Stephenson blogs on Internet of Things
Internet of Things strategy, breakthroughs and management
I Tweeted throughout the IoT Summit today, cryptic as the comments may have been. You can check them out at @data4all. Learned a great deal, and picked up several nice examples for the e-book I’m writing on implications for corporate management of the IoT!
Enjoy. Will do the same tomorrow!
I missed this when it came out in July, but thought it was worthy of notice!
In an Information Age article, Maurizio Pilu, a European leader in development of the IoT, throws cold water on those of us who believe the IoT may be as big an innovation as the Industrial Age. Pilu, who runs the UK’s Connected Digital Economy Catapult, which was established by the Technology Strategy Board to growth the UK’s digital economy, says that the IoT is an “..evolution, not a revolution.”
He should know: after all, his prior job was running the TSB’s “Internet of things” program.
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“He believes the Internet of things will (sic) gradualy follow analyst company Gartner’s much-cited hype cycle – a peak of inflated expectations, followed by a trough of disillusionment, followed by enlightenment and mainsteam adoption.
“If that’s true, then the trough is surely on its way. Last year, Gartner’s hype cycle for emerging technologies had the Internet of things approaching its peak.
“One risk factor that jeopardises the Internet of things’ potential is siloed thinking, Pilu believes. Every industry projects its own demands on the Internet of things, and the result may be disjointed – and therefore less powerful – systems.”
I don’t buy Pilu’s argument, but I do agree that “siloed thinking” is a threat to full development of the IoT. You’ll remember that my first “Essential Truth” about the IoT is that we must begin asking a fundamentally new question that is at odds with the old way of treating knowledge — hoarding proprietary information:
Who else could use this data?
In part, Pilu’s skepticism stems from the results of a program last year:
“.. the TSB oversaw a significant research programme to study the potential impact of the Internet of things.
“It brought together over 400 business and public sector organisations to develop proof-of-concept projects for potential Internet of things applications. These ranged from a mobile fitness app that could sell aggregated data to retailers to an assisted living system to monitor patients in their homes.
“Ten study groups examined these projects, conducting interviews and focus groups, to assess their technical, social and ethical impact.
“’One thing we found across all the studies was uncertainty about how to unlock the value from the Internet of things,’ says Pilu. ‘But another common theme was the use of data.’
Pilu argues that making data openly available will be the key to unlocking the Internet of things’ real potential.
But, as many of the TSB’s projects found, this is not always possible. One study looked at the public infrastructure on city streets, for example, and found that the associated data is often held in closed systems or discarded quickly after being gathered.
“’There are few incentives to make data available, owing to a combination of actual or perceived liabilities, unclear returns and costs,’ it concludes.”
So sharing information won’t come easily. It’s an issue to which I plan to devote much of my efforts in the field. I’ll keep you posted!
On the heels of Tom Friedman’s Sunday NYT column, here’s more evidence the IoT is achieving mainstream recognition: CNBC will air a 1-hour documentary tonight, titled “Rise of the Machines,” 9 PM EDT tonight.
The blurb for the show says, breathlessly:
“All around us, there’s a technological revolution underway powered by devices as small as a grain of rice. They are sensors, capable of tracking and recording everything we do. They’re in our smartphones, our cars, our appliances, even our bodies, and they’re connected to the Internet to share information and make our world smarter. Virtually all products that use electricity – from toasters and coffeemakers to jet engines and MRIs – now have the ability to ‘talk’ to each other, and to us. And, what they have to say is profoundly transforming our lives – the way we travel, treat disease, and enjoy our homes.”
Yep.
Segments in the show will include:
Should be interesting. Insightful or just skimming the surface? We’ll see!
PS: thanks to my book agent, Mike Snell, for tip on this one!
OK, the Internet of Things is officially a Big Thing: Tom “World is Flat” Friedman wrote about it in the Sunday NY Times.
Friedman, searching for evidence of American “exceptionalism” in a bleak landscape of Capitol Hill paralysis, etc. zeroed in on GE’s “Industrial Internet” initiatives as a ray of hope. As he wrote,
“I wanted to see what new technologies, and therefore business models — and therefore jobs — it might be spawning that public policy, and education policy, might enhance. I have no idea whether or how G.E. will profit from any of these breakthroughs, but I saw the outlines there of three radically new business trends that the United States should want to dominate.”
One of those themes was how 3-D printing could streamline the design and production process.
The second, which I wrote about earlier, was the concept of crowdsourcing design, in particular the contest GE held to design a new jet turbine mount (more about that later!!!).
