The Internet of Things (IoT) Conversation
Reimagining the Future
#IoT Strategies and #Mobile #Apps for the #COVID19 Pandemic Response
Kevin Benedict and I discuss how the Internet of Things can help companies respond and react to the pandemic and my ideas on the kinds of mobile apps we need to help contact tracing with COVID19.
IoT Day 2020: Fighting COVID-19 with Digital Twins
With #COVID19 sweeping the globe, knowledge is our best weapon in fighting this pandemic and associated economic collapse. #DigitalTwin technology is perfectly suited to represent people who have symptoms, are infected, or have recovered.
This capability can also aid in identifying people an infected person came in contact with via contact tracing using mobile apps and Bluetooth. Lastly, “green zones” can be identified where people can go back to work. Join Rob to learn how this powerful technology can be put to work in overcoming the Coronavirus threat.
Common Sense Connected Intelligence for 2020
When it comes to Connected Intelligence technologies like #Mobile, #5G and the #InternetOfThings, I’m all about moving the “Value Needle” as quickly, easily and sustainably as possible. #IoT #IIoT
This means following the same strategy you use when taking a big test. Do the easy stuff first and leave the hard things for later. So how does that apply to connecting your organization’s people and things to drive additional value? Read on as I illustrate some simple examples to get you started this year:
Remote Knowledge
People doing remote work in the field still capture information with a paper and pencil. Then they drive back to the office at the end of the workday to transcribe their scribbled data into their organization’s back office computer system along with a dose of human error. I know you’re thinking this is impossible in the 21st century but I see it all the time. Thanks to the magic of cellular data networks combined with smartphones, tablets and smart, connected IoT devices, this inefficient activity can come to an end.
If the remote activity requires dynamic, person-to-person interaction, data should be captured and validated by a smartphone or tablet app and wirelessly transmitted back to the organization. If the remote activity is an inspection that consists of taking an analog reading, drop the clipboard and utilize one or more sensors to convert analog values to digital equivalents and wirelessly transmit the data back to the organization. While newer machines may include the built-in compute, networking, storage and sensors to get the job done, most of the world is filled with older machines that must be retrofitted with these capabilities. If retrofitting isn’t possible, then visual inspection of an asset can be conducted by a fixed or mobile camera where the photo transmitted back to the organization and computer vision converts the analog image to digital values.
How does this move the Value Needle?
This is the simplest first step you can take in augmenting and/or replacing an expensive activity with connected intelligence. Without employing analytics, you cut costs by reducing or eliminating remote activities that include travel, vehicles, and fuel expenses just to name a few. You lower your risk and liability by reducing the need to put people in vehicles or having them perform inspections in precarious or otherwise dangerous situations. You gain speed and agility through the instant availability of data allowing your organization to respond to problems and opportunities more quickly.
Connecting Old Things
While we’re all excited about what the future holds, it’s important to interface with the world as it exists in the present. The overwhelming majority of the Things that are all around us have existed for years or even decades. In order to derive valuable insights from these operational technology (OT) machines and environmental systems, you’ll have to connect to them in often unfamiliar ways and learn how to speak their language. Achieving broad success requires you to be comfortable with brownfield projects. In many scenarios you’ll find yourself using low-speed serial cables and communicating via 100+ wire protocols and data formats.
You better have your Rosetta Stone handy. Don’t be surprised if you must interface with a programmable logic controller (PLC) instead of connecting to a machine directly. Oftentimes, the OT folks in factories won’t let you get near their machines. If you want to be successful, you’ll have to make peace with this OT/IT reality.
How does this move the Value Needle?
Many of these existing systems are either unconnected or connected to a closed system often built by the same manufacturer. Imagine dozens of machines on the shop floor individually connected to their own, proprietary analytics systems. By freeing the data found in these systems, you go from having countless data silos to a achieving a blend of machine, environmental, organizational and 3rd party data. This delivers much needed context and allows you to see the big picture across systems of systems to make better decisions.
