Tag: iot

Apple’s long game

Apple are playing the long game with their internet of things strategy so they aren’t panicking into a smart watch

It’s always risky to make predictions about Apple, particularly when they are silly. The company plays a long game and isn’t known for panicked releases of me-too products.

Time is ticking for Apple to announce an iWatch, say analysts is a good example of a silly prediction about Apple’s future products and something that’s quite rightly criticised by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.

As I’ve pointed out before, the watch market is tiny compared to the smartphone with the entire global wristwatch industry’s sales making up only one-seventh of Apple’s iPhone sales.

Part of the problem with stories like CNBC’s is the tech media’s focus on consumer goods, particularly in the internet of things and wearable technology markets.

Analysts like those quoted in CNBC’s story fall for this fallacy and overlook that the IoT market profits are going to come from the backend, B2B applications of the technologies.

With Apple we’re already seeing this with iBeacon being deployed in sports stadiums and shopping centres – Apple’s recent partnership with United Airlines to provide inflight entertainment is another step towards locking up business deals.

There’s no doubt those business deals will flow into the consumer market and an iWatch may well be part of Apple’s longer plan to lock customers into their products.

However claiming Apple have 60 days to launch an iWatch is plain silly, particularly when you have a company with a track record of not being panicked into launching me-too products and playing the long game.

The Internet of Racing Machines

Formula One racing gives us a glimpse of the technologies that will be commonplace in businesses in the near future.

For the Formula One racing circuit, the financial crisis of six years ago was an opportunity to reinvent the sport; today the teams use a combination of technologies to gain an advantage over their competitors.

“A few years ago you wouldn’t have been here today,” Francois Puentes, Head Of Account Management at Team Lotus told a group of journalists ahead of this week’s Melbourne Grand Prix. “F1 was a completely different sport.”

The 2009 financial crisis was the catalyst for the changes Puentes says; “we all sat down as teams at the same table to make the sport more sustainable, this obliged us to run the sport as a business.”

“Before we didn’t know what the unit cost was for a part. We would very often produce two of the same parts without even knowing what was going on.”

To tighten their management systems, Lotus bought in a range of cloud based business software such as Microsoft Dynamics and also accelerated its adoption of computerised manufacturing techniques.

Speeding up development

Lotus employs over 500 people to keep its two cars on the road and most of the vehicles parts are designed and manufactured at its headquarters in Oxford, England. During the season the team’s workshop may produce up to five hundred replacement or redesigned components each week.

This brings together a number of technologies including Computer Aided Design, 3D Printing and cloud computing.

The internet of racing machines

Massive rule changes have also accelerated Formula One’s adoption of in car technology with information being gathered from sensors throughout the vehicles.

During races data is transferred from the vehicles’ sensors by radio for the teams’ crews to analyse performance. This includes information like gear box temperature, tyre condition, and aerodynamic performance data.

Following the race larger volumes of data are downloaded from the vehicle for engineers to tune the car for the next event.

While Lotus has teamed with technology companies like Microsoft and EMC, rival team Caterham partnered with GE whose Global Research team worked to integrate the technologies demanded by the new F1 rules.

Global technology

Caterham’s cars use intercoolers developed in Germany, carbon fibre composites and fibre optic sensors from the United States, and big data analysis techniques developed in India.

Key to gathering that data are sensors throughout the vehicle that capture a constant stream of data about forces acting on the car during the race, transmitting this information in a far more efficient way than traditional methods which relied on load sensors attached to the suspension.

The result is massive volumes of raw data. On the track, Caterham cars generate 1,000 points of data a second from more than 2,000 data channels. Up to 500 different sensors constantly capture and relay data back to the team’s command centre for urgent analysis.

Learning from Big Data

By applying what the company has learned from its Industrial Internet projects, GE was able to help Caterham cut its data processing time in half, leaving the team in a stronger strategic and tactical position.

Thanks to these analysis techniques, the Caterham team can look at slices of its data across an entire season, pinpoint setups that were particularly effective, and identify reliability issues earlier.

Inside the vehicle, GE has also found a way to replace metal pipes with carbon fibre, reducing the overall weight of the vehicle.

These technology developments will continue to find applications beyond the 2014 Grand Prix season.

Carbon composites are being used extensively in the aviation industry and big data analysis is playing an important role in the renewable energy sector.