Finally, Friedman zeroed in on the IoT, specifically widespread use of sensors:
“Lastly, we are on the cusp of what G.E. calls ‘the Industrial Internet’ or the ‘Internet of Things’ — meaning that every major part of a G.E. jet engine, locomotive or turbine is now equipped with online sensors that constantly measure and broadcast every aspect of performance. Computers capture all this big data and use it to improve everything from the flight path to energy efficiency.”
He gave several examples, such as wind turbines and hospital beds, where data from sensors can help to optimize efficiency and cut operating costs. He pointed out that the data allows GE to create new services “… that offer not just to manage an airline’s or railroad’s engines, but how fast all its planes or trains go, how flight and train schedules are coordinated and even how its equipment is parked to get optimal performance and energy efficiency (aside to marketing managers: what kinds of services would the IoT allow you to introduce, perhaps replacing actual sales of products with leases based on use? Think about it!).
Friedman concludes, “Watch this space, even if Washington doesn’t: When everything and everyone becomes connected, and complexity is free and innovation is both dirt-cheap and can come from anywhere, the world of work changes.”
Indeed! Nice to have someone with Friedman’s clout recognizing the IoT is a paradigm shift!
MEANWHILE: Make certain to read the comments following the column. They are primarily negative, and zero in on one thing: the IoT’s threat to jobs. In particular, the critics focused on the GE engine mount design contest. One was particularly pointed:
“According to CNNMoney, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt pocketed $25.8 million in total compensation in 2012. That’s about $20,000 every hour and a half. How come 8 geniuses cost only 90 minutes of CEO time?”
You’ve gotta agree, $20,000 ($7,000 to the winner) is a pretty paltry sum considering what GE gets in return, and given readers’ suspicions that companies may let go their salaried designers and instead exploit freelancers (I’ve thought the same about some of the incentives offered by Innocentive member companies for some of the crowdsourcing projects that they’ve offered), you can bet that there will be more criticisms in the future if this becomes a common practice.
The IoT will undoubtably result in loss of some jobs — disruptive technologies do that — although optimists say they will create jobs as well. But if companies don’t want to reap a lot of criticism for their IoT initiatives, they’d better put some thought into the job creation aspect as well!
Holy Clayton Christensen! Another wave of “disruptive innovation” is on its way, and this time the Internet of Things is responsible!
I’m confident that the IoT is going to bring about radical change throughout a wide range (if not all…) of vertical markets in the near future, through new realities such as giving everyone who needs it access to real-time information or by making preventive maintenance simple through real-time data from products such as jet turbines (General Electric is, again, a leader…).
However, for concrete evidence of how the IoT will change things, perhaps the best industry to look at is auto insurance, where the IoT is facilitating a fundamental shift in marketing, from the prior practice of basing premiums on proxy indicators such as a student’s grades or a person’s credit rating (leading to the heinous — and expensive — crime of “driving while poor,” LOL).
Progressive Snapshot
Instead, what is emerging worldwide (especially in Europe) is “usage-based insurance” (UBI), where the rates are based not on guestimates, but the driver’s actual behavior!
Insurance & Technology reports that the transition will only accelerate in the future.
“‘In five or ten years, all insurers will have dynamic driving data, so all will be able to offer discounts,’ says George Ayres, vice president of global sales for Verizon Telematics. ‘There will be no more asymmetry in terms of what they know about customers, so price alone won’t be as effective [for acquiring and retaining customers]. …The insurers who are out front on this idea are realizing [that soon] all will [have to] start to provide much wider breadth of services to keep those captured through price.’
“These services can be as simple as sending additional driving data to the driver’s smartphone, or as complex as auto insurance bundled with a customer relationship solution that sends alerts for scheduled maintenance.”
What a transformation!
Smart business leaders will start paying close attention to the features of the Internet of Things, and begin planning now on how to get ahead of the curve on making certain they are the beneficiaries of disruptive innovation — not the victims!
There’s a new Deloitte white paper that echoes a theme I’ve been repeating since 1990: smart businesses eliminate inefficiency by eliminating environmental waste.
I predict that the Internet of Things will speed that trend by allowing real-time data sharing throughout the supply chain, further increasing its efficiency.
The white paper, “The Evolving Supply Chain: Lean and Green,” says that:
“Leading companies are now finding that a green supply chain doesn’t just improve the public’s perception of their company and brand; it can save money by using resources more efficiently and reducing waste. It can also help to manage risk by insulating a company from shortages and price shocks, and by reducing the chances that a supplier will do something that gets them in hot water.”