Bootstrapping New Things
You know how all the industry analysts throw darts at a board and tell you about the tens of billions of connected devices we’ll have in the coming years? They keep having to backtrack on these predictions because of one very important reason. Bringing the Internet of Things to life is still largely a very manual process of configuring devices, networks, code, platforms and security. IoT today operates like one big aftermarket car stereo store. For the Internet of Things to be the huge success we all want it to be, we have to remove many of these manual processes and leave custom work to those targeting specific use cases.
It must all start when Things are created on an assembly line by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The smart, connected machine must have compute, storage, networking, sensors and actuators baked-in from the very beginning. In other words, a microcontroller, cellular module, software, a trusted platform module (TPM) and associated security tokens or certificates from the get-go. This new product will be created in one country, possibly shipped to a distributor in another country, and purchased by a customer in yet another country.
When this smart, connected product wakes up somewhere in the world, it must first make an automatic connection to a local mobile network operator via its cellular module and associated connection management capabilities. Next, it must use that connectivity to access the OEM’s globally-available service and pass along its identity and security credentials. This service will determine what and where the product is, who bought it, and ultimately what IoT platform it should send its telemetry to and receive commands from.
How does this move the Value Needle?
By following this process, much of the friction that’s holding the Internet of Things back is removed. Time can be better spent targeting specific use cases allowing customers get to value more quickly at a lower cost. This better use of human and machine resources will exponentially accelerate the rising tide of IoT that lifts all boats.
Many Edges
I know you’ve heard a lot about Edge Computing over the last several years. As it relates to the Internet of Things, the Edge just means moving compute and associated data filtering, aggregation and analytics closer to the machines and environmental systems that actually create the data. When the IoT megatrend heated-up ten or so years ago, companies that weren’t familiar with the decades of capturing telemetry and controlling systems via M2M and SCADA systems assumed IoT data must go to one of the many public clouds. Unacceptable latency, high broadband costs and data governance issues gave rise to concepts like the Fog and Edge to mitigate cloud shortcomings. Since I’ve spent most of my time in the industrial space, this has typically meant placing edge compute near machines on the factory floor or even on a bullet trains where decisions could be made in milliseconds. Performing computing tasks at the Edge has also worked well for discrete and process manufacturers who say, “the data doesn’t leave my factory.”
More recently, the telecom industry has thrown their hat into the ring by placing distributed compute infrastructure and resources at the edge of service provider networks where “last mile” content and applications are delivered. While this particular Edge isn’t on-prem, the concepts of supporting low latency, data intensive applications still applies since it runs at the edge of cellular networks and is significantly closer to the source of IoT data than distant public clouds. It also provides the benefit of reducing congestion and signal load on the core network, so applications and analytics perform better. This architecture is sometimes referred to by the acronym MEC which can either mean mobile edge computing or multi-access edge computing. Expect to see this type of Edge compute used heavily in smart cities, public infrastructure, faster video games with reduced ping times and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) scenarios.
How does this move the Value Needle?
Moving compute resources to the Edge benefits myriad IoT use cases including split-second application responsiveness, reduction in bandwidth costs and congestion, plus the granular data governance needed to meet local, city, state/province, and country security + privacy requirements. Public clouds still have their strengths. As always, just use the right tool for the job.
Sustainable Side Effects
When you don’t put a person in a car, truck or plane to perform a remote inspection, you’re not burning fuel or congesting freeways. Think of wireless data networks as your replacement for travel. Using smart, connected, new machines and retrofitting older machines ensures you always know about their health and performance so they can operate more cleanly and efficiently. Edge computing allows you to address problems more quickly while alleviating network congestion. As always, think of the Internet of Things as your early warning systemto detect pollution, fires, water leakage, unsafe machinery, excessive electricity usage, deforestation, water contamination, and thousands of other important use cases.
