Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: iot

  • Management embraces M2M tech

    Management embraces M2M tech

    Companies are increasingly embracing machine to machine technologies, the 2015 Vodafone M2M Barometer reports.

    Interviewing  over 650 executives across 16 countries and seven industries, Vodafone’s report looks at how companies are using M2M technologies in their organisations.

    The most enthusiastic industry adopting M2M is the energy and utilities sector with 37% of respondents claiming they’ve implemented machine to machine projects followed by the automobile and retail sectors.

    Slightly behind the leading three sectors is the consumer industry and we can expect to see that grow as wearable technologies become more common and more household devices come with connectivity built in.

    Globally, the Asian region is driving M2M adoption with governments in China, South Korea and Singapore in particular driving the market growth as they mandate more connected technologies.

    Vodafone concludes the report by stating the question for businesses is not whether to adopt M2M, but how best the technologies can be used to drive business. As organisations find new ways to gather data and apply the insights they find from that information, the business case for adopting machine to machine technologies will get stronger.

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  • Sony hopes mobile phones are an IoT Trojan horse

    Sony hopes mobile phones are an IoT Trojan horse

    “We will never ever sell or exit from the current mobile business,” defiantly states CEO and president of Sony Mobile, Hiroki Totoki, in an interview with Arabian Business.

    “Smartphones are completely connected to other devices, also connected to people’s lives — deeply.” Totoki continues, “and the opportunity for diversification is huge. We’re heading to the IoT (Internet of Things) era and have to produce a number of new categories of products in this world, otherwise we could lose out on a very important business domain.”

    The smartphone has become the remote control for the smarthouse and connected car and that doesn’t appear to be changing as Totoki acknowledges.

    For companies like Sony it’s difficult to see the advantage of running their own hardware as it’s the software stack that matters in controlling the platforms with that battle long being settled as a contest between Google Android and Apple iOS for the user market.

    For Sony, the challenge is to find a niche to join players like BlackBerry’s QNX, Windows 10 and the other systems carving lucrative, but less visible, market sectors.

    Should Sony find a niche, it’s unlikely to based upon hardware unless they can find a modern equivalent of the 1970s Walkman.

    Whenever a corporation’s executives make a declaration like Totoki’s, it’s probably worthwhile for staff members in the affected divisions start brushing up their resumes. It’s not a good sign.

    Regardless of Totoki’s fighting words, it’s difficult to see how Sony’s mobile division can survive as a consumer vendor.

    It’s likely Sony will have to find something other than smartphones to be a Trojan horse into the Internet of Things.

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  • Google Glass goes to the enterprize

    Google Glass goes to the enterprize

    The original Google Glass program closed down at the beginning of this year and bought to an end the first stages of the highest profile virtual reality headset project.

    At the time, the company flagged Glass was entering another stage and now the 9to5Google site reports an enterprise edition is well underway.

    Despite the focus on consumer and gaming applications, enterprise applications in fields such as logistics and safety have been the bigger immediate opportunities for these products.

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  • Towards the zero defect economy

    Towards the zero defect economy

    At 2.03 in the morning of July 11, 2012, a Norfolk Southern Railway Company freight train derailed just inside the city limits of Columbus, Ohio.

    The resulting crash and fire caused over a hundred people to be evacuated, resulted in over a million dollars in damages and created massive disruption throughout the US rail network.

    Could accidents like this be avoided by the Internet of Things? Sham Chotai, the Chief Technical Officer of GE Software, believes applying sensor technology to locomotives can detect conditions like defective rails and save US railway operators around a billion dollars a year in costs.

    “We decided to put the technology directly on the locomotive,” says Chotai in describing the problem facing railroad operators in scheduling track inspections. “We found we were mapping the entire railway network, and we were mapping anything that touched the track such as insulated joins and wayside equipment.”

    This improvement in reliability and its benefits to business is something flagged by then Salesforce Vice President Peter Coffee in an interview with Decoding the New Economy in 2013.

    “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.’”

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

    Reducing defects isn’t just good for brands, it also promises to save lives as Cisco illustrated at an Australian event focused on road safety.

    Transport for New South Wales engineer John Wall explained how smarter car technologies, intelligent user interfaces and roadside communications all bring the potential of dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, the road toll.

    Should it turn out the IoT can radically reduce defects and accidents it won’t be good news for all industries as John Rice, GE’s Global Head of Operations, pointed out last year in observing how intelligent machines will eliminate the break-fix model of business.

    “We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

    “Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

    A zero defect economy is good news for customers and people, but for suppliers and service industries based upon fixing problems it means a massive change to business.

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  • Cisco expands its innovation centre network to Australia

    Cisco expands its innovation centre network to Australia

    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.

     

     

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