Is GE the future of manufacturing? IoT + nanotech + 3D-printing

Posted on 5th December 2014 in 3-D printing, collaboration, design, energy, environmental, Internet of Things, M2M, maintenance, management, manufacturing, open data, strategy

The specific impetus for this post was an article in The Boston Globe about heart stents that fit perfectly because they’re 3-D printed individuallly for each patient.

GE jet engine 3-D-printed fuel nozzle

That prompted me to think of how manufacturing may change when three of my favorite technologies — nanotech, 3-D printing and the Internet of Things — are fully mature and synergies begin (as I’m sure they will) to emerge between the three.

I’m convinced we’ll see an unprecedented combination of:

  • waste elimination: we’ll no longer do subtractive processes, where a rough item is progressively refined until it is usable.  Instead, products will be built atom-by-atom, in additive processes where they will emerge exactly in the form they’re sold.
  • as with the stents, products will increasingly be customized to the customer’s exact specifications.
  • the products will be further fine-tuned based on a constant flow of data from the field about how customers actually use them.

Guess what?  The same company is in on the cutting edge of all three: General Electric (no, I’m not on their payroll, despite all my fawning attention to them!):

  • Their Industrial Internet IoT initiative is resulting in dramatic changes to their products, with built-in sensors that relay data constantly to GE and the customer about the product’s current status, allowing predictive maintenance practices that cuts repair costs, optimizing the device’s performance for more economical operations, and even allowing GE to switch from selling products to leasing them, with the lease price determined dynamically using factors such as how many hours the products are actually used.  Not only that, but they practice what they preach, with 10,000 sensors on the assembly line at their Durathon battery plant in Schenectady, plus sensors in the batteries themselves, allowing managers to roam the plant with an iPad to get instant readings on the assembly line’s real-time operation, to fine-tune the processes, and to be able to spot defective batteries while they are still in production, so that 100% of the batteries shipped will work.
    They’re also able to push products out the door more rapidly and updating them quicker based on the huge volumes of data they gather from sensors built into the products: “… G.E. is adopting practices like releasing stripped-down products quickly, monitoring usage and rapidly changing designs depending on how things are used by customers. These approaches follow the ‘lean start-up’ style at many software-intensive Internet companies. “’We’re getting these offerings done in three, six, nine months,’ he [William Ruh] said. ‘It used to take three years.’”
  • They’ve made a major commitment to 3-D printing, with 100,000 3-D printed parts scheduled to be built into their precision LEAP jet engines — a big deal, since there’s not a great deal of fault tolerance in something that may plunge to the earth if it malfunctions! As Bloomberg reported, “The finished product is stronger and lighter than those made on the assembly line and can withstand the extreme temperatures (up to 2,400F) inside an engine.”  They’re making major investments to boost the 3-D printers’ capacity and speed.  Oh, and did I mention their precedent-setting contest to crowd-source the invention of a 3-D printed engine mount?
  • They’re also partnering with New York State on perhaps the most visionary technology of all, nanotech, which manipulates materials on the molecular level. GE will focus on cheap silicon carbide wafers, which beat silicon chips in terms of efficiency and power, leading to smaller and lighter devices.

GE is the only member of the original Dow-Jones Index (in 1884) that still exists. As I’ve said before, I’m astounded that they not only get it about IoT technology, but also the new management practices such as sharing data that will be required to fully capitalize on it.

Thomas A. Edison is alive and well!

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Interview w/ Echelon for its IoT blog

Posted on 2nd December 2014 in energy, Essential Truths, health, Internet of Things, M2M, maintenance, manufacturing

Just finished a delightful interview with three Echelon staffers for a forthcoming piece on its blog about my prognostications for the Industrial Internet of Things (AKA “Industrial Internet” ien GE-marketing speak).  They’ve been around in this field since the dark ages — 1988, and are now focusing on industrial applications.

My main point to them was the one I made in the SAP “Managing the Internet of Things Revolution” e-guide,  that even though the IoT hasn’t realized its full potential yet, that smart companies would begin creating and executing an IoT strategy now, “to connect their existing infrastructure and enhance key foundational IoT technologies,” optimizing their operating efficiency. Then they could build on that experience to make more fundamental transformations.

We touched 0n several other examples how the IoT could increase operating efficiency or make fundamental transformations:

At any rate, a fun time was had by all, and I’ll let you know when their blog post is up!

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Disney MagicBands: as important symbolically for IoT as substantively!

