IFTTT DO apps: neat extension of my fav #IoT crowdsourcing tool!

Have I told you lately how much I love IFTTT? Of course!  As I’ve said, I think they are a phenomenal example of my IoT “Essential Truth” question: who else can use this data?

IFTTT_DO_buttonNow, they’ve come up with 3 new apps, the “DO button,” “DO camera,” and “DO Note,” that make this great tool even more versatile!

With a DO “recipe,” you simply tap on the appropriate app, and the “recipe” runs. Presto! Change-o!

As a consultant who must bill for his time, I particularly like the one that lets you “Track Your Work hours” on Google Drive, but you’re sure to find your own favorites in categories such as play, work, home, families, and essentials. Some are just fun, and some will increase your productivity or help manage your household more easily (hmm: not sure where “post a note to your dog’s timeline” fits in (aside to my sons: feel free to “send notes to your data via email”.  If past experience is any indication, there should be many, many more helpful “Do” recipes as soon as users are familiar with how to create them.

As I’ve said before, it’s no reflection on the talented engineers at HUE, NEST, et. al., but there’s simply no way they could possibly visualize all the ways that their devices could be used and/or combined with others, and that’s why IFTTT, by adding the crowdsourcing component and democratizing data, is so important to speeding the IoT’s deployment.

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My #IoT predictions for 2015

I was on a live edition of “Coffee Break With Game-Changers” a few hours ago with panelists Sherryanne Meyer of Air Products and Chemicals and Sven Denecken of SAP, talking about tech projections for 2015.

Here’s what I said about my prognostications:

“I predict that 2015 will be the year that the Internet of Things penetrates consumer consciousness — because of the Apple Watch. The watch will unite both health and smart home apps and devices, and that will mean you’ll be able to access all that usability just by looking at your watch, without having to fumble for your phone and open a specific app.

If Apple chooses to share the watch’s API on the IFTTT – If This Then That — site, the Apple phone’s adoption – and usability — will go into warp speed. We won’t have to wait for Apple or developers to come up with novel ways of using the phone and the related devices — makers and just plain folks using IFTTT will contribute their own “recipes” linking them. This “democratization of data” is one of the most powerful – and under-appreciated – aspects of the IoT. In fact, Sherryanne, I think one of the most interesting IoT strategy questions for business is going to be that we now have the ability to share real time data with everyone in the company who needs it – and even with supply chain and distribution networks – and we’ll start to see some discussion of how we’ll have to change management practices to capitalize on this this instant ability to share.

(Sven will be interested in this one) In 2015, the IoT is also going to speed the development of fog computing, where the vast quantities of data generated by the IoT will mean a switch to processing data “at the edge,” and only passing on relevant data to the cloud, rather than overwhelming it with data – most of which is irrelevant.

In 2015 the IoT is also going to become more of a factor in the manufacturing world. The success of GE’s Durathon battery plant and German “Industry 4.0” manufacturers such as Siemans will mean that more companies will develop incremental IoT strategies, where they’ll begin to implement things such as sensors on the assembly line to allow real-time adjustments, then build on that familiarity with the IoT to eventually bring about revolutionary changes in every aspect of their operations.

2015 will also be the year when we really get serious about IoT security and privacy, driven by the increasing public concern about the erosion of privacy. I predict that if anything can hold back the IoT at this point, it will be failure to take privacy and security seriously. The public trust is extremely fragile: if even some fledgling startup is responsible for a privacy breach, the public will tend to tar the entire industry with the same brush, and that could be disastrous for all IoT firms. Look for the FTC to start scrutinizing IoT claims and levying more fines for insufficient security.”

What’s your take on the year ahead? Would love your comments!

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IoT ideal example of “recombinant innovation”!

I’m currently reading Erik Brynjolfsson (say that one fast three times…) and Andy McAfee’s brilliant The Second Machine Age, which I highly recommend as an overview of the opportunities and pitfalls of what they call “brilliant technologies.”

While they don’t specifically mention the IoT, I was riveted by one section in which they contrasted current digital innovation with past technologies, using economist Paul Romer‘s term “recombinant innovation”:

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that make them more valuable…. Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new … ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new … ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered… Possibilitities do not merely add up, they multiply.” (my emphasis)

I felt like Dr. Pangloss, who was surprised to learn he’d been speaking prose all his life: I realized Romer’s term and definition was a more elegant version of what I’ve written before, especially about IFTTT, about an Essential Truth of the IoT — that sharing data is critical to achieving the IoT’s full potential. IFTTT is a great example of Romer’s argument in practice: individuals are “taking resource and rearrang(ing) them in ways that make them more valuable.” As Brynjolfsson and McAfee write:

“.. digital innovation is recombinant innovation in its purest form. Each development becomes a building block for future innovations. Progress doesn’t run out; it accumulates. And the digital world doesn’t respect any boundaries. It extends into the physical one, leading to cars and planes that drive themselves, printers that make parts, and so on….We’ll call this the ‘innovation-as-building-block’ view of the world..” (again, my emphasis)

This is such a powerful concept. Think of Legos — not those silly ones that dominate today, where they are so specialized they can only be used in making a specific kit — but the good ol’ basic ones that could be reused in countless ways. It’s why I happen to believe that all the well-thought-out projections on the IoT’s potential size probably are on the low side: there’s simply no way that we can predict now all the creative, life-saving, money-saving, or quality-of-life-enhancing ways the IoT will manifest itself until people within and outside of organizations take new IoT devices and use them in IFTTT-like “Recipes” that would never have occurred to the devices’ creators.  But beware: none of this will happen if companies use proprietary standards or don’t open their APIs and other tools to all those who can benefit.

How exciting!

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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!

 

Nice long NPR piece on Stantander

Posted on 4th June 2013 in cities, government, Internet of Things, transportation

One of my sons turned me on to this long NPR piece this morning about Santander. Thought it did a good job of covering the mix of top-down (the city’s installations of sensors) and bottoms-up (the active involvement of citizens through apps to report potholes, etc.) that a make up a robust IoT program.

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