Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: iot

  • The future of wearables

    The future of wearables

    One of the most interesting aspects of  is that we are entering an age of what designer Gadi Amit calls an era of unlimited screens.

    This is coming about because almost everything is becoming a computer including everything we wear.

    At last week’s Dreamforce 2015, I caught up with the head of Salesforce Wear, Lindsey Irvine, to discuss the future of wearables.

    “There’s a whole big connected world out there, it’s daunting.” says Irvine. “We’re going to help companies how to use these technologies in new and different ways in this space.”

    Irvine sees industries where it’s easy to show a business case, like retail and sales, being the earliest business adopters of wearable technologies.

    Earlier this year Salesforce launched their Putting Wearables To Work that surveyed how enterprises are using wearable technology. Which gave the company the pointers for the direction of their business strategy.

    “We did a few things, one is we connected a range of different devices. Not all, but the ones gaining the most traction,” Irvine says. “We connected these devices to the platforms so that no company would no longer have to build one off apps for each device.”

    Irvine sees sectors like real estate and health care being big areas off opportunity and in the longer term she sees smart materials and biometrics becoming more common.

    The key with the future of wearables are that devices will become smaller and less intrusive, “you aren’t going to see people wearing five devices on their wrists or two sets of glasses.”

    Paul travelled to Dreamworld as a guest of Salesforce

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  • Managing the data stream

    Managing the data stream

    One of the world’s biggest tech events – if not the biggest of the vendor shows – is Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual spectacular that this this year attracted a 150,000 attendees to San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

    Every year sees the company – which now holds the title of the world’s fourth biggest software company – and its CEO, Marc Benioff, defining the direction of the company in the face of a rapidly changing market. Despite being a pioneer in cloud computing, the company is as vulnerable to disruption as anyone else in a rapidly changing marketplace.

    This year, the focus is on analytics and automation along with a strong leaning towards the Internet of Things and app development on the Lightning platform they announced last year.

    With the Thunder platform, Salesforce is offering a service that allows businesses to connect devices onto their platform where users can build up rules based business automation. One notable part of this is the integration with Microsoft Office 365, another example of Microsoft’s reaching out to previously hostile companies.

    For Automation, Salesforce is building upon its RelateIQ acquisition from last year, now branded as SalesforceIQ. The company says “Relationship Intelligence technology that utilizes advanced data science to analyze company relationships and drive actions.”

    The Wave analytics service, which was also announced at last year’s Dreamforce, is a key part of the the business automation and IoT services in providing the insights into the data being collected. In many respect, Wave is going to be the glue that holds most of the products being announced this year.

    Complementing the Wave, Thunder and SalesforceIQ products is the Lightning platform, again announced last year, that allows users to use the company’s AppCloud to quickly build business applications.

    For Salesforce, the direction being laid out from this Dreamforce conference is in making helping customers deal with the masses of data coming into the enterprise. As Tod Neilsen, the company’s Executive Vice President of the App Cloud says, “we’re look at making the data usuable for spreadsheet users.”

    As businesses struggle to manage and understand the masses of data flowing into their organisations, this may well be a powerful selling point for Salesforce.

    Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce

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  • Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

    Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

    South Korean industrial giant Samsung is struggling, in the last year its smartphone division reported a 75% drop in revenues while their handsets, while still the world’s most popular, lost ten percentage points of market share.

    The company’s smartphone division is stuck because mobile carriers in the western world are abandoning subsidies for handsets, with most developed markets now at saturation point for cellphone adoption there’s little point in chasing market growth for all but the most desperate telco.

    For Samsung that’s been a problem as their premium model strategy has been based upon western consumers ordering a new phone every 18 to 24 months as their mobile contracts were renewed, now those deals are not so common a key sales channel for the Korean conglomerate has been lost.

    This leaves Samsung looking for the next market and at this week’s IFA consumer technology event in Berlin, the company unveiled its Smart Things hub, a cylindrical device that connects with your TV, air conditioning, music system, and other home appliances.

    Smart Things was an acquisition Samsung made last year to improve its IoT product line and the company has an open platform for connecting household devices with over 200 already certified.

    For Samsung with its range of domestic equipment this may well mark the future for the business. The interesting thing though is the smartphone is still integral in today’s vision of the connected home, so we won’t see Samsung leaving the handset market soon.

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  • Taking the pain out of sporting venues

    Taking the pain out of sporting venues

    “We’re trying to take the pain out of visiting a stadium,” says John Paul, CEO of smart stadium service provider Venue Next in an interview with Robert Scoble.

    Scoble as usual gets the better stories than we do as this site’s visit to a smart stadium was somewhat underwhelming. Compared to the Sydney Cricket Ground, Santa Clara’s Levi Stadium is several degrees more advanced – one might suggest a generation ahead.

    The Santa Clara stadium has a comprehensive offering with everything from parking, where guests can purchase spaces through the app, and transport integrated and right down to ushers monitoring the restroom queues.

    Having one app to control the various feature is a benefit, “we can’t expect people to use multiple apps at a venue.” Paul says and adds the observation that venues can use the gathered intelligence enables the stadium management and concession holders to more efficiently deploy resources.

    This is a problem at the SCG where a plethora of agencies and outsourcing deals puts barriers in the way of introducing smart apps, at present a user who wants to check seat availability or buy parking has to deal with different service providers.

    One of the big problems facing Australian stadiums are the ticketing agencies where the two major operators – Ticketmaster and Ticketeck – have exclusive deals with the venues that dynamic pricing and upselling is difficult.

    Upselling tickets was one of the benefits of the smart stadium cited by Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment when Decoding the New Economy interviewed him last year.

    Having multiple providers with mismatching or inaccessible data sets is going to be a barrier for businesses trying to implement apps like VenueNext and information access is going to be an essential part of subcontracts and outsourcing agreements.

    Ultimately this is about making things as easy as possible for the fans. By adding features they are able to spend more money and have an enjoyable time.

    What’s notable with the VenueNext applications is the focus on the fans’ experience. By making the services more accessible and reducing the hassles of attending a major event, it’s more likely to attract more spectators.

    The sports industry is leading the way on using apps to enhance customers’ experiences, something other industries such as the restaurant or conference sectors can learn from.

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  • Subscribing to disruption – Zuora founder Tien Tzuo

    Subscribing to disruption – Zuora founder Tien Tzuo

    “This is a customer driven revolution,” says Zuora co-founder and CEO, Tien Tzuo, of the business shift to a subscription payment model.

    While the cloud computing business has been one of the leaders in the shift to the subscription model, the move is happening in industries as diverse as jet engines, agricultural machinery and music.

    Zuora is one of the businesses providing the tools to manage customer subscriptions and Tien Tzuo shares with Decoding the New Economy how he sees the subscription economy changing industries.

    Tien, who was an early Salesforce employee, describes some of the forces he sees driving this shift and where the opportunities lie for business owners, managers and entrepreneurs.

    “We looked at companies like Netflix which at the time it was DVD rental service and Zipcar and saw the same payment challenges we had at Salesforce,” says Tien. “The leap for us was looking at the transformation of companies like Zipcar into a subscription model.”

    There are few industries that won’t be affected to the shift to a subscription model, Tien believes, and he sees this radically changing many sectors with Internet of Things providing a huge push towards pay-as-you-go services.

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