Posted on 25th November 2014 in Internet of Things, management, marketing, mobile, privacy, retail, security, services, wearables

(I’ve been meaning to write about this particular IoT device for a long time — my apologies for the delay)

I have no objective evidence for this, but I suspect that many C-level executives first learned about e-commerce when they placed personal orders during the Christmas season of 1995. Thus, Amazon deserves a disproportionate share of credit for launching the e-commerce era.

Magic Bands play a number of roles at Disney parks

Similarly, I suspect that many C-level executives’ first direct experience with the Internet of Things has come, or may come this holiday season, with their family’s first visit to Disneyworld since Disney began the beta testing of its MagicBands, which are arguably the most high-profile public IoT devices so far.

IMHO, Disney deserves a lot of credit for such a public IoT project, especially many of the initial reviews were decidedly mixed due to technical and management glitches — risking irritating customers. 

The project reportedly cost north of $1 billion.

The major lesson to decision makers in other industries to be gained from the MagicBand is my favorite IoT “Essential Truth“: who else can use this data?

Disney uses the band data, either by itself, or aggregated with other visitors, to improve almost every aspect of park operations, marketing, and the customer experience — illustrating the versatility of IoT devices:

  • control logistics, speeding entry to the park and individual rides
  • coordinate outside transportation
  • balance demand for various rides
  • add new functionality to existing technology such as the Disney app
  • control mechanical systems, such as hotel door locks
  • add a social component (and avoid the stresses of families getting
  • handle and speed in-park financial transactions
  • personalize the park experience and improve customer satisfaction
  • harvest and analyze big data on customer preferences.

The bands, which work because they have RFID chips inside, are worn on your wrist throughout your stay at the parks. When you book the trip, Disney lets you choose your favorite color, and the band comes in a presentation box with your name on it.

Before leaving, you can program it in conjunction with the My Disney Experience app and web page, entering key choices such as hotels, your favorite rides (FastPass+), dinner reservations, etc., and your credit card info so that they can be used to pay for meals and merchandise.

Disney warns visitors not to pack the bracelets in their luggage, because they are even used to board the transportation from the Orlando airport.

Putting aside the programming involved, this had to be a tremendous logistical challenge, changing the hotel locks, installing readers at each ride, putting readers in the restaurants and shops, which probably accounts for many of the glitches that customers reported during the pilot phase.

My future son-in-law, Greg Jueneman, who knows EVERYTHING about Disneyland, weighs in from a customer standpoint:

“I think they take the spontaneity out of a Disney World vacation. Everything has to be planned in advance and a schedule has to be followed. As a technology they are cool, I’m sure Disney had lots of plans for them but so far the only real thing that they do is open your hotel room without a “key” and allow you to pay for things without your cards (I’m sure Disney loves that! – some blogs Ifollow have said that spending with Magic Bands is up 40%, that’s impressive!).”

As you can imagine, there are also important data privacy and security issues: on one hand, it would probably be very cool to have Mickey come up to you and say “happy 5th birthday, Jeremy,” but that could also creep parents out, and you’d be worried about someone running up a tab on your credit card if you mislaid the band.

From my reading of the most recent media coverage, it appears that most of the beta test problems have been worked out, and that Disney is fully-committed to universal use of the bands in the future.

If you’re visiting Disney this holiday season, think about possible IoT strategy lessons for your company from the MagicBand:

  • marketing: how it can personalize the customer experience and increase sales?
  • transactions: how can it streamline transactions (have to think that Apple looked carefully at this in designing Apple Pay)?
  • operations: how can real-time data from many users help streamline operations and reduce congestion?

Maybe you can write off the family vacation as research! Have fun.

 

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I’ll be on “Game Changer” Radio Today @ 3 EST Talking About IoT

Posted on 12th November 2014 in aging, collaboration, data, Essential Truths, Internet of Things, M2M, management, open data, paradigm shift, Quantified Self, security, seniors, strategy

Huzzah!  I’ll be a guest on Bonnie Graham’s “Coffee Break With Game Changers” show live, today @ 3 PM to discuss the Internet of Things. SAP Radio

Other guests will include David Jonker, sr. director of Big Data Initiatives at SAP, and Ira Berk, vice-president of Solutions Go-to-market at SAP, who has global responsibility for the IoT infrastructure and middleware portfolio.

