Wow! Mass. IoT market really heating up, as PTC grows again!

Posted on 24th July 2014 in Internet of Things, M2M, manufacturing

One of my roles is as founder and co-chair of the Boston/New England IoT Meetup, so I’m always eager to report positive news about IoT news here in the Hub of the Universe.

Big news today: Needham’s PTC is growing again (after its recent $130 million purchase of ThingWorx), buying Foxboro’s Axceda for $170 million, giving them a good base in both IoT platforms and devices. Both of these purchases are dwarfed by the $3.2 billion Google paid for Nest, but they do show that the industry is growing, and that PTC is suddenly emerging as a Player To Be Reckoned With. Wonder what their strategic plan is?

comments: Comments Off on Wow! Mass. IoT market really heating up, as PTC grows again! tags: , , , ,

Capgemini Report: dramatic proof most big companies lag on IoT strategy!

In writing the SAP “Managing the Internet of Things Revolution” i-guide to IoT strategy for C-level executives, my research led me to believe that most big companies were still clueless about the IoT and how it would revolutionize every aspect of their operations.  Now a great report by Capgemini, “The Internet of Things: Are Organizations Ready for a Multi-Trillion Dollar Prize?” seems to answer its own question with a resounding “No!” It’s a must read, whether you’re late to the game, or if you’re looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. Let’s start with the conclusion:

The IoT represents the next evolution of the digital universe. The speed at which nimble startups and Internet players are capturing IoT opportunities should serve as a wake-up call to larger, traditional organizations. Analyst estimates point to a world where startups will dominate the IoT market. Fifty percent of IoT solutions are expected to originate in startups less than 3 years old, by 201732. They may be less nimble, but bigger organizations need to step up to the plate. As with all digital disruptions, being an organization that is in catch-up mode will be a deeply uncomfortable place to be. ” (my emphasis)

Earlier, it emphasizes that success will require both a paradigm shift and mastering new technologies such as big data analysis:

The IoT prize will be won by those who achieve a change in mindset, from a product world to a service world. However, that fundamental mind-shift is not the only requirement. Organizations need to get the right IT infrastructure in place, quickly acquire capabilities in analytics, and strengthen a whole host of functional capabilities. “

Got your attention yet?

The report was most emphatic about an aspect of the IoT that I don’t think I’ve emphasized enough in the past, the shift from products to services. Once again, I look to GE as one big company that “gets it” about the IoT transition, building sensors into its products that rotate, then monetizing the investment by offering real-time data about the products’ operations to customers so that they can optimize their operations — and charging for that data.  The study said that within a year after GE began offering its “Predictivity” line of IoT services in 2012, it generated $290 million in revenues.

One of the reasons why I really like the analysis is that it zeros in on a range of management issues that executives must address to capitalize on the IoT.

The study of more than 100 US and European companies reported that most don’t have the in-house expertise to make the switch from selling products to offering services:

“They now need to be able to envision new services, develop commercial models and design service contracts that result in continuous revenue streams. Our discussions with senior executives revealed that these are not areas of strength for many product- centric organizations.”

In particular, it targeted salespeople as a problem area: “For IoT solutions, a sales force needs to be comfortable in articulating the value proposition and potential benefits, which is critical to convincing often-reluctant customers to pay for a new class of services.” Customer support will also need to be beefed up — and delivered faster to customers who come to expect real-time data.

 The research showed that most companies were only in the early stages of IoT implementation — if at all. Fewer than 30% support remote operation of devices, and fewer than 40% use sensor data to offer customers the kind of performance improvement insights that GE gives.

One major gap that jumped out to me is that most of the big companies just don’t get my “Essential Truth” that you have to begin asking “who else can use this data”?,” and begin opening up proprietary systems so that third parties will enrich your offerings by creating new combinations and complementary offerings. Fewer “than 15% of organizations offer IoT solutions that integrate with third-party products and services.” (my emphasis) If mighty GE can team with Quirky and Electric Imp, what’s your excuse? On the more positive side, the research revealed that nearly 60% use partnerships to develop IoT solutions, so there’s hope.

