Tag: iot

Building community knowledge

Google’s Waze is a good example of shared intelligence

One of the promises of big data and the internet of things is that local governments will be able to gather information about the state of their infrastructure.

A good working example of this is Google’s Waze, the Israeli traffic monitoring startup bought by the search engine giant two years ago.

Waze gathers information about traffic delays and transit times from users then aggregates them to give a picture of commuting times. It has always been a good example of how collaborative data can work.

This week Google announced the service will share its information with a handful of transit agencies and councils to improve their knowledge of the traffic choke points in their cities.

In return the agencies will give their transit information to Waze.

Waze’s story is a good example of how sensors and people, in this case smartphones and their users, are going to gather information on infrastructure and cities. The key is going to be in making sure that data isn’t locked into proprietory databases.

Building inclusive cities

Barcelona’s success in the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge show the human side of smart cities.

Yesterday Barcelona won the 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge — a ideas competition for European cities.

Barcelona’s winning idea was collaborative care networks for older citizens. In Barcelona’s case one in five residents is over 65 and by 2o40 seniors will make up a quarter of the city’s population.

The approach Barcelona’s council has proposed is a combination of high tech and the community working together.

Barcelona will use digital and low-tech strategies to create a network of family members, friends, neighbors, social workers, and volunteers who together make up a “trust network” for each at-risk elderly resident.

Last year I had the opportunity to interview the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Vives, on how the city was using the internet of things to improve citizens’ lives.

In that interview Vives spoke on how important was that these technologies improved the lives of all citizens, not just the young and the rich. Today’s prize illustrates how the city is applying that philosophy.

For technologists, one of the tasks ahead is to show how today’s inventions are more than the toys of rich men, but are things that genuinely improve society’s well being.

 

Skipping the trough of disillusionment

Will the IoT have a smooth transition from the top of Gartner’s hype cycle to general acceptance?

When consulting group Gartner placed the Internet of Things at the peak of their hype cycle last month it raised concerns that the technologies might be about to take a tumble.

Speaking to Networked Globe this week in San Jose; Maciej Kranz, VP and GM of Cisco’s technology group described how he believes the IoT’s evolution from the top of the hype cycle to the plateau of acceptance will be quick.

“We’re happy that Gartner put IoT on top as it means there’s awareness,” said Kranz. “We hope to prove Gartner wrong, that in IoT we don’t go through the classic hype cycle we go from hype into reality.”

Kranz’s reasoning while the IoT will suffer a short spell, if any at all, in Gartner’s ‘trough of disillusionment’ is because the major industry players are working closely together to build the sector and its standards.

“Where we think it’s a little bit different from some of the other hype cycles than some of the other hype cycles is that we continue to work very close at the industry,” Kranz explained.

“Because we’re all working as an industry to make it real it will go through the disillusionment and quickly into a reality.”

This may well turn out to be true if the big players like Cisco and GE in the industrial space along with companies such as Google and Apple in the consumer sector stay committed to the concept. If the major vendors stay the course, then it’s likely IoT technologies won’t suffer much at all.

Another aspect in the IoT’s favour is that it isn’t really a specific technology or product at all, instead being more of a concept bought about by various technologies such as home automation, industrial controls and cloud computing all reaching maturity.

Rather than one separate item on the Gartner hype cycle, the IoT is really made of dozens of different technologies that are mostly on the ‘plateau of acceptance’ themselves.

Kranz sees Gartner’s listing of the company as being on the top of the hype cycle as being a vindication for how the IoT has been adopted by industry and the community, “it is remarkable how we’ve gone in the last nine months from people saying it’s a vision to n

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.

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.

The internet of insecure things becomes a problem

Security with the internet of things is becoming a serious issue warns HP

Following yesterday’s posts on BlackBerry, security and the Internet of Things, HP Fortify released a report saying seventy percent of IoT devices are vulnerable to hackers.

The list of weaknesses is chilling and illustrates why IoT security is an issue that has to be resolved now.

It may well be that John Chen, BlackBerry’s CEO, has backed the right horse for his company.

