internet of things | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

The need for an IoT manifesto

As the internet of things rolls out, more care in the design of products and services will be needed

Last May at the ThingsCon conference in Berlin a group of European designers came together to form the IoT Manifesto.

Now vendors have the ability to put a chip into almost anything companies and designers are tempted to add connectivity simply for the sake of doing so.

In many cases this is opens up a range of security risks ranging from the screaming baby monitor to the hackable jeep.

Coupled with the security risks of your intimate devices being hacked there’s the related privacy risks as millions of devices collect data ranging from how hard you press your car’s brake pedal through to last time you burned your breakfast toast.

In an era where governments and businesses are seeking to amass even more information about us, there are genuine concerns about what that data is going to be used for and why it is being collected in the first place.

The IoT manifesto looks to manage these problems facing the sector through ten guiding design principles;

Don’t believe the hype around the IoT
Only design useful things
Deliver benefits to all stakeholders
Keep everything secure
Promote a culture of privacy
Gather only a minimal amount of data
Be transparent about who that data will be shared with
Give users control over their data
Design durable products
Use the IoT and its design to help people

All of the principles are laudable and it’s not hard to think that meeting the guidelines would make devices and services that aren’t just useful and safe but also simpler, cheaper and more effective.

There’s many ethical, business and safety issues facing the Internet of Things as connected devices rollout across almost every industry. The IoT Manifesto may well be a good framework in which to design them and the cloud services they’ll depend upon.

Marketing and the Internet of Things

We’re only just beginning to understand the marketing potential of the Internet of Things says Bosch’s Jim Fish

“There is no perfect product,” says Jim Fish, “but the Internet of Things makes it possible to deliver a close to perfect message.”

Fish, the Chief Innovation Officer & VP Global Automotive Diagnostics at Bosch North America, was speaking to Decoding the New Economy ahead of his visit to Sydney to speak at the 2015 ADMA Global Forum.

For marketers, the connected car and the Internet of Things presents a unique set of opportunities, particularly when overlaid with today’s social media tools.

“If you think about your ability to message with today’s Facebook and the ability for marketers to micro-target messages so you could push a message to people according to things they’ve shown preference for or things that they have liked.”

“The next leap frog ahead from an automotive perspective is in vehicle advertising specific to vehicle and location,” says Fish. “There is a battle for the real estate in vehicle’s infotainment systems. The automakers are placing a lot of effort in delivering the experience the mobile user desires.”

In the auto industry this has seen a battle between software vendors to stake a position on the smartcar’s dashboard. Fish sees Google with its mapping, search and advertising technologies as being the best placed in that field but doesn’t think there will be one single winner in the automobile space.

Smart Connected Living

One of the biggest opportunities beyond marketi Fish sees is in combining the smarthome with the connected car. “We see this exploding,” he says of Bosch’s future plans. “We see it as perfectly integrating,”

Fish sees how the connected home integrates with other technologies to provide seamless connectivity for people. Even if people lose their smartphones the smart house will be able to inform and communicate with them.

Again, combining the information gathered by social media and other services presents opportunities for businesses and governments.

Networking the smart city

For the smart city, Fish sees connected cars providing a key part in managing and planning the towns of the future citing how the Michigan Department of Transportation sees how equipping vehicles with road monitoring sensors could save the state 11 million dollars a year in inspection costs.

Fish also cites how cities are experimenting with monitoring how taxis and public vehicles are using their windshield wipers to determine weather conditions. The US Department of Transportation flags the smartcar as the mobile weather station.

Again Fish sees Google as having an advantage in applying these technologies with their acquisition of Israeli traffic crowdsourcing service Wayze.

“Crowdsourcing is in its infancy. There are many things computers can do but there are some things they will never be able to do. There are some human elements still required.”

Fish sees much of our understanding of what we can do with the internet of things and the data we generate from it as being in its infancy. The real value lies in extracting the value from it. For marketers the journey is only just beginning.

Management embraces M2M tech

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

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.