The gaps are technological as well as human. 67% of the respondents said they don’t have the technology (shout-out to SAP’s HANA) to handle the massive amounts of big data the IoT will generate.

Another obstacle that the report identified was one I’d not come across before: resistance from within. “An executive at a medical technology company outlined how resistance can come less from the customer – and more from within the organization, explaining, ‘We only have 20% resistance from the customer and 80% from our own organization. Consequently, it is a significant challenge to align our existing business processes with new IoT-based service offerings.’”

The final section is an action agenda to get companies up to speed on the IoT:

  1. Put the Right IT Infrastructure in Place and Acquire Data Analytics Capabilities.
  2. Strengthen Functional Capabilities across Product Management, Sales and Marketing and Customer Support
  3. Use Trainings and Incentives to Prepare the Sales Force to Sell IoT Solutions. Augment Product Management Capabilities with Services Expertise and Emphasize Ease-of-Use in Product Design
  4. Develop Customer Support Capabilities to Drive Real-Time Issue Resolution.

Bottom line, Capgemini concluded that a shocking 42% of all companies don’t provide any IoT services. That, in my mind, is a clarion call to action!

You simply must read this report — then act on it.

comments: Comments Off on Capgemini Report: dramatic proof most big companies lag on IoT strategy! tags: , , , ,

Internet of Things interview I did with Jordan Rich

Didn’t realize this had run several weeks ago, but here’s an introduction to the IoT (based on my SAP “Managing the Internet of Things” i-guide) that I did with Jordan Rich of WBZ Radio, who’s also my voice-over mentor.  The examples include the GE Durathon battery plant, “smart aging,” Shodan, the SAP prototype smart vending machine and Ivee. Enjoy!

comments: Comments Off on Internet of Things interview I did with Jordan Rich tags: , , , ,

Sentri: example of how IoT is re-inventing tired home devices

I’ll admit it: I’ve been a design junkie since the first museum show on Shaker furniture that I saw while I was in grad school at Syracuse (come to think of it, that epiphany was really when I visited Denmark with my parents, and saw Shaker-inspired Scandinavian design by Georg Jensen et. al.). I just love things that are sleek and functional.

Sentri home security system

Now, following in the Nest’s footsteps, there’s a neat Kickstarter project, the Sentri home security system, that repeats the Nest’s double-whammy of reinventing a tired product to add IoT functionality, and make it beautiful to boot.

Sorry, ADT, but the only reason anyone would display your monitor prominently would be to scare the Bad Guys: they’re just pug-ugly. As
this picture shows, the Sentri is another work of art — and it is more versatile to boot. A built-in HD camera and sensors not only detect movement, but also temperature (a sudden spike could mean a fire), humidity and air quality.  Like the Nest, it will learn from your behavior.

I like their design principles — would that more products were based on them:

 

  • Simple elegance: The best technologies are the easiest to use. Sentri is ready to use right out of the box – simply plug it in, power on, and download the Sentri smartphone app. No assembly or installation required. Hang up your Sentri on the wall, or set it right on your shelf and let Sentri take care of the rest.
  • Intelligence within reach: Minimize the rate of false alerts and create a security system adapted specifically to you with Sentri’s built-in notification system that not only keeps you in the know, but also learns — and acts on — the alerts that matter most to you.One of the biggest challenges traditional home security systems face is that most alerts delivered are false alarms, leading to many households opting out of security systems, or simply not turning their systems on.  With Sentri, maximize your home’s security with timely and accurate alerts.
  • Empowering you: While safety at home is essential for everyone, we know that your home and what security means is as unique as you are. Take control of how your Sentri looks, feels, and behaves by customizing when and where you want to see certain information and alerts. From choosing the background for your Sentri to showing which sensors are displayed and which smart devices are connected, always stay in control of your home.