The internet of things and empowered customers

The internet of things is changing the world of marketing, manufacturing and customer service says cluetrain writer Doc Searls

“The internet of things is about what we own and how we build solutions around that rather than what we buy and companies following us around and guessing about us,” says veteran industry commentator Doc Searls.

In an interview with Decoding the New Economy, the writer of the Cluetrain Manifesto discusses how he sees the internet of things changing marketing.

For Searls, the connected shoe is a good example of how individuals can control the data being collected on them and the way businesses can get far more relevant information about how customers are using their products.

Searls sees that the trend towards companies trying to dominate their fields in the Internet of Things as being doomed.

“It’s our internet of things, not theirs. Right now the internet of things is being discussed as Apple versus Google versus Facebook.”

“None of those are going to own the internet of things; the internet of things is a matter of you and your things and me and my things.”

Empowering customers

Searls sees the connected shoe as being a good example of how the internet citing his own New Balance shoes as how manufacturers can get richer data on its customers.

“The interesting thing is there’s much more intelligence a company can get directly from its customers who already own something rather than following us around on the internet.”

Searls’ view challenges today’s model of advertising based services; it may be this is the reason why companies like Google and Apple are so focused on playing a part in the internet of things.

Apple’s grab for the home internet of things

Apple’s iOS8 and OS X Yosemite announcements are part of the company’s attempt to dominate parts of the internet of things.

As usual, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco yesterday concentrated the attention of the tech world.

This year’s was a little more subdued than usual with the key announcement being around Apple’s new Yosemite OSX operating system, iOS8 and the new developer Software Developer Kit (SDK).

While a little underwhelming after all the speculation about smartwatches and fitness devices, these announcements mark a clear strategy for Apple to lock customers into their products through the cloud, smarthomes and wearable devices.

Open, but closed

Normally discussion about an SDK makes most people’s eyes glaze over, but Apple’s announcement marks a change in the company’s strategy in making over 4,000 APIs – Application Program Interfaces – open for developers to connect their programs into iOS8.

This marks a change for the company in allowing programs to easily hook into Apple’s mobile operating system and while it looks like a move to openness, the ease of making fitness applications, home automation and smart car services actually helps lock users into the Apple ecosystem.

Key to the ecosystem lock-in strategy are the Healthkit and Homekit services offering connections to health and home automation applications which are part of Apple’s Internet of things play, by offering easy access into the iPhone and iPad the company hopes to lock users of third party devices into the iOS world.

Increasing vendor lock-in

Similarly, the cloud services included with Yosemite and iOS8 increase that lock-in making it harder for users to step outside that ecosystem. It’s notable there’s no Android app version of the cloud service which indicates how Google is now Apple’s number one enemy.

Apple’s announcement today shows how the company is positioning itself to lock users into their services as the internet of things rolls into businesses, cars and homes.

It’s an indication the internet of things may well become a world of closed silos and it will be interesting to see how competitors react to Apple’s attempts to be the biggest walled garden.

The race to build smartcities

The race to build smart cities is important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

For the last decade city administrations have been jostling for the title of being a ‘smartcity’ – a metropolis that brings together technology, creativity and business to grow their local economy. Now the competition is getting fierce.

While the concept has been around since British Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase the Great White Heat of Technology fifty years ago, the arrival of the Internet of Things, cheap sensors and accessible wireless broadband have made wiring up a city far more easier than a decade ago.

So now we’re seeing a race to set up smartcities with just the last week seeing Kansas City join the Cisco Connected Communities program, a consortium of  UK technology groups announced Milton Keynes will be wired up and French machine to machine (M2M) network provider Sigfox launched its plan to add San Francisco to the cities it’s covering.

Kansas City is a particularly interesting location being the first town to recieve Google Fiber and  its designated Innovation Precinct along the new street car route the city is building. The Connected Cities scheme will cover that corridor.

Kansas City’s Innovation Corridor isn’t a new idea, it’s not dissimilar to the Digital Sydney project I put together a few years ago. The difference is it has both government commitment to it and a business community energised around the possiblities. Whether that’s enough to make it a success remains to be seen.

