Stephenson blogs on Internet of Things
Internet of Things strategy, breakthroughs and management
I guest blogged today @ INEX Advisors today on one of my favorite Internet of Things principles: how thinking collaboratively has to replace I-win-you-lose-zero-sum-game thinking if companies want to really profit from the IoT.
As before, I cited GE as one of the few big companies that’s seizing a strategic advantage in the IoT world by practicing this approach.
Sorry to keep harping on it, but two recent articles in high-visibility publications — The NY Times and Forbes — underscore my contention that security and privacy issues threaten to derail the IoT revolution before it really gets going.
I say that because I spent a decade as an award-winning corporate crisis communicator — on more than one occasion saving the corporate bacon of Fortune 100 firms that didn’t understand that the public isn’t always scrupulously logical when it comes to their fears. Illogical linkages are nonetheless real ones.
The current example of that is the flap over NSA surveillance. The most recent comprehensive public opinion survey, by Pew, shows that a majority of Americans are now concerned that the surveillance has gone too far:
“Among other things, Pew finds that ‘a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.’ And ‘an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.’ Moreover, ‘63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications.” That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government’s three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we’re not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.”
So what’s that have to do with the IoT?
Plenty!
Consider the beginning of Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill’s article on the security vulnerabilities of home automation systems, with the eye-catching title “When ‘Smart Homes’ Get Hacked: How I Haunted a Complete Stranger’s Home Via the Internet“:
“‘I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,’ I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning.
“He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well.
“’They just came on and now they’re off,’he said. ‘I’ll be darned.'”
I’m convinced that people who are already alarmed about the NSA surveillance will not be enthusiastic about home automation, or the IoT in general, when they read that! If not overt, their minds will at least make a subliminal connection between the two stories, and they’re going to be afraid!
Add in former CIA Director David Petraeus’ enthusiasm for the IoT as a new arrow in the quiver of spycraft, and you’ve got the potential for a really-spooked public.
Here’s a major part of the problem, based on my crisis management background: engineers, more likely than not, are left-brained and analytical. As a result, their immediate reaction will be to demonstrate — very logically — why the two issues are completely different, and the IoT shouldn’t be tarred with the NSA’s abuses.
Hogwash.
The majority of Americans aren’t engineers, and they’re scared, so deal with it, or the IoT will be crippled.
I’ve just drafted an op-ed that I hope to place this week that argues privacy and security must be just as much an #IoT industry priority as is innovative technology. It says that the emphasis of IoT consortia such as the IPSO Alliance and the IoT Consortium on collaborative approaches to security are critical, because the essence of the IoT is on sharing of data, and that the Obama Administration must become active as well.
It concludes:
“The Internet of Things has truly remarkable potential to improve the economy’s efficiency, improve health care, and make our lives more comfortable and enjoyable. But if it’s security and privacy standards aren’t a top priority for government and industry, all of those benefits may be squandered. “
Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
PS: the second article I mentioned at the top was a considerably less provocative one in today’s New York Times. The fact that The Gray Lady of American Journalism is now following this issue should be a significant concern.
There’s new confirmation that the U.S. remains dangerously behind the European Union on the twin issues of Internet of Things privacy and security. As I’ve warned before, especially in the context of the continued outrage over the NSA surveillance, if these issues aren’t solved collaboratively by the private sector and government, they threaten to derail the IoT express.
In her Stanford Masters thesis, I believe Mailyn (sic) Fidler accurately summarizes the US’s stance:
“The IoT in the United States is characterized by late but strong entry of companies to the market and by recent, but minimal, interest from the federal government. Specifically, the federal government views the IoT largely as part of the ongoing privacy and security discussion in Washington, D.C. Complicating analysis of the IoT in the United States is that the “Internet of Things” is not a generally recognized term. In the U.S., the IoT is viewed as a natural evolution of American innovation rather than as a unique field.”
http://m3.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_80_80/p/2/000/0dc/3bd/392d2fe.jpgFidler contrasts this lack of concern by the government to the EU, which, while also
Mailyn Fidler
viewing IoT privacy in the broader context of general privacy policy, has made IoT personal privacy and security a priority — more about that in a future post about the “Butler Project” report):
“The IoT has been a political priority for the European Union. Even with the recent recession, interest and funding in IoT enterprises has not slowed, and the EU has invested 70 million Euros in at least 50 research projects since 2008. In addition to the EU’s hopes that the IoT will bring economic benefits, particularly to small businesses and public institutions, the EU’s interest in the IoT reflects its concerns about who controls emerging technologies. Indeed, EU officials have stated an ambition to build an IoT ‘that will bring about clear advantages for Europe.’
