise markets, “what we do and what they do is completely different.”

Focusing BlackBerry

The focus for Chen is to differentiate Blackberry and play on its strengths, particularly the four markets it calls ‘regulated industries’ – government, health care, financial and energy that the company claims makes up half of enterprise IT spending.

Whether this is enough to bring Blackberry back on track remains to be seen but Chen says this is where he sees the company’s future, “This is why we are so focused on enterprise and so focused on these pillars.”

For Blackberry, the emphasis on enterprise communications is a step back to the profitable past. It may well be successful as businesses become more security conscious in a post-Snowden world.

Paul travelled to the Blackberry Security Summit in New York as a guest of the company.

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A big reset button on business

Business is like a petrie dish says Internet pioneer and Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls about companies on the web.

“Every large company is just another color of a spore in a petrie dish.”

For the latest Decoding the New Economy video Internet Pioneer Doc Searls discusses The Respect Network, online privacy and the future of business on the web.

Doc Searls is one of the internet’s pioneers who helped write The Cluetrain Manifesto that laid out many of the ideas that underpinned the philosophies driving the early days of the internet.

Searls’ visit to Sydney was part of the rolling worldwide launch of the Respect Network, a system designed to improve internet users’ privacy through ‘personal clouds’ of information where people can choose to share data with companies and others.

A big reset button on business

In many ways The Respect Network shows how the internet has evolved since the days of the Cluetrain Manifesto, something that Searls puts in context.

“We wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999,” says Searls. “At that time Microsoft ruled the world, Apple was considered a failure – Steve Jobs had come along and they had the iMac but it was all yet to be proven – Google barely existed and Facebook didn’t exist at all.”

“On the one hand we saw the internet, we being the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and this whole new thing in the world that basically hit a big reset button on ‘business as usual'”

“It did that. I think we’re vindicated on that.”

Resetting business

“What we have now are new industrial giants; Apple became an industrial giant, Microsoft are fading away, Nokia was the number one smartphone company and they’re all but gone.”

One of the key things with today’s markets in Searls’ view is the amount of information that businesses can collect on their customers; something that ties into the original Cluetrain idea of all markets being conversations.

With the evolution of Big Data and the internet of things, Searls sees challenges for companies using old marketing methods which rely upon online tracking. Something that’s a challenge for social media services and many of the existing internet giants.

“The interesting thing is there’s a lot more intelligence that a company can get directly from their customers from things they already own than following us around on the internet.”

Breaking the silos

Searls also sees the current trend towards the internet being divided into little empires as a passing phase, “every company wants a unique offering but we need standards.”

For Searls the key thing about the current era internet is we’re only at the beginning of a time that empowers the individual,  “the older I get, the earlier it seems.”

“Anyone of us can do anything,” Searls says. “That’s the power – I’m optimistic about everything.”

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Electrocuting elephants – the cost of competing standards

We’re bad at setting standards but we have moved on from electrocuting elephants

A constant theme when new technologies appear is the inevitable war about standards that often sees bitter arguments over how the new methods should be used.

Over the centuries we’ve seen fights over railway gauges, video tape formats and even the shape of lighting conductors.

The struggle over lightning rods between the English and French camps in the eighteenth century was parodied by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels where the two tribes fought over which end of a boiled egg should be broken.

Probably the nastiest dispute in modern times was the battle over DC and AC electricity transmission between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, a fight made worse by Edison’s former employee Nikola Tesla taking his patents over to Westinghouse.

The fight became so fierce that Edison actually electrocuted an elephant to illustrate how dangerous AC electricity would be to householders.


Tesla and Westinghouse eventually won the argument, but it came at a cost to Topsy the Elephant.

While we may draw the line at electrocuting elephants in these enlightened days, we aren’t much better at settling standards. That’s why it’s fascinating watching how technologies like the smart car and the connected home will evolve.

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