What is clear though is that today’s technologies are changing cities, just as roads and electricity did in the Twentieth Century and steam traction, railways and town water did in the Nineteenth.

That’s why the race to build smart cities is so important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

Microsoft and the Internet of Your Things

Microsoft has come the IoT party with the ‘Internet of Your Things’ tagline

Microsoft has come late to the Internet of Things party, but it is has a good angle with it’s ‘Internet of Your Things’ tagline.

General Manager of Microsoft’s embedded systems division, Barb Edson, spoke with Decoding The New Economy about the company’s strategy with the Internet of Things.

For Microsoft, the emphasis is on the enterprise side of the business with Edson describing their strategy of “B2B2C” where the value in the IoT lies in managing the data for the businesses providing consumer services.

Most notable is the company’s IoT tagline, as Edson says; “from Microsoft’s perspective we view the Internet of Things as ‘the internet of your things.”

“Lots of companies out there talking about the Internet of Everything that there’s 212 billion devices, why do you care as business executive. You care about your things.”

Microsoft’s strategy is based on leveraging their own assets such as Azure cloud services, SQL Server and Dynamics along their customers’ existing infrastructure.

This retrofitting the internet of things to existing infrastructure is illustrated by Microsoft’s using the London Underground as its main reference site.

Connecting all 270 stations of London’s 150 year old Tube network to the IoT is a massive undertaking and one that can only be done by retrofitting existing monitoring and SCADA systems.

Interestingly the case study only look at Phase One of what appears to be pilot project in selected locations, the Microsoft spokespeople were a little unclear on this when asked.

The London Underground is only one example of millions of organisations that will grapple with adding existing equipment to the internet of things in coming years; it’s an opportunity that Microsoft has been smart to identify.

Edson however is clear on how Microsoft intends to help companies deal with the information overload facing managers, “I think the most exciting thing is we’re seeing real business problems being solved.”

Microsoft’s not like everybody else

The first advert for Microsoft’s Nokia phones is a little mysterious and worrying

“Not like everybody else” proclaims Microsoft’s first ad for its newly acquired Nokia phone division.

In what way the Microsoft-Nokia product isn’t like its Apple and Android competitors isn’t clear from the ad, but hopefully they’ll tell us.

The real concern with the Microsoft ad is that it again appears the business is being left behind in a marketplace shift as Google, Samsung, Apple and all the other smartphone leaders move to integrate their phones with smarthomes, fridges and even football stadiums.

Sadly it might turn out that, once again, Microsoft isn’t like everybody else.

Bleeding hearts and internet security

No technological revolution is simply or without problems, securing information is one of the great challenges of today’s revolution and Heartbleed is a reminder of that.

The big tech news story of the last two days has been the Heartbleed security flaw, that might have compromised users’ passwords and other details.

Given the nature of the bug where a server can tricked into giving away bits of what’s stored in its memory, it’s hard to say exactly what has been compromised – on most sites you’d be very unlucky to have your password on banking details in the system at the precise millisecond a malicious attacker exploited the bug – but the risks are still real.

While webmasters and system admins around the world are frantically patching their systems, for the average user the best advice is to wait before changing your passwords as if the bad guys already have your details you’d have probably used them by now and changing your logins on a vulnerable server might actually increase the risk of crooks stealing your information.

The Internet of Things

The longer term risks with Heartbleed are actually in embedded systems and the Internet of Things; many systems will have hard coded implementations of the buggy software which may never be patched and these devices may be give up much richer data than a web server would.

It’s another illustration of how difficult the task of keeping embedded technologies up to date and how to secure the Internet of Things.

Open source blues

While there’s no shortage of similar security lapses in commercial software, the Heartbleed saga is going to concentrate the minds of open source community on how to tighten peer review and audit version updates.

Most open source projects are staffed by small groups of time poor volunteers, making auditing and quality control harder. That key parts of the internet and computer industries rely on these underfunded, and often unappreciated groups is a weakness for the entire sector.

No technological change is simple or without problems and securing information is one of the great challenges of today’s tech revolution and Heartbleed is a strong reminder of that, hopefully we’ll learn some lessons about building robust systems.