However, despite the EU’s investments, a lack of legislative clarity, slow technical progress, and pressure from international strategic interactions threaten to slow EU efforts to develop a globally competitive, European-centric IoT.
The EU considers privacy a societal priority and has a history of regulating technologies to prevent privacy risks, as its Data Protection Directive indicates. The IoT is no different. The privacy risks the IoT presents, however, are discussed in the context of ongoing data protection reform in the EU. EU officials are debating how to author broad, technology-neutral guidance while, at the same time, many officials seem convinced that technology-specific guidance will be necessary. The EU’s political prioritization of the IoT fuels attempts at lobbying for IoT-specific regulation, as the myriad, overlapping attempts at IoT guidance demonstrate. The IoT’s advancement, then, is mired in this larger debate about the future of technology policy.”
Even with this greater focus, Fidler says the EU hasn’t made as much progress as might be hoped. Only 1 of the 33 2010 Cluster of European Research Projects on IoT explicitly investigated security, and, in a study the same year of IoT standards, only 2 or 175 explicityly investigated security — and none have addressed IoT cybersecurity.
In other words, they ain’t great, but we’re worse (in fact, among US agencies, only the FTC seems to give a fig about the IoT). Pathetic.
Fidler’s report also covers China. You can bet that privacy and security aren’t high on their priority list, LOL.
The EU, while perhaps lagging behind on IoT technology, may get the last laugh on the privacy and security issues. As we’ve seen with successful suits against Microsoft and Google on other Internet issues, the EU has prevailed in the past on questions of privacy and security, and, according to Fidler, it may happen again:
“The EU, faced with the IoT approaches of the United States and China—arguably the leading centers of technological innovation—may stand behind its social parameters and emphasis on new international governance mechanisms as a way of asserting alternative power. With such laws and institutions, economic activities involving the EU and the IoT would have to conform to EU-based standards. The EU, thus, compensates for technological disadvantages in innovation through social and governance parameters. Similarly, the United States and China are seeking to maintain or create their technical edge in new cyber technologies by encouraging unique standards regimes or more aggressive development environments.”
If so, I say bully for them! Someone has to stand up for the individual in this brave new world, and it looks as if the Obama Administration isn’t taking the challenge. Shame!
Fidler concludes that the geopolitical competition among the U.S., E.U., and China may have negative effects on the IoT’s overall growth if it results in incompatible standards:
“This geopolitical competition at such an early stage of the IoT’s development could create international interoperability problems, with negative political, economic, and social consequences. How governments and societies navigate the technological and political aspects of the emergence of the IoT will determine if the IoT’s benefits will be ubiquitously available or if the Internet’s foray into the realm of things will be interrupted.”
FADE TO Youngbloods singing “Get Together”…..
Just had a great conversation with a brilliant consultant, Michael Woody, the president and founder of International Marketing Advantages, Inc (he and I have the same wonderful literary agent, Michael Snell).
Woody helps small, innovative companies successfully compete with China, using a simple formula: fewer, faster, finer.
Check out the American Dragon site, and think hard on how to apply these principles in conjunction with your innovative Internet of Things product design, and I think you’ve got the formula for manufacturing success!
As someone who spends much of his time introducing the Internet of Things to people who’ve never heard of it, much less thought about how it might improve their lives, I think there might be something to the logic of this Fast Company article about the GE Eggminder.
The article points out that the IoT still provokes blank stares from most people, a fact that those of us who are immersed in it every day may tend to forget. As the subhead said, “EGG MINDER MIGHT BE DUMB PRODUCT DESIGN, BUT AS A PIECE OF MASS COMMUNICATION ABOUT WEB-CONNECTED PRODUCTS, IT JUST MIGHT BE GENIUS.”
GE Eggminder
The Eggminder doesn’t do much — tells you, via the app, how many eggs you have left in your fridge, but it’s the kind of simple-to-understand example of the kinds of connectivity possible through the IoT that is likely to make a lot of people say “Now I get it!”
It’s not life-changing, as the article points out, and maybe even dumb: “(How dumb? To quote Quirky’s own product evaluation video, ‘it’s a pain in the ass,’ ‘superfluous,’ ‘really silly,’ and ‘the height of laziness.’). BTW: am I right in guessing that this might have been one of the award winners in the contest that GE, Quirky and Electric Imp held to find fast-to-market IoT products. which I praised as an example of the kind of collaboration it will take to capitalize on the IoT?