Among other topics that I hope to get to during the discussion:

  • The “Collective Blindness” meme that I raised recently — and how the IoT removes it.
  • The difficult shift companies will need to make from past practices, where information was a zero-sum game, where hoarding information led to profit, to one where sharing information is the key. Who else can use this information?
  • How the IoT can bring about an unprecedented era of “Precision Manufacturing,” which will not only optimize assembly line efficiency and eliminate waste, but also integrate the supply chain and distribution network.
  • The sheer quantity of data with the IoT threatens to overwhelm us. As much as possible, we need to migrate to “fog computing,” where as much data as possible is processed at the edge, with only the most relevant data passing to the cloud (given the SAP guys’ titles, I assume this will be of big interest to them.
  • The rise of IFTTT.com, which means device manufacturers don’t have to come up with every great way to use their devices: use open standards, just publish the APIs to IFTTT, and let the crowd create creative “recipes” to use the devices.
  • Safety and security aren’t the other guy’s problem: EVERY device manufacturer must build in robust security and privacy protections from the beginning. Lack of public trust can undermine everyone in the field.
  • We can cut the cost of seniors’ care and improve their well being, through “smart aging,” which brings together Quantified Self fitness devices that improve their care and make health care a doctor-patient partnership, and “smart home” devices that automate home functions and make them easier to manage.

Hope you can listen in.  The show will be archived if you can’t make it for the live broadcast .

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Perhaps Most Important Internet of Things Essential Truth: Everything’s Linked

Posted on 11th November 2014 in Essential Truths, Internet of Things, M2M, management, manufacturing, marketing, paradigm shift, strategy, supply chain

PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

You see, I’m thinking out loud (that accounts for that sound of gears grinding….) — I really am writing this post as I mull over the subject for the first time, so you’re forewarned that the result may be a disaster — or insightful. Bear with me…

I’m working on a book outline expanding on “Managing the Internet of Things Revolution,” the introduction to IoT strategy for C-level executives that I wrote for SAP. One of the things I’ve been looking for is a theme that would bring together all of the book’s parts, which include product design, manufacturing, marketing and corporate organization, among other topics.

I think I’ve got that theme, and I think it may be the most Essential Truth of all the ones I’ve written about regarding the IoT:

Everything’s Linked!

When you think about it, there have been a lot of dead-ends in business in the past:

  • we haven’t been able to know how customers used our products. We’ve actually got a lot more information about the ones that failed, because of warrantee claims or complaints, than we have about the ones that worked well, because that information was impossible to gather.
  • data that could help workers do their work better has always come from top down, filtered by various levels of management and only delivered after the fact.
  • customers can’t get the full value of our products because they operate in isolation from each other, and often were slow to react to changing conditions.
  • assembly-line machinery has frequently been hard to optimize, because we really didn’t know how it was operating — until it broke down.
  • key parts of the operation, such as supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution, have been largely independent, without simultaneous access to each other’s status.

With the Internet of Things, by contrast, everything will be linked, and that will change everything:

  • we’ll get real-time data about how customers are using our products. Most radically, that data may even allow us, instead of selling products and then severing our ties to the customer as in the past, to instead lease them the products, with the pricing dependent on how they actually use the products and the value they obtain from them.
  • everyone in the company can (if your management practices allow!) have real-time access to data that will help them improve their decision making and daily operations (hmm: still looking for an example of this one: know any companies that are sharing data on a real-time basis??).
  • products will work together, with synergistic results (as with the Jawbone UP turning on the NEXT), with their operation automatically triggered and coordinated by services such as IFTTT.
  • the assembly line can be optimized because we’ll be able to “see” into massive equipment to learn how it is operating — or if it needs repairs in time to avoid catastrophic failure.
  • access to that same data may even be shared with your supply chain and distribution network — or even with customers (again, looking for a good example of that transformation).

There’s won’t be dead ends or one-way streets where information only flows one way. Instead, they’ll be replaced by loops (in fact, I thought loops might be an alternative theme): in many cases, data will be fed back through M2M systems so things can be optimized.

If that’s the case, we’ll be able to increase the use and value of tools such as systems dynamics software, that would help us model and act on these links and loops. Instead of massive oscillations where we’re forced to make sudden, major corrections when data finally becomes available, machinery will be largely self-regulating, based on continuous feedback. We’ll delight customers because products will be more dependable and we’ll be able to fine-tune them by adding features based on actual knowledge of how the products work.  Workers will be more efficient, and happier, because they’ll be empowered. We’ll tread lightly on the earth, because we’ll use only what we need, precisely when we need it.

By George, I think I’ve got it! I’m excited about this vision of the Internet of Things linking everything. What do you think?? Please let me know! 