Summary
As you can see, none of the topics I discussed required Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, or any kind of Artificial Intelligence to move the Value Needle. Throughout 2020 I want you to avoid the hype that bombards us from every direction and focus on specific problems that can be solved in your organization through the use of Connected Intelligence. Steer clear of esoteric technologies and concepts that you and your colleagues struggle to wrap your head around.
If you start small, keep things simple, and iterate steadily throughout the year, I know you can knock it out of the park and derive tremendous value for your organization while being sustainable.
Digital Trends and Predictions for 2018
With software and adjacent technologies continuing to eat the world, we see the pace of #digital transformation accelerating in 2018 as organizations strive to enhance their customer and operational intelligence.
Organizations will grapple with a variety of digital technologies and skillsets this year to become more data-driven in order to improve their agility and decision-making capabilities. As always, they’ll be looking for ways to simplify operations and get more done with less. We predict the concepts and trends listed below will light a path for organizations to show them the way forward:
- Climbing the Stairway from the Edge to the Cloud
The ongoing journey to move data, apps and other digital assets from private, on-premises data centers to public clouds will continue unabated as organizations look to reduce or eliminate internal ICT functions and responsibilities. Even in the midst of cutting costs, organizations will still struggle with concerns around cloud vendor lock-in via PaaS which will benefit IaaS virtual machines, container technologies like Docker and container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos and Marathon. Overall, Amazon AWS plus Microsoft Azure and Office365 will continue to be the biggest beneficiaries of the public cloud megatrend. Along the way, one of the stair steps that remains on-premise is something called the Fog or the Edge. If you’re familiar with how content delivery network (CDN) proxy servers around the world cache and speed the delivery of Web content to your browser, Edge gateway devices do something similar. With more and more of an organization’s compute occurring in distant, public clouds, Edge devices residing on the local network can cache, aggregate, analyze and speed up cloud content to give employees inside the office a better experience. Edge devices can also be used with the Internet of Things where they connect to machines and cache, aggregate, and analyze data locally instead of waiting for that data to be transported to a distant cloud. Since neither people nor machines are vary tolerant of too much latency, expect the adoption of Edge gateway devices and associated local storage to surge in 2018.
- Enhanced Networking Inside and Out
As organizations reduce the number of digital assets and activities that take place in-house, the primary role of ICT departments will be to create and maintain fast, reliable connectivity via wired and wireless technologies. Wired networking will be “more of the same” as we push speeds forward with fiber optics and Gigabit Ethernet to shuttle employees out to the Internet. Wireless is where things get more interesting. Inside the office, organizations will continue rolling out 802.11ac Wi-Fi access points running in the 5 GHz band to deliver data and high-bandwidth content like HD video to any device. Outside, the 3GPP has officially signed off on the first 5G specification which promises to deliver greater bandwidth, lower latency, better coverage, lower battery consumption and a higher number of simultaneously connected devices. As you might imagine, it will take some time to roll out technology based on this spec so we will look to get more mileage out of 4G technologies like LTE Advanced. On the slower side of things, you have Low-Power, Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies that are making great strides for certain Internet of Things use cases. The ability to create a large wireless network in places where no cellular coverage exits is compelling for organizations capable of managing such a system. If you have devices or machines that don’t send much data every day, require years of battery life, or need to send data over long distances, one of the many LPWAN technologies might be a good fit. Whether you’re inside or outside, looking for narrowband or broadband, there’s plenty of wireless choices for organizations in 2018.