My personal favorites in terms of IoT products that are easy to understand are the SmartSlippers that can alert a caregiver when a frail senior is likely to fall, or the onesie that alerts parents that their baby has stopped breathing — in time to avoid SIDS. But you get the point: until people see something that could simplify their life — or save it, they may not understand exactly how revolutionary the IoT is.
So let’s have more Eggminders — simple products that will result in more “aha moments” — and speed public adoption of the IoT!
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!
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!
I just uploaded my presentation to tonight’s Boston/New England IoT Meetup, which will be held in Providence beginning at 5:30.
I’ll be speaking about what’s often overlooked in the introduction of exciting new technologies — and the IoT is no exception: the human communication possibilities and challenges that it introduces.
In the case of the IoT, all of the attention on automatic, non-human mediated machine-to-machine communication obscures the fact that the IoT will have profound implications for human communications as well.
More than anything, it’s the fact that, for the first time, we’ll be able to share critical data on a real-time basis among co-workers, our supply chains, our distribution networks, and our customers. IMHO, that changes everything: workers will be able to do their jobs better because they’ll know exactly what’s happening at the time, and we’ll be able to make better decisions because everyone with a valuable perspective will be able to chime in at the same time: reducing the chance that some critical aspect of the issue will go ignored. That’s going to be amazing!
I’ll also talk about Chris Rezendes’ concept of “ground truth,” i.e., that one of the things we’ll be able to share in making those better decisions is “device intelligence,” real-time data from “smart things.” Hopefully this will lead to fact-based decision making (OK, maybe I’m a Pollyanna!) .
I conclude with my argument that, to fully take advantage of this real-time data flow, we need new management styles, including a “Buckyball Management” organizational chart in which every member of the organization is an important, value-creating “node” and every member can communicate with every other member when its relevant.
Hope you can make it tonight!
Most readers of this blog probably already know Rob van Kranenburg, arguably THE leading European Internet of Things theorist. What you may not know is that, for the past year, he and a core group of IoT leaders have been planning creation of a UK-based global IoT consultancy, “The Internet of People.”
Unfortunately, one of the victims of that effort was a planned collaboration
between Rob and me on an article about the IoT for the Harvard Business Review, but now I’ve got Dave Evans of Cisco as a writing partner, so I ain’t complainin’!
At any rate, there’s glorious news today: The Internet of People has officially launched, and there are more than 100 of us consultants who are already in the fold!
This is going to be an all-star team, so if you’re in need of IoT strategy and other consulting services, I hope you’ll contact us!
At last week’s 2nd Boston/New England IoT Meetup, LogMeIn officials hinted at a big announcement today.
No kidding! The news was that they’ve teamed with ARM, the mobile chip giant, to launch the “Xively (Xively? Where, pray tell, do they come up with these names ??) Jumpstart Kit” to accelerate the launch of commercial projects on the IoT:
“…a rapid prototyping-to-production bundle that significantly reduces the cost, complexity and learning curve required to bring IoT-based connected products and solutions to market.”
The kit combines:
The combination of services will allow developers of any size to quickly move from prototypes to IoT commercial services.
According to LogMeIn CEO Michael Simon:
“The Internet of Things signifies the next major wave of the Internet, one that we believe could even eclipse both the web and mobile waves combined, and presents a massive opportunity for businesses that want to create a new generation of compelling connected products. In order to make this happen, they need a simple, affordable way to experiment and innovate through a platform that will enable them to seamlessly move from prototype to commercial product, and then scale as demand grows. By working together with leading vendors like ARM, a company that’s been a driving force in the enablement of the IoT, we can deliver a powerful, easy way for companies to jumpstart their IoT-based connected products and turn them into reality.”
Analyst Glenn Allmendinger, CEO of Harbor Research, said the service is one of three factors that will accelerate growth of the IoT:
“We are seeing real traction in the Internet of Things market. Three forces are converging: connectivity, innovative new device designs and a new generation of technology tools that let manufacturers focus on their core product innovation instead of on building Internet of Things infrastructure from scratch. This can be a hundreds of billions of dollars opportunity. Xively Cloud Services organizes a true end-to-end chain of tools, support, partners, and infrastructure for smart systems on the IoT.”
Xively is the latest evolution in what began as Usman Haque‘s pioneering Pachube platform.