Lewis Butler, Caterham’s chief designer, says working with GE is helping the team deepen its skills base.

“GE are working with Caterham to help with the manufacturing process and knowledge transfer, and giving Caterham F1 Team the capability to manufacture its own parts,” he says.

All the Formula One teams are using Internet of Things technologies to gather information on their vehicles, Big Data tools to manage that information along 3D printing to accelerate their research and manufacturing processes.

The Formula One world is a glimpse into the future of business as various technologies come together to change the way industries operate.

Paul travelled to the Melbourne Grand Prix as a guest of Microsoft and Team Lotus.

Network neutrality and the internet of things

Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision ruling against network neutrality is a mixed bag for the Internet of Things industry.

Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision ruling against the Federal Communication Commission’s regulations on network neutrality is a mixed bag for the Internet of Things industry.

Network neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic is treated the same, regardless of its nature or destination.

The FCC rules meant US based Internet Service Providers weren’t allowed to discriminate between different types of services, for instance blocking Netflicks or allowing faster downloads from Amazon.

In the United States network neutrality has been a bone of contention between consumer groups, government regulators and ISPs for over a decade, although it hasn’t been much of an issue outside North America.

For Machine to Machine (M2M) or Internet of Things (IoT) vendors and services there is some attraction in Telcos being able to offer prioritised traffic for mission critical systems.

In applications like supply chain management and public safety, reliability of the connection is essential and something the ‘best effort’ services offered by ISPs are not well suited to.

When networks are overcapacity, say at sporting events or during disasters, being able to shed non critical traffic may be important for emergency services and the devices they may depend upon.

So for IoT and M2M services, network neutrality is not necessarily a good thing.

However there is a downside should network neutrality be overturned, the risk of vendor lock in is high and it’s quite possible to see as situation where, for instance, AT&T enter into an agreement with Google to provide the public network capabilities for Nest home automation devices.

This could see Nest customers suffering a substandard service if they choose another provider.

Internationally the attitude towards network neutrality has been that competition will sort things out, however the IT and telco industries do have a habit of trying to enforce their own monopolies on customers – something we’re currently seeing in the Apple-Google battles over smartphones and connected vehicles.

So it isn’t clear whether network neutrality isn’t a good thing for the M2M sector, however it’s something that’s going to play out as these technologies become more ubiquitous across the economy.

Who pays for the internet of things?

Our assumptions about where the money will be made from the internet of things may turn out not be so.

“If there’s one number I’d like you to remember, it’s 19 trillion.” Cisco CEO John Chambers told the 2014 International CES during his keynote speech earlier this week.

Chambers was referring to the economic value of the Internet of Things or machine to machine technologies as they get rolled out across society, but who pays for the connectivity?

In the case of the smart home, office, factory or farm the data costs go onto the existing internet bill, but once you get out of the office or on the road then the bills start mounting up as systems start connecting to a cellular or satellite network.

Certainly the telcos see the opportunity with Ovum Research predicting telco’s M2M revenues will grow to reach US$44.8bn over the next five years.

While for logistics companies and similar businesses this will be just another cost of doing business, for many consumers being stuck with an expensive mobile data plan with their smart car might not be attractive.

As car manufacturers start to push their vehicles as being more like smartphones, suddenly the choice of network provider, compatibility with apps and operating systems starts to become a valid concern.

In that world, choosing a car on the basis of which telco it connects to is a sensible idea.

Of course it may be that consumers may not own cars by the end of the decade. The vision of companies like Zip Car and Uber is that we just call for a towncar or pick up a share car when we need one.

Certainly that vision makes sense from an economic perspective and the trends right now show that millennials are nowhere near as interested in cars as their parents and grandparents were.

As with every technological change, it’s not always obvious in the early days how things will pan out. In 1977 the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation Ken Olsen said, “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Within 15 years he was proved very wrong.

The motor car drove western society during the Twentieth Century and to assume we’ll continue to use it the same way in the 21st is as flawed as believing a hundred years ago that we’d continue to use horse carriages the same way as previously.

So the assumptions about where money is to be made with the Internet of Things may turn out to surprise us all.