- Mobility for People and IoT for Machines
While the mobile device revolution has been the biggest megatrend of this new century, the torch has now been passed to the Internet of Things. When you think about it, they’re not terribly different from each other except for the endpoints. Mobile device endpoints are proxies for people and Thing endpoints refer to machines (intelligent or otherwise). They’re both sending data about themselves and other topics of interest over a network. Both interact with apps, analytics and other on-prem or cloud data sources to derive value and business intelligence. In order to regain a level of simplicity and perhaps sanity, organizations will push back against the use of multiple enterprise platforms for Mobile people and IoT machines. Additionally, many organizations will wring their hands of having to understand an alphabet soup of protocols and myriad IoT standards and revert to using the same Web and Internet standards they already understand. Just like they currently do with Mobile and the Web, organizations will insist that IoT sends and receives JSON data to and from URLs over HTTP/REST while being displayed via HTML5, secured with TLS and brought to life with JavaScript. This use of familiar, widely-used, “good enough” Web technologies will win the day over the more advanced but esoteric technologies currently employed by IoT platforms. This move to simplicity and familiarity will reduce friction and help the Internet of Things deliver value and fulfill its promise the way the Mobile, Web and the Cloud have. Expect big changes in IoT for 2018 along with a big shakeout of the hundreds of Internet of Things platform companies.
- Digital Twins make Everything Digital
The rise of Digital Twins will give every organization the starting point they’re looking for to begin their Digital Transformation. A Digital Twin is essentially a digital representation of a physical object. It can be a machine, a person, a complex mechanical subsystem, a collection of machines working together on an assembly line, or even a process. These twins have attributes or properties that describe them like a person’s heart rate or a motor’s temperature or current revolutions per minute (RPM). Organizations can assign key performance indicators (KPIs) to the current values of these properties. A red heart rate KPI might be 200 whereas a green motor temperature KPI might be 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Digital Twins can exhibit behavior by executing programming language and/or analytics code against the combination of their current property values and associated KPIs. Not only does this bring everything in an organization to life, it also facilitates the running of simulations to see how things will behave when different types of data points are fed to these Digital Twins. This is definitely the most promising and exciting technology for 2018.
- Security, Privacy and GDPR cause Organizations to Stumble
Unrelenting cyberattacks keep organizations in a defensive posture rather than moving forward with important digital initiatives and deployments. While we won’t cover the myriad security steps every organization must follow in order to stay ahead of individual and state-sponsored hackers, this is one of the most important functions of an ICT department. Organizational leaders who don’t take this seriously by not funding the appropriate security technology or staffing the appropriate security employee headcount do so at their own peril. Needless to say, organizations must prioritize the privacy and protection of data, people (employees and customers), and systems if they want to remain viable. To turn up the heat a bit, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes enforceable on May, 25 2018. This regulation gives control back to EU citizens and residents over their personal data by strengthening data protections for all individuals within the European Union as well as the export of personal data outside the EU. Quite a few companies operating in countries across the globe play it fast-and-loose with the security and privacy of individual data without user consent. This comes to an end in May when companies can be fined up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual revenue, whichever is greater, for violating this regulation. Any company operating in the EU must obtain explicit consent for all data collected from an individual as well as reason/purpose of using and processing that data. Additionally, that user consent may be withdrawn. Many companies around the world haven’t made the necessary changes to their digital systems to be compliant with GDPR and will be in for a rude awakening in 2018. Data privacy and security matters in a big way.
- Making Sense of an Avalanche of Data with Advanced Analytics
While data and analytics systems have been around for decades, the amount of data collected for analysis by organizations has increased exponentially. With a 50x growth rate from machines alone, the Internet of Things has become the newest data source for organizations to analyze. Lots of little data integrated from people, machines and business systems adds up to an overwhelming amount of Big Data to make sense of. Luckily, there are an increasing number of streaming and batch analytics systems and tools to tackle this job. Making this trend better is that most of these technologies are open source and free which helps level the playing field between small, mid-sized and large organizations with varying amounts of money to spend. Head over to Apache.org. Another interesting trend in data science is how Python has surpassed R as the most popular language for Machine Learning. An increase on online courseware, an abundance of scientific libraries, and the fact that Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, means you don’t always have to be a PhD in Statistics to get the job done. Virtually every organization in the world is looking for Machine Learning/Deep Learning expertise, so this trend should help the supply side of this equation. The last analytics trend that is coming on strong in 2018 has to do with where data is analyzed. It will no longer be the exclusive domain of the cloud or large clusters of servers. The need to answer questions and make decisions more quickly is driving analytics of all types out to the Edge. Thanks to Moore’s Law and the need to eliminate latency, more and more edge gateway devices will be performing IFTTT and even Machine Learning predictions (with models trained in the cloud). There’s no shortage of important trends that are simplifying advanced analytics for organizations in 2018.