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Global Warming: The IoT Can Help Fill Some of the Gap Due to Government Inaction

Posted on 10th November 2014 in agriculture, cities, energy, environmental, government, Internet of Things, US government

I won’t dwell on politics here, but  97% of scientists agree that global warming is real, and, according to the latest United National report this month, it is worse than ever (according to the NYTimes,

“The gathering risks of climate change are so profound that they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.”). (my emphasis)

Thus, it should be noted that the chances of significant government action to curb global warming during the next two years have vanished now that Senator James Inhofe will chair the the Senate Environmental Committee (I won’t repeat any of the clap-trap he has said to deny global warming: look it up…).

While probably not enough to combat such a serious challenge, the Internet of Things will help fill the gap, by helping bring about an era of unprecedented precision in use of energy and materials.

Most important, the IoT is a critical component in “smart grid” electrical strategies, which are critical to reducing CO2 emissions.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, “Because a smart grid can adjust demand to match intermittent wind and solar supplies, it will enable the United States to rely far more heavily on clean, renewable, home-grown energy: cutting foreign oil imports, mitigating the environmental damage done by domestic oil drilling and coal mining, and reducing harmful air pollution. A smart grid will also facilitate the switch to clean electric vehicles, making it possible to “smart charge” them at night when wind power is abundant and cheap, cutting another huge source of damaging air pollution.”

And then there’s generating electricity from conventional resources: GE, as part of its “industrial internet” IoT strategy, says that it will be able to increase its gas turbines’ operating efficiency (which it says generate 25% of the world’s electricity) by at least 1%.

Equally important, as I’ve written before, “precision manufacturing” through the IoT will also reduce not only use of materials, but also energy consumption in manufacturing.

In other important areas, the IoT can also help reduce global warming:

  • Agriculture: conventional farming is also a major contributor to global warming. “Climate-smart” agriculture, by contrast, reduces the inputs, including energy, needed while maximizing yield (Freight Farms, which converts old intermodal shipping containers into self-contained “Leafy Green Machine” urban farming systems, is a great example!).
  • IoT-based schemes to cut traffic congestion.  As The Motley Fool (BTW, they’re big IoT fans of the IoT as a smart investment opportunity) documents, “1.9 billion gallons of fuel is consumed every year from drivers sitting in traffic. That’s 186 million tons of unnecessary CO2 emissions each year just in the U.S. “

The Motley Fool concludes that, combined, a wide range of IoT initiatives can reduce carbon emissions significantly while increasing the economy’s efficiency:

“A recent report by the Carbon War Room estimates that the incorporation of machine-to-machine communication in the energy, transportation, built environment (its fancy term for buildings), and agriculture sectors could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 9.1 gigatons of CO2 equivalent annually. That’s 18.2 trillion pounds, or equivalent to eliminating all of the United States’ and India’s total greenhouse gas emissions combined, and more than triple the reductions we can expect with an extremely ambitious alternative energy conversion program.

“Increased communication between everything — engines, appliances, generators, automobiles — allows for instant feedback for more efficient travel routes, optimized fertilizer and water consumption to reduce deforestation, real-time monitoring of electricity consumption and instant feedback to generators, and fully integrated heating, cooling, and lighting systems that can adjust for human occupancy.”

It always amuses me that self-styled political conservatives are frequently the ones who are least concerned with conserving resources. Perhaps the IoT, by making businesses more efficient, and therefore more profitable, may be able to bring political conservatives into the energy efficiency fold!

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Coming Soon to a Language Near You: my IoT guide for C-level execs!

Posted on 31st October 2014 in Uncategorized

Neato! Just heard from SAP that reaction to “Managing the Internet of Things Revolution,” my e-guide to IoT strategy for C-level executives, has been so positive that they’re translating it into 4 languages. C’est magnifique!

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Egburt: key tool to make IoT pay off NOW

Posted on 31st October 2014 in data, energy, Internet of Things, maintenance, management, retail

As I’ve remarked before, writing the Managing the Internet of Things Revolution e-guide to IoT strategy for SAP was an eye-opener for me, shifting my attention from the eye-popping opportunities for radical reinvention through the IoT (products as services, user-customizable products, seamless smart phone-car integration, etc.) to very practical ways the IoT could begin optimizing companies’ current operations TODAY (BTW: much-deserved shout-out to SAP’s Mahira Kalim: it was dialogue with her that led to this insight!).

Egburt

In that vein, I was blown away at this week’s IoT Global Summit by the roll-out of Egburt by Camgian.

Egburt stresses two crucial, inter-related obstacles to widespread IoT solution deployment by mainstream businesses:

  • low cost-of-ownership sensing (by using very little energy, thereby extending battery life)
  • reducing potentially huge cloud-computing costs (because of the sheer volume of 24/7 sensor data) by allowing “fog computing,” where the processing would be done right at the collection process, with only the small amount of really relevant data being passed on to a central location.

