Tag: iot

The Internet of Things runs ahead of standards

As the Internet of thngs develops, industry standards struggle to keep up, leaving users at risk of being stranded with incompatible devices

A week or so ago we reported why LogMeIn’s CEO, Bill Wagner, wasn’t interested in participating in the Internet of Things industry groups as they are too bureaucratic and slow in a fast moving sector.

Last week I asked John Stewart, Cisco’s Chief Information Security Officer, about how the networking giant thinks about this attitude given Cisco is a key member of a number of IoT standards groups.

Stewart’s view is nuanced, “the notion of open operability versus standards is where the world needs to be. We’ve been pushing this notion of open interoperablity knowing that standards might take longer but yet you don’t want to create these islands of operational capabilities that need to be stitched together in weird ways. That would add friction to the world.”

“There’s not much room for non-interoperable systems as they would have to connect with something else,” Stewart added.

In this, Cisco’s Stewart agrees with Ericsson’s Esmeralda Swartz who believes device diversity will beat vendor’s attempts to lock customers into their IoT platforms.

While it may be true that industrial and smartcity technologies will be interoperable in order to work within complex systems, it’s highly likely many consumers devices will be locked into proprietary systems so vendors can monetize them.

For consumers, users and citizens the questions of interoperability and standards are going to be a pressing question as connected devices become common and in some cases unavoidable.

 

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Google’s plans for the smartcity

Google Sidewalk may be considering building its own smart city, but will it’s lack of commitment and locked in technology be a turn off?

Last June Google launched its Sidewalk Labs project to explore smart city technologies. At a conference this week the scheme’s director, Dan Doctoroff, hinted they may be looking at building an entire digitially connected town from scratch.

Planned cities don’t have a good track record, as Disney discovered in Florida with their community named Celebration, so the odds are against Google from the start in this.

Google adds to the challenge with some distrust towards the company following the shutting down of the Revolv device — even the slightest risk of a service or device being shutdown or discontinued is enough to dissuade even the most eager smartcity enthusiasts.

Making Google’s task of successfully rolling out smartcity products, let alone build a smartcity from scratch, is the company’s notorious attention deficit disorder where management struggle to maintain focus on products or projects.

For anyone thinking of living in a smartcity, the commitment of developers, vendors and authorities towards the technologies is an essential consideration. It’s also why open source software and standards are essential when building a community around technology.

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Japan looks to startups

Japan’s efforts to encourage startups is a pointer to the rest of the world’s economic future

Can Japan reinvigorate its startup community? A story in the Wall Street Journal describes some of the attempts to encourage entrepreneurs in an economy that has been stagnant for a quarter century.

In many ways Japan is a prototype for the modern global economy, just as the Japanese tried to stimulate their economy following their 1989 bust by pumping money into their deeply corrupt construction industry , so too has the rest of the world tried a similar strategy with the banking system after the 2008 crisis.

The results in both cases been the same stagnation as the money is wasted on non productive schemes and speculation rather than investment in job and wealth creating businesses and innovations.

Now the Japanese are looking to a bottom up stimulus to their economy which challenges the country’s social norms where getting a ‘safe job’ with a large corporation is seen as the best prospect for young people.

While this is a change from the accepted wisdom, the entrepreneurial model really isn’t that strange for the Japanese with a range of successful technology companies started by post World War II entrepreneurs ranging from Sony to Softbank.

The Japanese model though may not be suited to the Silicon Valley venture capital model and this is where it’s dangerous to make comparisons with what works in San Jose, Tel Aviv or Shoreditch.

Japan’s strengths in industrial engineering may well make its businesses well suited for the Internet of Things the Wall Street Journal article quotes serial entrepreneur Taizo Son as suggesting. Interestingly, the 43 year old serial entrepreneur is the youngest brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Another area where Japan is a glimpse of the future is in the aging population and it may well be that harnessing the abilities of older entrepreneurs is another area where the country can either show the way to success or what not to do with an older, stagnant economy.

In many ways Japan is a pointer to where the world is heading. How they manage the early twenty-first century will be a lesson for the rest of us.

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ABC Nightlife – is the smarthome worth the trouble?

This month’s ABC Nightlife show will look at whether the smarthome is really worth the trouble

Is the smart home worth the trouble? We live in an age of connected smoke alarms, kettles and even egg trays. For this month’s ABC Nightlife we’ll ask if these devices add to our lives or just make things more complex.

Earlier this month Google announced it would down their Evolv home automation platform leaving hundreds of users stuck with useless devices. So what happens to smart gadgets when they are disconnected from the Internet? We’ll also look at the new folding phone and just what a dire state the Australian telecoms industry is in.

Some of the questions we’ll cover include;

  • What was Google’s Evolv system?
  • Disabling the devices is a bit dramatic, why have they done that?
  • Do customers have any recourse?
  • Is this a risk with all connected devices?
  • What about connected cars, could they be turned off?
  • My computer needs updating, what about these devices?
  • What happens when the internet is disconnected, will my internet fridge work?
  • Samsung showed off a new folding phone last week. What exactly is it?
  • When will we see it on the market?
  • The Annual CommsDay conference was held last week in Sydney. Is there any good news for Aussie consumers?
  • Is the National Broadband Network looking any better?
  • How is the global telecommunications industry looking, can we expect anything exciting?

Join us

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

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

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

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When a CEO meets the Internet of Things

Life changes when you become the CEO says Bill Wagner of LogMeIn

Life changes when you become the chief executive says Bill Wagner, the CEO and President at remote access company LogMeIn. “I now spend thirty percent of my time with investors,” he says

Wagner, previously the company’s Chief Operating Officer, took over the leadership at LogMeIn last September after founder Michael Simon  stepped down.