Clearly, 2018 is going to be a transformational year where properly-equipped decision-makers and leaders can shift their organization into the next gear to accelerate their digital transformation. Hold on tight.
Monetizing the Industrial Internet of Things
I was privileged to moderate a panel discussion on monetizing Industrial #IoT at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle. This year’s event focused on Connected Intelligence and the intersection of Man, Machines and Platforms.
I hosted a panel discussion on Monetizing and Scaling the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Wave with a distinguished panel of guests including:
- Allen Proithis – President at Sigfox
- John Aisien – CEO at Bluecedar
- Russ Green – CTO and Head of Products at SAP Digital Interconnect
- Adam Hertz – Vice President of Engineering at Comcast
In front of large audience we discussed a variety of important topics including:
- Why is industrial IoT moving faster than consumer?
- As the next generation of intelligent endpoints, how are the Mobile and IoT ecosystems blurring?
- How do the various types of wireless connectivity options fit into IIoT solutions?
- How do companies get IoT platforms integrated with their existing systems of record?
- What should organizations be doing to secure their IoT infrastructure?
- What are different ways companies can monetize IIoT?
We had a lively discussion with great questions from the audience. Chetan Sharma, the number one name in Mobile, knows how to put on a top tier conference and his insights were invaluable.
Mobile World Congress 2017 in Pictures
Welcome to beautiful Barcelona for Mobile World Congress 2017 where this year’s event was more about #IoT, VR, #5G and AR while less about #Mobile.
Entrance to the event at the giant Fira Gran Via
Interview with SAP’s Amisha Gandhi discussing IoT
Lenovo is still trying to keep Motorola relevant in the smartphone market
Sony shipped new smartphones but I’m not sure if anyone noticed
Samsung is taking people for a ride with their VR technology
Qualcomm is talking about 5G
Intel is also talking about 5G
Nokia is talking about MulteFire LTE running in unlicensed spectrum
Serving as a judge at IoT Stars hearing pitches from promising IoT startups
Sitting in a Scania connected truck
Harman is connecting cars and much more (even industrial IoT stuff)
Ericsson wants to help connect all your things globally
Gemalto wants to help you with security and connectivity
Interview with VMware IoT VP Mimi Spier
Nokia brings back the 3310
The LoRa Alliance is making great headway in the narrowband IoT space
Libelium is the “go to” company to get all your smart city sensors
A vibration-powered device with GPS, LoRa and other sensors onboard
Attack of the drones
LG tries to get “fly” with its G6
IoT + AI interview with Kevin Benedict from Cognizant
Sigfox is the LoRa pride of France and is disrupting mobile operators
Head down the street to Fira Montjuic to see where the 4YFN action is at
The Four Years from Now (4YFN) event is where you want to go to see what the newest startups are working on
Listen to great speakers in the 4YFN workshop domes
All in all, Mobile World Congress + 4YFN were great events this year and served as a good opportunity to connect with customers, partners and analysts while learning about new technologies.
IoT Stars @ Mobile World Congress 2017
#IoT Stars is a high-profile pitching event for Internet of Things startups during #Mobile World Congress and I had the pleasure of serving as a judge.
If you’ve ever watched “Shark Tank” on TV in the United States, then you’ll have a good idea what this event is all about. IoT Stars is put on by Marc Pous (CEO of theThings.io) and Rudy De Waele (Futurist) and hosted at the Estrella Damm brewery in Barcelona.
My fellow judges included Francesca Bria (CTO City of Barcelona), Rob Van Kranenburg (Founder of IoT Council), Rosalia Simon Navarro (IoT Smart Cities Director at Telefónica) and Anthony Charbonnier (Startups at Sigfox).