The highlight of the product launch was a live demo of Egburt in real-time use at a chain of dollar stores in the south, monitoring a wide range of factors, from floor traffic to freezer operation (Camgian pointed out the system paid for itself in the first month of operation when it recorded failure of a freezer when the store was unoccupied, in time for immediate repairs to avoid loss of frozen foods).

Think about it: the very volume of Big Data possible with constant monitoring by a whole range of sensors can also be the IoT’s undoing. Since all that’s of interest in many cases is data that deviates from the norm, doesn’t it make sense to process that data at the collection point, then only pass on the deviations?

The company has targeted three IoT segments:

  • retail to reduce heating and lighting, and maximize sales through tracking foot traffic patterns to optimize product placement.
  • infrastructure: with sensors at key points such as bridges that will detect flooding and stress.
  • smart cities: optimizing emergency response.

In a sponsored white paper by ABI Research, “Evolution of the Internet of Things: from connected to intelligent devices,” they documented the benefits of going beyond first-generation, “connected,” IoT devices that were just sensors collecting and passing on data, to a second generation of “intelligent ones” such as Egburt the combine sensors and processing and offer not only lower operating costs but also — critically — more data security:

  • “Communication Latency: Handling more processing at the network’s edge reduces latency from the device’s actions. Use cases that are highly time-sensitive and require immediate analysis of, or response to, the collected sensor data are, in general, unfeasible under cloud- centric IoT architectures, especially if the data are sent over long distances.
  • “Data Security: By and large, sensitive and business-critical operational data are safer when encrypted adequately on the endpoint level. Unintelligent devices transmitting frequent and badly secured payloads to the cloud are generally more vulnerable to hacking and interception by unauthorized parties. Additionally, many enterprises may need to secure and control their machine data on the edge level for compliance reasons.

  • “Total Cost of Ownership: Perhaps most significantly, the paradigm shift can reduce the IoT systems’ total cost of ownership, or TCO. Intelligent devices are usually more expensive than less sophisticated alternatives, but their TCO over a long service life can be substantially lower.”

IMHO, for the IoT to be widely deployed, especially in SMEs, devices such as Egburt that reduce the cost of collecting and processing data are a critical component.

(PROMINENT DISCLAIMER: I actually won a FitBit in Camgian’s drawing at the conference. That has no impact on this review. Had I won the iPhone 6 that they also gave away, I would have totally been in the bag, LOL…)

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Smart Washing Machine: another example of “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”

Posted on 29th October 2014 in design, energy, Essential Truths, home automation, Internet of Things, smart home

When I buy the much-hyped smart refrigerator, you’ll know I’ve officially gone around the bend, and have officially surrendered to IoT hype: it makes sense for those who buy a ton of processed foods with bar codes on them, but I just can’t see the value to those of us who buy a lot of label-less veggies from farmers markets, for example.

In a close second place on my personal list of those IoT devices that violate one of my Essential Truths of the IoT: “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should” would be a smart washing machine.

As the Washington Post wrote about Whirlpool’s $1,699 “smart” washer,

“Few expected ‘smart’ machines would fly off the shelves. They’re expensive, and Americans don’t typically replace their washers and dryers all that often. But analysts say the problem is bigger than that. Today’s smartest washer and dryer set won’t fold your clothes, erase wrinkles or stop you from mixing reds and whites. It won’t even move a load from one machine to the other. So what’s the point?”

I know there are going to be some false starts in creating IoT-enabled products that really do provide value, and good for Whirlpool for experimenting, but I do wonder whether something we used to call “common sense” is sorely lacking in some companies’ IoT decision-making.

IMHO, it would really be helpful if my washer and dryer could go on late at night to take advantage of utilities’ off-peak pricing as part of their smart grid initiatives (to their credit, as you’ll see from the photo of the companion smart dryer, a smart grid link is part of these appliances)

smart grid button on Whirlpool dryer

. However, I suspect that would be easily possible if the utilities just published APIs so some smart IFTTT user could create a “recipe” that would turn on an utterly-conventional washer that was plugged into a WeMo smart plug (hmm: did a search for that, and found a recipe that would automatically turn off a washer plugged into a WeMo if a Nest alarm detected a fire: nice, but rather low on my list of what I’d want to have done in case of a fire….).

So, yea, smart appliances, but let’s also make sure that one of the questions companies ask before committing to a really expensive initiative is: “do we really need it?”