Sony hopes mobile phones are an IoT Trojan horse

Are mobile phones the cornerstone of an IoT strategy? Hiroki Totoki, CEO and president of Sony Mobile, believes so.

“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.

Towards the zero defect economy

The Internet of Things promises to eliminate defects which is good news for most, but not all, industries

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.

Liability and the Internet of Things

What happens when an internet connected device fails?

In The Australian today I have a piece discussing the legal risk of the IoT.

Lawyers warn that manufacturers, distributors and installers all face the possibility of damages should their devices malfunction or not perform as advertised.

This risk is compounded by the data analysis with Michael Stojanovic of international law firm Bird & Bird citing the example of a gas monitoring device accurately detecting and reporting a surge but a company being liable because they didn’t warn their customer something was amiss.

Equally there’s a risk with misreported or lost data. This in itself is presents a problem as many of the software vendors currently looking at supplying the IoT have a ‘best effort’ mentality where they don’t accept responsibility for service interruptions.

While that attitude may have stood up before courts over the last twenty years, it’s unlikely to get much sympathy from judges and juries when critical systems are affected.

Like everything else in life, the lawyers are coming for the IoT.

How software defines the Industrial Internet

The Internet of Things is a fourteen trillion dollar opportunity for industrial companies says Bill Ruhe, the head of GE Software

The Internet of Things is a three legged stool of the consumer, enterprise and industrial applications says Vice President of GE’s software division, Bill Ruh.

“It’s about connecting machines, connecting people and driving a new kind of experience. For the consumer it’s a social experience, for the enterprise it’s a whole new way of how their IT departments running, in the industrial space it’s a revolution where we get to rethink how we operate.”

Ruh sees the IoT as being worth over 14 trillion dollars to GE over the next two decades, making it bigger than the other two legs combined.

Eliminating downtime

Most of that value comes from three areas; improved resource utilisation, operational optimisation and eliminating unscheduled downtime.

“The fact is downtime is expensive, for airline 41% of all delays and cancellations are due to mechanical errors. If we get rid of those your life gets better, my life gets better and the airline’s lives get better.”

“Zero unscheduled downtime doesn’t sound sexy but it’s one of the most profitable and sexiest topics ever.” In this Ruh agrees with Salesforce’s Peter Coffee that eliminating outages is a key part of delighting the modern customer.

Ruhe sees that the industrial sector hasn’t used IT and the internet well in the past, “RFID was going to change the world and it didn’t, we saw smartgrids were going to be the biggest thing and it didn’t achieve a lot of the hype that people saw.”

“Now the technology is aligned not just with technology for technology’s sake but to an outcome that leads to growth for an industrial sake.”

An example of the operational efficiencies that Ruh is particularly proud of is GE’s PowerUp technology that promises to improve the output of wind turbines, “it is a series of technologies used to analyse information about every wind turbine on a farm and to dynamically adjust each and every one to optimise the wind speed.”

“When you do that we’ve found we can generate up to five percent more electricity per wind farm because of software, which adds twenty-five percent more profitability.”

“In the next generation of wind turbines all this kind of software is going to be embedded in it from the design phase through to the operational phase,” Ruh says. “It’s going to change how our customers are going to operate wind turbines.”

Building digital twins

Another aspect Ruh sees with the changes is how machines and data will work together where equipment or parts are shipped with a ‘digital twin’, a software representation of the device that lets the customer test scenarios on their computers.

“I can now do ‘what if’ analysis on that machine using its data and that’s going to change how things work. That takes everything from 3D modelling, to manufacturing, to maintenance to operations.”

Building on domain knowledge

Ultimately Ruh sees GE’s strength with the Industrial Internet being the company’s domain knowledge, “this world is different and you cannot come from outside and pretend you’re going to learn it as you go.”

“The way people buy equipment is totally different, we have equipment that’s eighty years old and we still support it. That’s totally different from the software world.”

Cisco and the connected stadium

Cisco’s Mike Caponigro explains the company’s smart stadium strategy

One of the challenges facing sports administrators and leagues around the world is that the quality of broadcast coverage has become so good it’s become increasingly harder to get fans out to the games.