We listened to pitches from six IoT startups and peppered them with questions about technology, uniqueness of ideas, business models and product-market fit. The startups we heard from included:
- CHARGIFI (Wireless Charging)
- FLUIDRA CONNECT (Internet of Pools)
- KOLIBREE (Smart Toothbrush)
- SMART PLANTS (Machine Energy Savings)
- U-SMART TOYS (Large Interactive Toys for Playgrounds)
- MOODNODE (Smart Home)
We heard lots interesting ideas, but in the end our jury had to come together and pick one we thought had the most promise.
In the end, we selected Barcelona-native U-Smart Toys. They have a goal to get kids to put down their game controllers and get back outside. Their touchable, connected, gamified outdoor toys look right at home in a playground and get kids moving in a manner reminiscent to the Pokemon Go phenomenon.
It was a great event with innovative new IoT startups and plenty of time to network with a packed house of executives, entrepreneurs, developers, influencers and the press.
Mobile WebViews Close the Performance Gap with Native Apps
New WebViews with the same performance as #mobile browsers mean #web skills are finally viable for building fast, cross-platform hybrid #apps.
Back in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook’s mobile strategy relied too much on HTML5 rather than native apps. While it was a great way to target multiple platforms from a single codebase, Facebook’s hybrid app suffered from poor performance. They used a WebView which is a web browser encapsulated in a software component that can be added to a native app. This allows HTML, JavaScript and CSS to run inside a native app container with access to platform APIs that browser-based apps don’t get, like the camera or push notifications. The problem was these WebViews didn’t share all the features or performance of the full web browsers.
Today, iOS 8+ includes a WKWebView API with access to the Nitro JavaScript JIT compiler and rendering performance equivalent to the Apple Safari browser. The Chromium WebView introduced in Android 4.4 KitKat takes advantage of the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine for dramatic gains. On Windows 10, the WebView based on the Edge browser is the ticket. All these WebView controls offer enhanced HTML5 and CSS3 feature support and significantly better performance to close the gap with native apps. If your corporate designers and developers have web skills, consider using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap or Kaonsoft to rapidly target multiple mobile platforms with a single codebase.
Reduce development expenses by building apps for all mobile platforms with a single codebase by a smaller development team using widely-available web skills that gets your apps to market more quickly and pervasively. Does your company have a hybrid web app strategy to reach more customers faster?
Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”
Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!
Give Smartphone Users Mobile Web Apps or Else!
Replace heavyweight, desktop focused, bandwidth eating, #Web 1.0 sites with lightweight #Mobile Web apps using responsive web design.
Just like their native counterparts, many Web 1.0 apps were built with a particular screen resolution in mind where bigger was better on an endlessly scrolling screen. As time progressed throughout the late 90s, poor performing dial-up modems running at 28.8 kb/s gave way to 56 kb/s modems, followed by 128 kb/s ISDN and then true broadband with the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem technologies. Web designers kept pace with this trend by loading up web pages with heavy graphics leading to slower load times and average page sizes of 2 MB.
Web apps must be designed for mobile first. This means they must load quickly, be cached for performance and use smaller JavaScript libraries and minimal graphics. Amazon says a 100ms increase in load time equates to 1% reduction in sales. Remember, nine out of ten mobile shoppers use the mobile web while in-store and 51% of that research has led to a purchase. Follow responsive web design (RWD) principles via CSS media queries to adapt to the screen size of any device. Hide navigation menus to keep layouts simple and don’t make users pinch, zoom or pan. Google reports over 70% of consumers access websites from their mobile devices while only 20% of companies have optimized their sites for mobile. Clearly, you can increase your company’s engagement with customers and employees alike via the mobile web that’s already in their hands.
Boost user productivity and revenue by delivering a fast web site that adapts itself to the device users are carrying allowing employees to complete tasks and customers to make purchasing decisions. Is your company doing everything it can to reach mobile users?
Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”