Sentri as smart home hub

OK, it doesn’t have wired-in-place switches on each window that could detect a break-in (score one for the incumbents), but on the other hand, you just plug the Sentri in and it’s ready to go. Perhaps most important, there are no monthly monitoring fees: who needs them when you get an instant alert on your smart phone if there’s a problem.  Also, there’s another bonus: it’s designed to be a smart home hub: the illustration shows it also controlling your HUE lights, WeMo sockets, and a Nest.

Before I get too rhapsodic, I’m reminded of the recent headline about a crowdfunding project that wasted millions and didn’t produce a usable project. However, overall, it seems to me that, out of the soup of crowdfunding dollars, IoT reinventions of conventional products, inspired design, and plunging sensor prices, we’re seeing a real revolution in product design and manufacturing that can pay multiple benefits to all concerned! Bravo!

 

 

comments: Comments Off on Sentri: example of how IoT is re-inventing tired home devices tags: , , , , ,

If This, Then That (IFTTT): essential crowdsourcing component to speed IoT development

I’ve been meaning to write about IFTTT (If This, Then That, pronounced like “gift,” but minus the g) for a long time, because I see it as a crucial, if perhaps underappreciated, component to spread the IoT more rapidly and increase its versatility — by democratizing the IoT.

That’s because this cool site embraces one of my favorite IoT “Essential Truths.” We must start asking:

who else could use this data?

I first started asking this question in my book, Data Dynamite, which largely focused on a fundamental paradigm shift away from the old view of data, namely, that you could gain a competitive advantage if you had proprietary information that I didn’t have. It was a zero-sum game. Your win was my loss.  

No longer: now value is created for you if you share data with me and I come up with some other way to use that data that you hadn’t explored. Win-win!

As applied to the IoT, I’ve explored this shift primarily in the context of corporate initiatives, where it becomes possible, for the first time, to share data instantly among everyone who could benefit from that data: everyone within the company, but also your supply chain, your distribution network, and, sometimes, even your customers. 

samples of IFTTT recipes

Here’s where the benefit of sharing data with your customers on a real-time basis comes in: there are a lot more of them than there are of manufacturers, and I can guarantee you that they will come up with clever uses that your staff, no matter how brilliant, won’t. Exhibit A: during last year’s World Series, GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham, did an IFTTT “recipe” that turned her HUE lights red (too bad for her, the Sox scored more runs. Wait until next year…). What Philips researcher would have ever done that on company time?

By harnessing crowdsourcing of ideas, the IoT will progress much faster, because of the variety of interests and/or needs that individuals add to the soup!

So, how’s IFTTT work?

Here’s a brief outline (or go here for details):

  1. a “recipe” is made up of a “trigger” (i.e., if this happens, such as “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook”) and an action (then that happens, such as “create a status message on Facebook.”).
  2. the building blocks for recipes are called channels — 116 as of now, and growing all the time — each of which his its own triggers and actions.  The channels include a wide range of apps and products, such as Nest thermostats or Facebook.

There is a wide variety of recipes on the IFTTT site (you can subscribe to have new ones involving a given channel that interests you sent to you as they are shared) or you can easily create your own — with no programming skill required. How cool is that?

Yes, IFTTT can be fun (“email your mother Foursquare checkins tagged #mom. Useful for brownie points“), but I’m convince that it’s also a critically important tool to speed deployment and impact of the IoT, by harnessing the power of crowdsourcing to complement the work of app developers and device manufacturers.

Now get going!

 

Detailing my “Smart Aging” through the IoT vision

The best-laid plans get canceled due to Summer vacation…

I was supposed to speak to seniors (and those who love or care for them!) today in my dear little burg, Medfield, MA, about my “Smart Aging” through the IoT vision. However, the talk has been postponed til September due to the small number of sign-ups. Oh well, I guess most revolutions start with a whimper, not a bang.

Because I believe so strongly in the idea, I’ve posted the talk (including presenter’s notes) to SlideShare.

