Month: December 2012

Connected Things: a decade of progress?

The above video, the infamous Legomercial, is about to celebrate its ten year anniversary. In January 2003, over the span of a week, I built the Lego sets, shot the stop motion using a Lego webcam, wrote the entire score using an Alesis Quadrasynth and produced the video using VideoWave, the rendering taking hours on an AMD Duron 700MHz. We played the video in a non-stop loop for two days at our booth at the Davis Centre of the University of Waterloo as we showed off our fourth-year design project.

The project: a web-connected home automation system. Three engineering classmates and I built a web server, an embedded client, a digital controller and a few analog sensors and actuators. Essentially, you could use a web page to turn electrical outlets on and off in your home. You could read your thermostat remotely. And you could remotely trigger the Ferris Bueller doorbell message to play off of a CD-ROM. And it all worked!

I bring this up because at LeWeb’12 in Paris, SmartThings demoed remotely turning on and off a Christmas tree in Minnesota by using a smartphone. It was a great demo with a sexy mobile app and the audience loved it. But it gave me flashbacks to 2003 when people told us we were late to the game and that X10 already enabled the connected home. So if the technology exists, and people are excited by the idea, why are there still so few connected Things in the home?

Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge asks the age old question “why doesn’t my fridge have the Internet yet?” In the Legomercial, we show the connected oven (Samsung has now built this), the doorbell camera (now crowd-fundable as Doorbot) and the pet feeder (which you can have today as FeedandGo). So there’s been some progress, but contrast that to the following:

  • the mobile device in your pocket today is more powerful than the computer used to create and render the Legomercial and it even shoots photos and videos
  • we had to build and host our own web server for the system to work whereas today you could have that up and running on AWS in minutes
  • in the Legomercial we show the Netscape browser (we avoided IE back then too), Web 2.0 has come a long, long way since then

All this to say that the idea of connecting Things is as cool as ever, but progress lags far, far behind mobile devices, the cloud and the web. So, will 2013 finally be the year of the Internet of Things? Will it be consumer applications that lead the way? Will GE’s Industrial Internet or Cisco’s Internet of Everything lead the way? Time will tell, but one thing’s for sure, it’s not technology that’s holding us back.

LeWeb’12 Paris: Location and Context

LeWeb'12 conference floor

In the photo above you see the conference floor at LeWeb’12 in Paris, aka the place where you go to get food, coffee and wine. The previous sentence demonstrates the importance of location and context. This blog post is about just that!

The theme at LeWeb’12 being the Internet of Things, there was no shortage of presentations on Things that connect to the Internet. Those Things may be sensors or actuators, or, literally by definition, anyThing. Regardless of what they are, in all cases, these Things are exchanging information, they’re creating, consuming and moving data.

Data scientist DJ Patil opened his presentation with a slide of the Internet of Things, with the word Internet crossed out and replaced with the word Data. He argued that it’s not just about connecting Things and generating data, but adding context and putting the data to good use. In fact, that’s quite possibly a greater challenge than connecting the Things in the first place!

Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case followed his presentation with excellent complementary arguments. She spoke of the need for frictionless data correlation. In other words, what good is it if the Data of Things lives in multiple, separate silos? Another key argument: “location should empower people”. Imagine the “invisible button” where the presence of a person (or Thing) is enough to trigger an action. Location matters!

Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari also spoke of the “importance of place”. He presented the City Lens project which visually augments your surroundings with contextual data. According to the Nokia booth staff, this is equally applicable to indoor environments, which may explain Nokia co-launching the In-Location alliance three months earlier.

Finally, during Om Malik’s interview of Matt Mullenweg, the Internet of Things discussion turned toward the effects of an increasingly connected world on individuality. Fortunately, Om thinks the IoT will create hyper-personalized experiences rather than turn humans into conformist robots. And that is our hope too: by creating more data with full accessibility, and by including location and establishing context, the hyper-connected world becomes a progressive hyper-personalized world for its human (cyborg) inhabitants!

LeWeb’12 Paris: Connecting Things

Notre Dame has nothing to do with connected things...