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Live Blogging from IoT Global Summit

Posted on 27th October 2014 in cities, data, environmental, government, home automation, Internet of Things, M2M, management, mobile, open data, privacy, retail, security, smart home, strategy

I’ll be live-blogging for the next two days from the 2nd Internet of Things Global Summit.

  • Edith Ramirez, FTC chair:
    • potential for astounding benefits to society, transforming every activity
    • risks: very technology that allows this can also gather info for companies and your next employer
    • possible consumer loss of confidence in connected devices if they don’t think privacy w
    • 3 challenges:
      • adverse uses
      • security of the data
      • collection of the data
    • key steps companies should take:
      • security front and center
      • deidentify data
      • transparent policies
    • data will provide “startlingly complete pictures of us” — sensors can already identify our moods, even progression of neurological diseases
    • how will the data be used? will TV habits be shared with potential employers? Will it paint picture of you that others will see, but you won’t
    • will it exacerbate current socio-economic disparities?
    • potential for data breaches such as Target grows as more data is collected
    • FTC found some companies don’t take even most basic protections. Small size and cheap cost of some sensors may inhibit data protections
    • steps:
      • build security in from beginning
      • security risk assessment
      • test security measures before launch
      • implement defense and depth approach
      • encryption, especially for health data.
    • FTC action against TrendNet
    • follow principle of “data minimization,” only what’s needed, and dispose of it afterwards.
  • she’s skeptical of belief that there should be no limits on collection of data (because of possible benefits)
    • de-identified data: need dual approach — commit to not re-identify data
    • clear and simple notice to consumers about possible use of data.
    • Apple touting that it doesn’t sell data from Health App — critical to building consumer trust
    • transparency: major FTC priority. FTC review of mobile apps showed broad and vague standards on data collection & use.
  • Ilkka Lakaniemi, chair, FIWARE Future Internet PPP, EU perspective on IoT:
    • lot easier to start IoT businesses in Silicon Valley because of redundant regulations in EU
    • Open Standard Platform + Sustainable Innovation Ecosystem. “Synergy Platform”
  • Mark Bartolomeo,   vp of integrated solutions, Verizon:
    • Bakken Shale area visit: “landscape of IoT” solutions — pipeline monitoring, water monitoring, etc.
    • concerned about rapid urbanization: 30% of city congestion caused by drivers looking for parking. $120B wasted in time and fuel yearly.
    • cars: “seamless nodes” of system.
    • market drivers & barriers:
      • increased operational efficiency, new revenue streams, better service, comply with regulators, build competitive edge
      • fragmented ecosystem, complex development, significant back end obstacles
    • they want integrated systems.
    • need to remove barriers: aging infrastructure, congestion, public safety, economics
    • remove complexity
    • economies of scale: common services
    • trend to car sharing, smart grid
    • yea: highlighting intellistreets — one of my 1st fav IoT devices!!
    • Verizon working primarily on parking & traffic congestion on the East Coast, and water management in CA.

Smart Cities:

  • Nigel Cameron: nation-state receding, cities and corporations on ascendency
  • Sokwoo Rhee, NIST: Cyber-Physical Systems — emphasis on systems dynamics, data fed back into system, makes it autonomous.  Did Smart America Challenge with White House. Fragmentation on device level. Demonstrate tangible effects through collaborations. Examples: health care systems, transactive energy management, smart emergency response, water distribution, air quality. 24 projects.  Round Two is application of the projects to actual cities. Now 26 teams.
  • Joseph Bradley, VP, IoT Practice, Cisco Consulting: value isn’t in the devices, but the connections. Intersection of people, data, process, and things. Increase City of Nice’s parking revenue 40-60% without raising taxes through smart parking. They project $19 trillion in value over 10 years from combo of public and private innovations. Smart street lighting: reduces crime, property values increase, free wi-fi from the connected street lights. Barcelona is Exhibit A for benefits. Need: comprehensive strategy (privacy is a contextual issue: depends on the benefits you receive), scalability, apps, data analytics, transparency, powerful network foundation, IoT catalyst for breaking down silos, IoT must address people and process.
  • Ron Sege, chair and ceo of Echelon Corp: got started with smart buildings, 25 yrs. old. Why now with IoT: ubiquitous communications, low cost, hyper-competition, cloud. They do outdoor & indoor lighting and building systems. Challenges: move to one infrastructure/multiple use cases, will IT learn about OT & visa-versa?, reliability: critical infrastructure can’t fail & must respond instantly.
  • Christopher Wolf, Future of Privacy Forum: flexible, use-based privacy standards. Industry-wide approach to privacy: auto industry last week told NISTA about uniform privacy standards for connected cars (neat: will have to blog that…).
  • Peter Marx, chief innovation officer, City of LA:  big program to reduce street lights with LEDs: changed whole look of city at night & saves lot of money. 6 rail lines being built there. Adding smart meters for water & power. EV chargers on street lights. Held hackathon for young people to come up with ideas to improve city. Procurement cycles are sooo arcane that he suggests entrepreneurs don’t do business with city — he just tries to enable them.