Basically, it fleshes out what I’ve written in a number of recent posts, that I believe we can and must meld two aspects of the IoT, Quantified Self wearable devices that measure and record personal health and wellness data 24/7 and smart home devices such as the Nest thermostat and Ivee voice-activated base station, to create a new approach to aging. I defined smart aging as:

using senior-friendly home and health technology to cut your health and living costs,
improve your health and quality of life, and keep you in your own home as long as possible.

I predicted that it can “bring unprecedented health and happiness to our senior years — while saving us  money!”

While there have been efforts for a while to specifically use technology to improve aging, I predicted that

“Smart Aging will instead result from tweaking efforts underway as part of the Internet of Things to improve life for everyone, of all ages. As Joe Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, says, ‘Counterintuitively, making home automation mainstream and cool means that it’s likely to end up in the hands of older adults sooner than if home automation technologies were only designed specifically for older people.’”

(that’s why I suspect that wearables such as the Nike Fuel or prototype MC10 for jocks will be more important for seniors than anything specifically designed for them — and will face fewer obstacles to adoption).

I stressed that there are still important obstacles, not only the security and privacy ones that are essential for ANY IoT product or service, but also some that are specific to seniors, such as preserving their dignity and letting them control who will share access to their data.

I concluded that this approach will pay multiple benefits:

  • Improve your health & fitness
  • Cut your medical bills
  • Build your self-esteem
  • Cut your living costs
  • Let you stay at home, safely.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

comments: Comments Off on Detailing my “Smart Aging” through the IoT vision tags: , , , , ,

Will sports-star wearables make them cool enough for general public?

OK, first an admission of guilt: I don’t synch my Jawbone UP every day (although now that my wife and I are sharing results and challenging each other, that’s subject to change).  Evidently, I’m not alone: I read stats somewhere (can’t remember the source) that about 40-50% of all Quantified Self device users stop using them within the first six months.

But that’s not the big problem: that’s the fact that only a very small percentage of the population ever uses the devices at all, despite their benefits for health and fitness.

Part of the answer, IMHO, is making them sooo simple to use that you’d automatically use them (for example, I like the fact that the Lose It! app nags me every day if I haven’t entered my diet, activity, or weight), but the other factor is creating a cool factor about wearables. I read recently about a VC in Silicon Valley who always wears her Jawbone to cocktail parties because it starts conversations, but Silicon Valley VCs aren’t generally regarded as celebrities in the heartland, so I’m thinking more about sports stars.

biostamp

Now there’s a Boston-area startup, MC10, that might just make that breakthrough.  According to The Boston Globe, the company has a number of 1st-rank sports luminaries as investors/advisors, including former NBA star Grant Hill, hoop coach John Thompson III,  Indianapolis Colts quarterbacks Andrew Luck and Matt Hasselbeck, soccer star Kristine Lilly, and four-time Olympic women’s ice hockey medalist Angela Ruggiero.

The company’s first product is the translucent, stick-on Biostamp, due to be released next year. “The device, a barely visible 2-square-inch patch, is designed to stick on any body part like a second skin and record biometric data from heart rate and hydration levels to muscle activity and sleep patterns.”  It’s likely to replace the current, bulky and obtrusive devices for serious athletes. 

According to The Globe, there is about a dozen companies developing similar devices for jocks.

I’ve got a big collection of ball caps (primarily those of The Team That Shall Not Be Mentioned This Year, the one that “plays” [as it were…] @ Fenway Park), and an equal number of T’s from the same guys. Obviously, fans love to bond with their fav jocks by wearing their apparel, so I’m wondering whether the advent of Biostamps and similar devices will lead to fan apparel with similar devices built in, as worn by their favorites (hmmm: somehow I can’t see comparing my caloric intake with Big Papi …).

I see a lot of guys and gals around Boston with gray hair wearing the same gear, so I suspect the same approach might be a more productive way to get seniors to wear such devices than to design ones specifically for them.

This niche bears watching!