It continues by identifying five key factors to reduce:
“Leading companies create value by modifying their supply chains to manage five key inputs and outputs: energy, carbon, water, materials and waste. These five resources are ubiquitous throughout the supply chain and thus offer vast potential for improved efficiency and cost reduction. Energy is expensive to use; carbon, in the form of emissions, represents dollars gone up in smoke; scarcity and commodity inflation are driving up the price of water and materials; and waste is a potential profit thrown away.”
In my speeches on the “Zero-Waste Economy,” I used to suggest that executives that were contemptuous of tree-hugging environmentalists and could care less about generating wastes should just substitute the work inefficiencies for waste. What hard-nosed company could justify inefficiency?
It’s great to see that the message is finally getting mainstream acceptance, and I really do think that the IoT will boost supply chain efficiency and thereby reduce environmental impacts by allowing everyone in the supply chain who needs operating data to share it simultaneously and in real time.
So there’s really no excuse any more for not practicing smart environmentalism, is there?
PS: To get the specifics about how to translate smart environmentalism into profits, check out Gil Friend’s Natural Logic. He’s got the operating manual.
(BTW: thanx to @TheloT, always a great source of IoT info, for Tweeting this!)
I was impressed when a Harvard research team created a 3-d printed battery the size of a grain of sand, but this is a REAL gamechanger!
CIO reports that a team of University of Washington researchers have created a new technique, ambient backscatter, which:
“…leverag[es] existing TV and cellular transmissions, rather than generating their own radio waves. This novel technique enables ubiquitous communication where devices can communicate among themselves at unprecedented scales and in locations that were previously inaccessible.”
Thus, existing wireless signals are transformed into a source of power and a communication medium.
You can imagine the implications for the Internet of Things!
Among other applications, the researchers say ambient backscatter could be used for wearable devices, smart home systems, and sensor networks such as ones embedded in bridges to give advance warning of maintenance problems. It could also be used for NFC payments.
CIO reports that:
“Groups of the devices were tested in a variety of settings in the Seattle area, including inside an apartment building, on a street corner and on the top level of a car park. These locations ranged from less than half a mile away from a TV tower to about 6.5 miles away.
“They found that the devices were able to communicate with each other, even the ones farthest from a TV tower. The receiving devices picked up a signal from their transmitting counterparts at a rate of 1 kilobit per second when up to 2.5 feet apart outdoors and 1.5 feet apart indoors. This is enough to send information such as a sensor reading, text messages and contact information.
“The researchers were able to demonstrate how one payment card can transfer funds to another card by leveraging the existing wireless signals around them.”
The U of Washington team won the prize for the top paper at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2013 conference in Hong Kong.
What a breakthrough! It looks like Kris Pister’s “smart dust” vision will be a reality soon!
Wired has an article this week about Shodan, the “IoT search engine,” which I hope scares the bejesus out of enough companies and government officials that they’ll finally realize how absolutely critical it is that we make security and privacy THE top public policy/corporate management priorities regarding the IoT.
Shodan’s homepage proudly proclaims that it will let you “EXPOSE ONLINE
Shodan
DEVICES: webcams, routers, power plants, iPhones, wind turbines, refrigerators (there’s that meme again!), VoIP phones.” Anyone out there who isn’t covered by that list? If so, stay in your cave!
As for everyone else, maybe you’d be more properly attracted by the CNN story about Shodan several months ago: “Shodan: the scariest search engine on the Internet.” Got your attention yet?
Here’s what Shodan can do, according to CNN:
“It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights,security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.
Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan.”
Command and control systems for nuclear power plants? Sheesh!
Reminds me that while the Obama Administration remains abysmally ignorant of the IoT (and, remember, I’m a fan of them in general …) one official who was all in was former CIA Director David Petraeus:
Sufficiently alarmed yet?
Let me be clear: I am convinced that security and privacy are the two issues that have the greatest potential to stop the Internet of Things dead in its tracks — and I felt that way even before Edward Snowden was a household name.
Snowden, ooops, Shodan, has revealed shocking indifference to security on the part of countless organizations (and, BTW, don’t forget that 85% of the U.S.’s critical infrastructure — power plants, pipelines, chemical factories, etc., is in private hands):
“A quick search for ‘default password‘ reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use ‘admin’ as their user name and ‘1234’ as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all — all you need is a Web browser to connect to them.
In a talk given at last year’s Defcon cybersecurity conference, independent security penetration tester Dan Tentler demonstrated how he used Shodan to find control systems for evaporative coolers, pressurized water heaters, and garage doors.
He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city’s entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put into ‘test mode’ with a single command entry. And he also found a control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each.