Outside the City:

  • Darrin Mylet, Adaptrum: Using “TV white space spectrum” in non-urban areas. Spectrum access critical:need mix of spectrum types. Where do we need spectrum? Most need in non-line-of-sight areas such as trees, etc. Examples: not only rural, but also some urban areas (San Jose); Singapore; Africa; redwood forests;
  • Arturo Kuigami, World Bank: examples in developing nations: (he’s from Peru); most of global migration is to smaller cities; look at cities as ecosystems; “maker movement” is important — different business models: they partnered with Intel and MIT on “FabLabs” in Barcelona this year. MoMo — water access point monitoring in Tanzania.  Miroculus: created by a global ad hoc team — cheap way to make cancer diagnosis: have identified 3-4 types of cancers it can diagnose. Spirometer to measure COPD, made by a 15-year old! “IoT can be a global level playing field.”
  • Chris Rezendes, INEX Advisors: Profitable sustainability: by instrumenting the physical world, we can create huge opportunities for a wide range of people outside our companies. Focusing on doing a better job of instrumenting and monitoring our groundwater supplies: very little being done in SW US right now (INEX investing in a startup that is starting this monitoring). If we have better data on groundwater, we can do a better job of managing it. “Embrace complexity upfront” to be successful.
  • Shudong Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences: talking about the Chinese food security crisis because of milk production without a food production license.  Government launched “Wuxi Food Science & Technology Park.”

Smart Homes:

  • Tobin Richardson, Zigbee Alliance: critical role of open, global standards. Zigbee LCD lights now down to $15.
  • Cees Links, GreenPeak Technologies: Leader in Zigbee-based smart home devices. Smart home waay more complex than wi-fi.  1m chips a week, vs. 1 million for whole year of 2011. “Not scratching the surface.” Small data — many small packets.
  • Todd Green, CEO PubNub: data stream network.
  • no killer app for the smart home..  Controlling by your phone not really that great a method.
  • FTC agrees with me: a few adverse stories (TrendNet baby cam example) can be really bad for an industry in its infancy.
  • always hole in security. For example, you can tell if no one’s home because volume of wi-fi data drops.W
  • FTC: consumer ed critical part of their work. Working now on best practices for home data protection.
  • mitigation after a security breach? Always be open, communicate (but most hunker down!).

DAY TWO

Beyond Cost Savings: Forging a Path to Revenue Generation

  • Eric Openshaw: (had tech problems during his preso: very important one — check the Deloitte The Internet of Things white paper for details) cost savings through IoT not enough for sustainable advantage: need to produce new revenue to do that. Defined ecosystem shaping up, which creates clarity, breaks down silos.
    • areas: smart grid, health care, home automation, cars, industrial automation
    • study the GE jet model for health care: what if doctors were paid to keep us healthy.
    • need comprehensive understanding of the change issues
    • be very specific: singular asset class, etc. — so you get early victories
    • companies will have overarching, finite roadmap
    • security & privacy dichotomy: differentiate between personal health care data and data from your washing machine. Most of us will share all sorts of information if there’s something in return
    • get focused on customer and product life cycle — that’s where the money will be. Focus on operating metric level. This is most far-reaching tech change he’s seen.

Managing Spectrum Needs

  • Julius Knapp, Chief, FCC Office of Engineering & Technology: new opportunity to combine licensed and unlicensed space. Described a number of FCC actions to reconsider role of various types of spectrum. “Hard to predict I0T’s long-term spectrum needs” because industry is new: they’ll watch developments in the field.
  • Prof. H. Nwana, exec. director of Dynamic Spectrum Alliance: most spectrum usually not used in most places at most time.  His group working to use changes to spectrum to end digital divide: (used incredible map showing how much of world, including US, China, India, W. Europe, could be fitted into Africa).
  • Carla Rath, VP for Wireless Policy, Verizon: “in my world, the network is assumed.”  Need for more spectrum — because of growth in mobile demand. Praises US govt. for trying to make more spectrum available. Don’t want to pigeonhole IoT in certain part of spectrum: allow flexibility.  Tension between flexibility and desire for global standards when it comes to IoT.
  • Philip Marnick, group director of spectrum policy, Ofcom UK:  no single solution.  Market determines best use. Some applications become critical (public safety, etc.) — must make sure people using those are aware of chance of interference.
  • Hazem Moakkit, vp of spectrum development for 03b (UK satellite provider for underserved areas of developing world): “digital divide widened by IoT if all are not on board.” Fair allocation of spectrum vital.
  • interesting question: referred to executive of a major farm equipment manufacturer whose products are now sensor-laden (must be John Deere…) and is frustrated because the equipment won’t work in countries such as Germany due to different bands.