The company is in the midst of a major change as Simon steered the company toward the Internet of Things in response to the shift away from desktop personal computing that had been the business’ core market.

LogMeIn’s IoT strategy is around being a trusted platform for controlling the myriad household, CEcommercial and industrial devices that want to connect to the internet, with Wagner only seeing AWS as being their main competitors that has seen a range of companies entering in the last few years.

“I don’t think IoT will be a wave, it’s more like a rising tide,” Wagner says.

Wagner is one of the IoT’s enthusiasts citing applications ranging from the insurance sector through to connected clothing as being potential markets, although industrial application may be the earliest adopters of LogMeIn’s services. “The more industrial the industry, the more mature is M2M to IoT adoption,” he observes.

That adoption though is tempered by the presence of industry groups where Wagner maintains LogMeIn’s hostility towards slower moving associations such as the Industrial Internet Alliance and proprietary platforms like Google Nest.

An advantage Wagner sees in his taking over as LogMeIn’s Chief Executive Officer is his experience with the company, “I don’t know how externally recruited CEOs manage it,” he observes.

With LogMeIn facing a continued transition into uncertain markets, the company needs a steady vision. It may be that internal recruitment is an important strategic move.

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Open sourcing the IoT

Increasingly it appears open source software is the way to avoid IoT vendor lock in

With vendors shutting down connected devices and restricting data feeds, customers demanding open source software and open standards may be essential to safeguard against companies misusing their power over the IoT.

Last night I had dinner with a group of executives from US telco CenturyLink. During the the evening, conversation turned to the use of US and Chinese routers and the risks of government mandated backdoors in both countries’ equipment.

My thought during that conversation is concerns about software backdoors are a compelling argument for these devices to run open source software, making it harder – although not impossible – for hidden nasties harder to be built into systems.

Google Nest becomes evil

Overnight that argument for open source became stronger in my mind with the news Google Nest were to shut down the Revolv home automation hubs the company bought two years ago.

Google aren’t just stopping support for these devices, they are going to render them useless to their owners. It’s a remarkable move that undermines any confidence customers can have in Google’s hardware offerings.

While Revolv isn’t the first and will be far from the last Internet of Things device to be abandoned by its vendor, its fate indicates the importance of keeping as much of the ecosystem as open as possible – the less vendor lock there is, the less hostage you are to rapacious manufactures.

Locked out of the subscription economy

As we’ve seen with Amazon in the past, the ‘subscription economy opens users to the risk they can be locked out of their data or purchased apps. Now we’re seeing how vendors can lock users out of the products entirely.

With connected cars and homes now becoming common, this is something that should concern buyers. As we see everything from door locks to smoke detectors and kettles being connected to the Internet of Things, the risk of being at the mercy of an unreasonable vendor or malfunctioning software becomes greater.

At least with an open source model, it’s easier to build workarounds when faced with an uncooperative supplier and, in a world full of poorly designed IoT products, it’s possible for the community to review the software and understand its bugs.

The security aspect of open platforms is also critical for the IoT as we’re already seeing a plethora of unpatched devices where vendors have long lost interest in supporting the older products.

Open interoperation

More importantly, open platforms make it easier for devices to work together, something that is critical in connected buildings or industries. At the moment the IoT is a mish mash of competing standards and formats.

Over time it won’t be surprising to see the market demanding more open source applications and data feeds – indeed we’re seeing this happen with artificial intelligence platforms – the proprietary model brings in too many risks and makes the IoT far more complex.

While open source software won’t solve problems such as APIs and data feeds being closed or changed, it does give more power back to users and communities. It’s not hard to understand why vendors though would resist these moves.

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Can diversity defeat vendor lock in?

Ericsson’s Esmeralda Swartz believes device diversity will beat vendor’s attempts to lock customers onto their IoT plaforms

Does the sheer range of vendors selling connected products mean the Internet of Things cannot be siloed? Esmeralda Swartz, VP of Marketing Enterprise and Cloud at Ericsson, believes the flood of devices entering the market place will keep IoT standards open.

Swartz spoke to Decoding the New Economy during her Sydney visit last month where she laid out Ericsson’s vision of the connected city.

One of the aspects marking Swartz’s and Ericsson’s view of the smartcity evolution is that for a connected community to succeed is that there needs to be a mix of large corporations, startups, community groups and government agencies working together.

That view is different from most smartcity advocates’ views which are either top down with the technologies being implemented by governments or bottom up with adoption being driven by startups.

Community groups are usually overlooked in the smartcity discussion so it’s refreshing, and possibly more democratic, to hear them being included in the conversation.

One area that isn’t missed in the smartcity discussion is security, something Swartz agrees with.

“With the IoT the attack surface expands exponentially,” Swartz says. “Security needs to be built into every layer at both the application and device levels.”

Along with privacy, standards are the other issue challenging the smartcities movement and Swartz is more relaxed saying, “the diversity of devices means it is hard to achieve vendor lock-in.”

“The nature of all these things that can be connected means you can’t connect all the layers without the connections being open.”

As we’re seeing in everything from cars to smart rice cookers, the race is on to lock consumers, businesses and communities into platforms. Many of the vendors are creating their own platforms to lock customers into their walled gardens.

If Swartz is right, then the market will defeat the vendors’ attempts to lock users onto their platform. That does seem though to be high risk for customers who may find themselves stuck in the grip of one standard or company.

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