What Things are being connected and how? Here’s a brief summary from our perspective at LeWeb’12:

SmartThings

SmartThings may look like connected home meets Kickstarter, but at LeWeb they announced a $3M round for a much larger vision: the Open Physical Graph. It’s great to see investors excited about an open ecosystem, and this may very well be the catalyst for major advances that extend far beyond the Internet of Things!

Ninja Blocks

Ninja Blocks is another Kickstarter hardware project that’s making big waves. At LeWeb they announced that they’re opening not only their software but also their hardware. Now anyone can build on an already capable platform that includes a connected computer (Ninja Block) and an if-this-then-that style web interface (Ninja Cloud). While the current examples lean towards connected home, it’s clear that the platform can be applied to much, much more.

SIGFOX

SIGFOX is an M2M infrastructure for Things, and it already covers just about the whole of France, requiring only a thousand or so base stations. Things can communicate over kilometers, sending messages of a few bytes. And their target is a $1/year/Thing and a $1 device. If you’ve ever priced hardware and plans for M2M over cellular, you’ll appreciate how disruptive this is!

Sen.se

Sen.se is an open platform in beta that explicitly intends to extend beyond Things, including humans, environments and much more in the mix. SmartThings and Ninja Blocks have far more advanced platforms, but perhaps their twist on the vision will generate traction. They ended their presentation with the tagline “The Meaning of Life”™ (yes, with the trademark), but gave due credit to Monty Python.

Orange MyPlug

The MyPlug from French giant Orange is a connected-home play that has the advantage of easy configuration: it uses a cellular plan with three years of service included in the purchase price of 80 Euros. Conclusion: the carriers can fight SIGFOX’s cost/simplicity advantage (at least for non-battery-operated devices) but, without an open platform, can this ever become more than a novelty/experiment?

Koubachi

Let’s wrap up with the Koubachi, a $99 WiFi plant health monitor. That description alone highlights many of the problems of the present-day IoT. First, if the sensor costs more than the Thing it’s monitoring, the economics simply don’t work. Second, simple sensors shouldn’t speak WiFi (did you enjoy that alliteration?). In fairness, CEO Philipp Bolliger acknowledges this fact, lamenting the lack of a ubiquitous infrastructure for Things. And finally, how will this device connect to and communicate with the open platforms described above?

In summary, it’s wonderful to see so many visions already extending beyond the Internet of Things, but then you have Nest CEO Tony Fadell suggesting that the Internet of Things is a decade away. As is often the case, it’s less an issue of the technology being ready and more an issue of society being ready. The hyper-connected world needs to become far more compelling if we want it to percolate to the top of everyone’s wishlist anytime soon!

LeWeb’12 Paris

LeWeb'12 Paris Banners

The theme of this year’s LeWeb conference in Paris was the Internet of Things, how about that! A few months ago we would have hesitated to mention the term “Internet of Things” as it didn’t seem to mean anyThing to even the technically inclined. Yet today, that term has become a buzzword in the tech and startup communities. Thanks LeWeb for helping spread the word!

Having had the pleasure of attending, I must commend the event organisers, Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, on the execution, the speaker lineup and the catering! It’s a nice touch when the cheese is blue rather than orange. 😉

The biggest news to come out of the event: Instagram’s Twitter card removal. Certainly not a euro-IoT themed story, but it was supported by a fair bit of discussion around the future of social networking and the protectionist strategies of the giants. Probably a good discussion for the IoT to learn from: it’s not difficult to imagine Things being connected to different networks for different reasons all with insufficient integration. At least that’s where it looks like the fledgling IoT is headed right now.

Euro vs. US was an underlying theme, with questions about when Europe will produce a Facebook, if at all. It seems that even with EU integration, cross-border expansion is far from trivial, and labour laws get in the way of the “hire fast, fire faster” mantra. The discussion simply strengthened my affinity for Montreal. It’s good to sit on top of an accessible US market and enjoy some socio-economic advantages as well as cheese that’s the right colour.

And on the theme of the Internet of Things, well, things are moving forward. Several IoT startups had noteworthy announcements, and the list of connected things included lights, plants, electrical outlets, thermostats and even brainwave-sensors. Some very cool stuff, but certainly nothing to make anyone say “OMG this changes everyThing!” Had that been the case, it surely would have demoted the I-can’t-tweet-a-picture-of-my-lunch story from the headlines.