Architecting the IoT: Sensing, Networking & Analytics: 

  • Tom Davenport: IoT highly unpredictable. “Great things about standards is there’s so many to choose from” — LOL.  Will IoT revolution be more top down or bottom up?
  • Gary Butler, CEO, Camgian: announcing an edge system for IoT. Driven by sensor info. Need new networking architecture to combine sensing and analytics to optimize business processes, manage risk. Systems now built from legacy equipment, not scalable. They’re announcing new platform: Egburt. Applicable to smart cities, retailing, ifrastructure (I’ll blog more about this soon!!). “Intelligence out of chaos.” Anomaly detection. Real-time analysis at the device level. Focus on edge computing. Must strengthen the ROI.
  • Xiaolin Lu, Texas Instruments fellow & director of IoT Lab: Working in wearables, smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart manufacturing, health care, automotive. TI claims it has all IoT building blocks: nodes, gateway/bridge or router/cloud.  Power needs are really critical, with real emphasis on energy harvesting from your body heat, vibration, etc. Challenges: sensing and data analytics, robust connectivity, power, security, complexity, consolidation of infrastructure and data. Big advocates for standards. They work on smart grid.
  • Steve Halliday, president, RAIN RFID: very involved in standards. 4 BILLION RFID tags shipped last year. Don’t always want IP devices. Power not an issue w/ RFID because they get their power from the reader. Think RFID will be underpinning of IoT for long time. Lot of confusion in many areas about IoT, especially in manufacturing.
  • Sky Mathews, IBM CTO: IBM was one of earliest in the field, with Smarter Planet. Lot of early ones were RFID. A variety of patterns emerging for where and how data is processed. What APIs do you want to expose to the world? “That’s where the real leaps of magnitude will occur” — so design that in from beginning.

‘People’ Side of the IoT: meeting consumer expectations:

  • Mark Eichorn, asst. director, Consumer Protection Bureau, FTC: companies that have made traditional appliances & now web-enable them aren’t always ready to deal with data theft. Security and privacy: a lot don’t have privacy policies at all. At their workshop, talk about people being able to hack your insulin readings.
  • Daniel Castro, sr. analyst, Center for Data Innovation: thinks that privacy issue has been misconstrued: what people really care about is keeping data from government intrusion. Can car be designed so a cop could pull it over automatically (wow: that’s a thought!). Chance for more liability with misuse of #IoT data.
  • Linda Sherry, director of national priorities, Consumer Action: “convenience, expectations and trust.” “What is the IoT doing beside working?” Connecting everything may disenfranchise those who aren’t connected. Need to register those who collect data – hmm. Hadn’t heard that one before. Even human rights risks, stalking, etc. — these issues must be thought about. Can algorithms really be trusted on issues such as insurance coverage? How do you define particularly sensitive personal data? “Hobbling the unconnected” when most are connected? “Saving consumers from themselves.” “Document the harms.” Make sure groups with less $ can really participate in multi-stakeholder negotiations.
  • Stephen Pattison, vp of public affairs, ARM Holdings: disagrees with Linda about slowing things down: we want to speed up IoT as instrument of transformation. We need business model for it. Talks about how smart phone didn’t explode until providers started subsidizing purchase. He suspects that one model might be that a company would provide you whole range of smart appliances in return for your data. “Getting data right matters.” “Freak events” drive concerns about data security & privacy: they generate concern and, sometimes, “heavy-handed” regulation.
    Industry must work together on framework for data that creates confidence by public. Concerns about data are holding back investment in the field. They’re working with AMD on a framework: consumers own their own data — must start with that (if they do, people will cooperate); not all data equally sensitive — need chain of custody to keep data anomyzed; security must be right at the edge; simplify terms and conditions.
    Sometimes thinks that, in talking about IoT, it’s like talking about cars in 1900, but we managed to create a set of standards that allowed it to grow: “rules of the road,” etc.
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