 

comments: Comments Off on Will sports-star wearables make them cool enough for general public? tags: , , , , ,

The New IoT Math: 1 + 1 + 3 — Jawbone UP24 now controls Nest thermostat

A chance conversation about the IoT the other day turned me on to this elegant proof-of-concept that what I call “Smart Aging” to help seniors be healthier and avoid institutionalization is possible: my Jawbone UP bracelet could now control my Nest thermostat (if I had one: with three heating zones in my house, I’m gonna wait until the NEST price drops before I’ll buy them…).

That, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I’m talking about with my concept of “Smart Aging” for seniors, which would combine:

  • Quantified Self devices such as Jawbone UPs, Nike FuelBand, the congestive heart failure necklace,  or the Biostamp sensor (more about that one in a future post!) that will easily and unobtrusively monitor your bodily indicators and, if you choose, report them to your doctor, both to improve diagnoses, and to encourage you to adopt healthy practices such as a daily walk.
  • smart home devices such as the NEST or the voice-activated Ivee hub.

Even better, if device manufacturers get it about one of my Essential Truths about the IoT:  who else could use this data?, they will allow free access to their algorithms, and someone will realize that 1+1=3: the two devices are even more powerful when linked! In this case, the Jawbone UP is powerful, and so is the Nest, but something totally new is possible when they are linked:

“By connecting your UP24 with your Nest Thermostat, the temperature of your house will automatically adjust to a temperature you prefer – the moment you go to bed or wake up.

“Through UP Insights, we have shared the fact that an ideal sleeping environment is cooler, between 65 and 72 degrees. With the Nest integration, we no longer just tell you this fact. We make it a reality. Once your band enters Sleep Mode, your thermostat will kick down to your ideal temperature. And when you wake? You guessed it. Your thermostat will automatically adjust to a warmer temperature… all without leaving your bed.”

Nest-2_thermostatJawbone_UpHow cool (or hot, depending on the season…) is that?

I particularly like it for seniors because of one UP feature: instead of setting a precise wake-up alarm, you also have the option of creating a 30-minute window when it it should vibrate to wake you, with the exact time determined by what the UP determines is the ideal point in your natural sleep cycle.  Some working people on extremely tight morning schedules may not want to take advantage of that option, but for seniors, answering to no one but themselves, that would be an added benefit: get the best possible sleep, AND get up in a warm house (oh, and while you’re at it, why not link in some Phillips HUE lights and a coffee pot plugged in to a Belkin WeMo socket, so that you’ll also have fresh-brewed coffee and a bright kitchen?).  Sweet!

Do the math: one IoT-empowered device is nice, but link several more of them, and 1 + 1 = 3 — or more!

Smart Toothbrush: another example of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should”

I absolutely love my current Braun electric toothbrush, because it (unlike the first one I had, which basically just spun around) has a timer that reminds me to brush each quadrant of my teeth for 30 seconds.  In the past, I never thought about what amount of time was optimal for brushing, let alone monitored how long I actually did so. As a result, I’m confident that I’m really keeping my teeth clean.

smart toothbrush

However, I just don’t get it about why I should transfer that info via Bluetooth to an app. Shouldn’t we be content with the bare minimum of technology that gets us to adopt better health practices, and, where relevant, to transfer that information to our doctors so they can get a better idea of our daily practices and state of health?  Maybe I’m nitpicking, but I do think it’s relevant to relay to your doctor potentially highly-variable data such as your daily Fitbit or Jawbone readings (as patients at certain MGH or Brigham & Womens’ practices can now do), but it seems to me that in the case of toothbrushing, it should be enough to simply provide feedback that lets you know you’re brushing enough, and leave it at that.

Thus, the “connected” toothbrush to me seems to violate one of my “Essential Truth” of the IoT, that “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.”

Again, I realize I may be splitting hairs here distinguishing between reporting some health data and not other. What do you think?  Let me know!

comments: Comments Off on Smart Toothbrush: another example of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should” tags:
http://www.stephensonstrategies.com/">Stephenson blogs on Internet of Things Internet of Things strategy, breakthroughs and management