Coupled with the constantly improving television coverage, fans are also expecting more as they go to games with their smartphones and tablets. Part of the solution for venue managers is to roll out smart stadium facilities that enhance spectators’ experience at the games.

Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment, sees the smart stadium as complementing the ground experience and Cisco are working with over three hundred venues in thirty countries around the world.

Improving the live experience

“Live is always going to be best,” states Caponigro. “You can’t replace that tribal passion of the crowd. No matter how excited I get in my living room or with some friends in a pub you’re never going recreate that enthusiasm.”

However the expectations of sports fans are changing Caponigro points out citing how HD television and the internet is changing the experience for spectators outside the stadium, “fans don’t want to be removed from that action.”

Cisco started their Connected Stadium program when the Oakland Athletics were looking at moving home stadiums seven years ago. While Oakland decided to remain at their existing stadium the company realised the market for connected stadiums was potentially huge, “it really pushed our thinking on how could we service an industry sector that hadn’t been well served.”

Accelerating innovation

“Arguable you’ve seen more innovation in that last seven years in the sports and live entertainment field than in the five decades prior to that,” says Caponigro who attributes the rate of change to consumer adoption of smartphones. “Now we’re working with three hundred properties in thirty countries around the world.”

“What fans are saying is that in order to continue to go to events there are things that need to be tweaked around the experience,” Caponigro states. “We did a study two or three years ago that found seventy-five percent of fans bring a smartphone to the venue. In the latest studies we’re finding ninety percent.”

Those fans are expecting a reliable signal to share information and access data. At last year’s Superbowl the crowd consumed 6Tb of data, half of which was outward traffic. “That just reinforces that fans aren’t just consuming services but it’s also become an increasingly social environment.”

Improving revenues

One of the areas Caponigro sees as an opportunity for connected stadium administrators is in seat management citing the Golden State Warriors NBA team that have used BlueTooth beacons to drive their seat upgrade application to generate $300,000 in additional revenue.

Fans have two frustrations with attending live games says Caponigro, is the convenience of getting to and from the game and not getting a good view of the play from their seats.

The ‘single seat experience’ as Caponigro describes it, uses the stadium’s smart vision TVs and the apps on spectators’ phones to give fans the same access to replays and stats that viewers watching the game on TV or the internet can access.

Making transport easier

Getting to and from the game is another advantage the smart stadium technologies offer both spectators and stadium administrators, by giving real time information on parking and public transport status crowds can be better managed and fans can have a smoother experience travelling into and away from the event.

In the future, Caponigro sees the next wave of innovation integrating back of house services into the connected stadium giving administrators greater understanding of concession sales and crowd movement.

Another opportunity lies in bringing player biometrics to the spectators, “you might find out if Ronaldo is really as cool as he looks when he takes a penalty” grins Capringo.

While it’s still early days for the connected stadium, like many Internet of Things applications businesses are exploring the limits. For sports fans, they can expect a richer experience being delivered to their smartphones and seats.

The IoT undergoes a restructure

Quirky’s restructure shows the IoT isn’t the easy road to riches, regardless of how well funded a business is.

Quirky, the well funded Internet of Things startup that came to attention for its connected egg holder, announces a restructure.

It looks like the IoT isn’t the easy road to riches, regardless of how well funded a business is.

Management in an age of information abundance

How do managers and business owners deal with an age of abundant information?

The Twentieth Century was defined by abundant and cheap energy while this century will be shaped by our access to massive amounts of data.

How do managers deal with the information age along with the changes bought about by technologies like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, automation and social media?

Management in the Data Age looks at some of the opportunities and risks that face those running businesses. It was originally prepared for a private corporate briefing in June 2015.

Some further background reading on the topic include the following links.

Delivering on the promise of the connected stadium

The connected stadium promises a lot but has a long way to deliver on those expectations

Once a year I come out of the closet in Sydney and admit I support Carlton in the Australian Football League. This usually ends in humiliation as Carlton hasn’t beaten Sydney in the last twenty years.