This is as scary as the Vanity Fair article last year about how a miscreant could use an iPhone to kill you!
The 85% of critical infrastructure in private hands number should be a stark reminder: the only way we can possibly address IoT privacy and security is through collaborative government/private sector action — with strong involvement by you and me.
If you are involved in the IoT in any way, you simply can’t duck this issue!
I’m still dubious about the Internet of Things refrigerator meme (although, as someone who shops daily for dinner and only decides what to cook about 2 hours before hand on the basis of a web search for something novel, it would be cool to instantly know what ingredients I had on hand…), BUT home automation is definitely cool (and the Nest’s success shows consumers are ready for it).
I bet having the IoT affect people’s home life will also drive a lot of IoT adoption at work (the same way a lot of CEOs were introduced to the wonders of e-commerce back in the day when their kids showed them how to buy books on Amazon).
SOO, the news that ivee Sleek has launched a Kickstart campaign (as is typical for IoT 
campaigns on Kickstart, it’s already waay over its goal!!) for its wifi voice activated assistant for the home is big news! There’s already one backer who’s pledged $10,000, and gets the Big Enchilada perk:
“All-inclusive Factory Tour in Asia! — We will first fly you out to meet us in Hong Kong for dinner and a night on the town with the ivee team. The next day we will head to Shenzhen in order to visit our factory and tour the manufacturing floor. You will have a chance to pick any ivee (in either pearl white or night black) as she is being made right before your eyes! We’ll spend the night in Shenzhen before heading back to Hong Kong for the remainder of the trip. This trip will include air fare + hotel + meals for 7 days. Limited to 5.”
I ask you, does crowdsourcing rule, or what???
The team says that “Our goal is to create a simpler and more natural way of interfacing with the Internet and your smart home. We want to deliver the virtual assistant experience that you’ve been dreaming about for years. (their italics)”
Here’s the nitty-gritty: the device will ship in October, and initial voice commands that you’ll be able to speak include:
I know there are some who grumble that getting this kind of information automatically will make us slaves to our machines, but it seems to me that it will actually just remove a lot of the minor hassles from our lives and improve our quality of life (and, as the website points out, it can be a real benefit for those with vision problems or who have trouble with computers), so I opt in!
ivee’s online dashboard will let users personalize their experience and connect it to many third party smart home devices, such as thermostats, locks, lights, plugs, vacuums, and more, including the Nest, WeMo, and the Roomba.
Now we’re talking!
Last Friday my wife and I were driving through the wilds of Utah (aside: wow, is the West different from The Hub of the Universe!) when we chanced upon SciFri, which was doing a great segment about cool government-funded energy research (no, not the Solindra picking winners-type stuff, but real basic research that can lead to quantum leaps in performance).
One of the speakers was Prof. Jennifer Lewis, who has the all-time greatest academic title: Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences! Go biomimicry (just a little reminder, BTW, that nature has already solved every problem that we, as an advanced, information-based economy, face. Think not? The answer to your problem lies just outside your window: we’re just too divorced from nature to be able to see it!)!
OK, got that out of my system…..
Now for the big news: Prof. Lewis’ team and their associates at the University of Illinois have invented the Holy Grail for Internet of Things sensors: lithium-ion batteries the size of a grain of sand, created through 3-D printing (as you may remember, I blogged recently about the role 3-D printing could play in fully-realizing the IoT’s potential. Little did I think it would be this soon, and this direct a role)!
This is a game-changer when it comes to sensors: their size has been getting smaller and smaller, but the big obstacle to realizing Kristofer Pister’s vision of “smart dust” sensors so tiny and self-powered that they could be strewn about was that the batteries were still relatively big and clunky. Lewis’ breakthrough changes all of that.
lithium-ion batteries produced by 3-D printing
The batteries are built by printing precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less than the diameter of a human hair.
Here’s the process:
“In this case, the inks also had to function as electrochemically active materials to create working anodes and cathodes, and they had to harden into layers that are as narrow as those produced by thin-film manufacturing methods. To accomplish these goals, the researchers created an ink for the anode with nanoparticles of one lithium metal oxide compound, and an ink for the cathode from nanoparticles of another. The printer deposited the inks onto the teeth of two gold combs, creating a tightly interlaced stack of anodes and cathodes. Then the researchers packaged the electrodes into a tiny container and filled it with an electrolyte solution to complete the battery.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Material Interactions in Energy Conversion.
This is so exciting. Now to commercialize the technology and to turn our attention to the real obstacles to the Internet of Things: privacy and security problems!