 

What’s coming in tech for 2014 – ABC Nightlife computers

On ABC Local Radio we’ll be looking at the big tech stories for 2014

For the first Nightlife tech spot of 2014 Paul will be joining Kate O’Toole to look at what’s going to big technology news in the year ahead.

The show has been and gone. If you missed it, you can download it from the ABC Nightlife website.

A lot of this year’s technology stories will be around things we’ve been talking about for a while, but a wave of cheap devices is making things like the connected car and smart house more affordable and accessible to homes and businesses.

The Connected car

While it’s early days for the connected car, in the near future we’ll see them talking to intelligent roadsigns to reduce the roadtoll and to our smart houses to let our airconditioners and kettles know we’re on the way home.

2014 is going to see these vehicles become common, by the end of next year we’ll be expecting most models to have these features.

Wearable tech

We’ve been hearing a lot about Google Glass, but the real advances in wearable tech are in devices like the Fitbit that tracks your daily exercise.

The next wave of wearable tech will be intelligent clothing, a good example of this is the Mimobaby kimono that measures a baby’s movements and repiration during the night.

The Internet of Things

One of the truths of the tech industry is that it loves buzzwords – in recent years we’ve had social media, cloud computing and crowdsourcing – the next big one is The Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things deserve the hype. With cheap sensors, accessible internet and cloud computing it’s now possible to connect, monitor and analyse everything from cows to refrigerators. This will have big effects on most industries.

Smartphone wars

For the past few years we’ve seen the iPhone and then Android, primarily Samsung phones, dominate the smartphone market. This is about to change as a wave of cheap Chinese phones flood the market.

Expect smartphone and tablet prices to fall dramatically as a range of new devices appear on the shelves. We will probably see Apple and Samsung respond by increasing the features available on their more expensive, higher margin devices.

3D Printing

Another technology that’s become affordable in recent years is 3D printing. At the CES show, a new range of 3D printers was released that have cameras so you can make copies of items.

3D printing is rapidly gaining acceptance and the worldwide makers’ movement is showing what we can do with these machines.

National Broadband Network

In Australia the NBN will continue to be the biggest local tech story. Unfortunately the project will remain mired in contractual and political problems as the government tries to figure out exactly what it wants to build.

While Australia plays games, the rest of the world is getting on a building their networks and Australians can expect the country to fall further behind the global leaders on almost every measure.

Security

With the revelations of Edward Snowden we can expect security and privacy to be an ongoing story in 2014.

As corporations and social media companies struggle with the challenge of storing and protecting customer’s data, there will be more discussion of how we can protect our vital information both on and offline.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Eastern Summer time on Thursday, January 10 or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Launching Networked Globe

Network Globe aims to be one of the main sources for information on the Internet of Things

Out of the last six months of travelling, a new project has been born. Networked Globe is intended as a clearing house for news and opinion on the Internet of Things, Machine to Machine and all the technologies that surround these industries.

The intention is to have a daily update on industry news along with two or three feature pieces a week to start with. If gets legs, and an income, then we’ll be looking at extending the coverage.

Finding things to cover certainly won’t be a problem, equipment vendors and telecommunications companies are pouring into the space and security issues are already becoming a major concern, as this story on the vulnerabilities of home automation illustrate.

Hopefully this blog won’t be neglected as the focus shifts to Networked Globe, although there’ll probably be more posts about the usual rollercoaster ride about setting up a business.

Security and the hackable baby monitor

Poor internet security on a baby camera should remind us of the importance of keeping your network secure.

Imagine a baby monitor that can be hacked, that’s the story that Forbes magazine tells about the Foscam baby monitors that can be owned by anybody using the Shodan search engine to find unsecured video devices.

Like all similar stories, the Foscam monitors’ weaknesses are born out of good intentions, the idea is parents can keep an eye on their children across the internet.

The problem, as always, is convenience and ease of use trumped security with Foscam making it easy for parents to by having trivial, if any, security on their devices.

It’s a lesson that should have been learned a million times, yet manufacturers continue to disregard the risks of poor security on internet connected devices.

As these internet connected devices become critical to business and public safety, this lack of security won’t be acceptable.

Slowly, companies like Foscam are being forced to take security seriously — hopefully consumers will accelerate the process by voting with their wallets.

In the meantime, it might be a good idea to make sure your home or business router has a good firewall before setting up internet connected devices.