This year’s ritual humiliation coincided with an offer by Telstra to review their smart stadium rollout at the Sydney Cricket Ground’s rebuilt MA Noble stand following a tour of Etihad’s stadium earlier this year.

Late last month I interviewed Mike Caponigro, Cisco’s head of Global Solutions Marketing for Sports and Entertainment, around how smart stadiums are being rolled out around the world, including the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Caponigro sees the smart stadium as complementing the ground experience and Cisco are working with over three hundred venues in thirty countries around the world.

So how does the connected stadium experience stack up for a punter who’s used to being in the cheap seats and often wonders if buying that ticket along with putting up with the hassles of getting to the ground, being overcharged for bad food and water down beer is worthwhile compared to staying at home and enjoying it on TV?

A limited App

Like all the smart stadium rollouts, the SCG’s revolves around the onscreen displays and the spectators’ smartphones. Once downloaded the 35Mb app isn’t spectacular. The sports news focuses on cricket – somewhat irrelevant in a Sydney winter – while the transport map front ends into Google Maps.

Probably the biggest disappointment with the app is the venue map which is a detailed PDF lacking any interactive capabilities which successfully manages to pack a lot of information, like the location of light towers, without actually telling you anything useful.

In seat ordering is one of the attractions of the app. Unfortunately we were unable to test it as the collection points are within the members section of the Noble stand which we didn’t have access to.

The lack of real time information about seating, transport and ground information makes the app at best ornamental, indeed there are opportunities missed in upselling such as offering spectators seat upgrades or merchandising offers.

In stadium connectivity

Where the SCG smart stadium shines is in the Wi-Fi connectivity. Mobile connections over 3 and 4G services have always been problematic during match breaks. During the game, the connection was flawless, the only gripe being that the login screen reappeared for a moment everytime the phone was bought out of sleep.

Again though it’s hard not to think the ground management are missing opportunities with the Wi-Fi as the login screen asked for an email address but didn’t give the option of providing an SCG or Swans membership number rather than just an email address.

Not so smart screens

The biggest boast of smart stadiums are the connected screens, the previous tour of Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium showed what could be done but the SCG game was an opportunity to see the videos in action.

Unfortunately the screens actually detracted from the experience. While the main scoreboards were showing game details and replays the smaller screens were showing the SCG members in ground advertising which added nothing for spectators.

Even during the match play, the screens carried the Channel Seven television feed with food outlet advertising wrapped around it. Disappointingly the screens didn’t give any updates on the match play, the goal kicked by Swans’ debutante Dan Robinson (who played for my local junior club) didn’t receive a mention at all.

Overall the spectator experience from the SCG’s smart stadium rollout is underwhelming. This isn’t a result of Telstra and Cisco’s technology but of its implementation with a focus on low value advertising rather than adding value for spectators.

Leaving money on the table

The smart screens need to be delivering more relevant information to fans in the stadium while the smartphone app has to be giving dynamic and useful data to help spectators before during and after the game.

At the moment, it seems there’s a lot of money being left on the table as opportunities beyond pushing advertising onto spectators aren’t being explored.

It’s hard not to think that right now the smart stadium is a solution in search of a problem. Certainly for fans to take anything except the improved Wi-Fi service seriously there ground managements have to offer more than continuous ads for chicken outlets and expensive private schools.

Then again, maybe I’m just bitter as once again us Carlton fans were humiliated by another hundred point loss. For Blues supporters it was another dismal night at the footy ground.

Social media types, IoT gadgets and the internet’s future –ABC Nightlife May 2015

Paul Wallbank regularly joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife on to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

Along with covering the tech topics of the day listeners are welcome to call, text or message in with their thoughts and questions about technology, change and what it means to their families, work and communities.

If you missed the May program, it’s now available on our Soundcloud account.

For the May 2015 program Tony and Paul looked at some of the gadgets coming out of the Internet of Things, what your social media posts say about you and Mary Meeker’s big Internet Trends report.

2015 Internet Trends Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

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