Internet-connected cars

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the Internet of Things is the speech of Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motors Company, on TED from March 2011 where he talks about his vision of how technologies can reduce air pollution by minimizing traffic jams and time spent on finding parking spots. 

 Amongst different technologies he mentioned I would like to talk about two concepts that inspired me the most.

·         Smart Vehicle Network      Cars communicate to each other and the vehicle that hits a traffic jam sends signals to vehicles behind it so they can reroute before it’s too late.

                            

·         Smart Parking System    A network that connects parking slots and cars (or smartphones) and shows all free parking places in your neighborhood and you can book one in advance. 

 I tried to find if there has been any progress in the implementation of the above-mentioned concepts. Especially in the area of Smart Vehicle Network, that was being tested at the time. And indeed Ford Motors organized an event in June 2011 where it presented a demo version of the talking  car tech, but announced that technology will not be available for use untill 2016. But will other car manufacturers accept this standard if Ford can successfully implement the technology in its vehicles? Or each of them will try to create their own platform. Situation becomes more interesting because recently wireless carriers, such as Verizon and  AT&T, already started to invest in connected-car technologies. May be we will see new battle for the industry standard very soon.

I found a company that already offers a working Smart Parking System called FastPrk.  
Video: Smart Parking

And this system is already tested in Barcelona.  
Video: Barcelona Activa

The system works based on sensors embeded in each parking bay in the street. When a car is parking or leaving, information is being sent and updated in database (more details in the picture below) .

Those who drive in cities can't underestimate benefits of this system. Now it is turn of city municipalities and companies that operate paid parkings to make this a reality. Implementation of this kind of systems is benefitial for drivers because they waste less time on seeking parking spaces, for operators of parkings because they can increase utilization rates, and for whole population because of less air pollution.

Keeping cool with the Internet of Things

The cold bothers me. Living in Melbourne my house was never warm so that bothered me greatly.

I remember driving home on cold winter nights, snug in the heated interior of my car, and dreading arriving home to my cold, unheated house. I would huddle in my car outside the door, working up the courage to leave the comforts of the heated cabin and wishing that SOMEHOW, the heating would have been turned on and my house would be warm.    

And then there were those days Melbourne’s temperature dropped by more than 20°C in an hour.  I might be out and about in a summer dress, when the heavens would open and the temperature would drop faster than I could ever imagine. I’d scurry home, again wishing that SOMEHOW, my heating would be on and my house warm.  

There was a solution to the first of my problems. I could leave the heaters on all day - neither an environmentally sound nor, given the exorbitant cost of electricity in Victoria, a budget friendly option.  I could install timers on the heaters, and set them to turn on at a particular time.  While useful, this was still not ideal – I was rarely home at the same time every night, and so would overuse. I had never come across a solution to the second of my problems.   

Until I heard of NEST, a business that uses the Internet of Things to provide a solution to both of my problems. 

NEST offers a thermostat that links your home’s heating and cooling devices to the internet.   You can then access your account over the internet to adjust the temperature of the home.

Imagine working late, and being able to turn your heating on with your smartphone just as you leave work, arriving home to a nice, warm house without unnecessary electricity costs.  Or being able to turn on your air-conditioning while mobile at just the right time, so the house is cool when you arrive home.  Or going on holiday, and forgetting to turn off the pre-programmed heating or cooling – now simply turn it off from your phone.

But the benefits of NEST don’t stop there.

NEST developers recognize that programmed thermostats give excellent electricity savings, but that few people program their thermostats to achieve the cost savings.  And so they made the NEST device smart. In the first few days of use, it learns your schedule and what temperatures you like at what times. It then creates a personalized schedule, automatically adjusting the thermostat so you don’t need to. 

Combined with the ability to control your device from outside the home, this equals serious electricity cost savings.  NEST estimates that this system can reduce heating and cooling costs by around 20%.  At Australia’s prices, that’s a significant amount of money.

And I’m not the only one who is impressed by NEST – Google just handed over $3.2 billion to acquire the company in a bid to move into the home automation market.

Clearly Google valued the nascent technologies and vision of NEST’s founders more than the immediate opportunity of a smart thermostat. This is why it will be so interesting to follow where Google and NEST move next, and which home devices they are able to make a part of the “The Internet of Things”.     

The 19 Trillion Dollar Market

The Internet of Things: 19 Trillion Dollar Market

Your fridge will soon buy your groceries!

Today,we are going to talk about food (I love food!), and how IoT (Internet of Things) can help food businesses to expand their operations and increase the number of point of sales in an economically efficient way.

An American start up called Pantry provides food companies with a very smart business solution to sell their products unattended/without staff.

You can discover their product in the following video:

The “intelligent” fridge uses the RFID technology to charge the customers. They will be billed what they removed from the fridge.

Value is not only added for the customer, who can assess and check the food  before actually buying it, but for the company too. Indeed Pantry  provides its customers with analytics enabling the food providers to optimize restocking, identify trends, and ensure freshness. They also provide up to minute inventory and sales data. This data will be used to optimize operations and increase both customer satisfaction and profits.

In the near future we can imagine a company like Corte Ingles in Spain (of Whole Foods in the USA). To develop the same kind of technology where a customer would fill in a database their standard fridge inventory, and every week Corte Ingles would only refill the items that are no longer recorded as being in the fridge. The company could also send text messages to the customers when there is a shortage of an item in fridge reminding them to do pick it at the store.

A new breed of products are coming our way

In previous blogs we have focused on the consumer side of the Internet of Things (IoT), but what about businesses, what are they doing with the information provided? As products start to connect to the Internet, the amount of information available becomes exponential. A phone is no longer a  communication tool, its a database carrying more information than any customer study. The iPhone is more advanced than the Apollo computers that put the man on the moon. Actually, the comparison is better with the IBM PC XT launch in 1979.  Today’s technology is equipped with sensors, software, and digital user interfaces that are now connected to the Internet and each other. What this will mean? How will products of the future look like? Who is using this information?

The iPad was the world first tablet computer. Tablets are mobile computers with display, circuitry and battery in a single unit. They are built around a touchscreen that replaces the mouse and keyboard.  In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad to the market.  Critics received the iPad with mixed feelings, making both the list of 10 worst products of 2010 and the best product list. By 2013, 193 million tablets were being sold yearly. What changed? How can a completely new product become so popular? How can a company led by a man like Steve Jobs, who constantly was saying that “people don't know what they want until you show it to them” could launch such a product, the answer: the IoT.

Today information is a grasp away from businesses. Information is generated in everything that we use and is connected to the Internet.  Even if we do not realize it, information is being gathered, collected and used by most corporations.

According to the article “Stop Bothering Your Customers To Learn About Your Products”, from Forbes Magazine, the success of a company will be based on unleashing the “Voice of the Product (VoP) – to capture, analyze and capitalize on what the product is saying” and change the objective from “talking to the customer about your product, to talking to your product about the customer”.

The iPad was one of the first successful stories of the IoT and VoP. But the question will remain on who can unlock the power of the 50 billion devices estimated to be connected at the end of the decade, and who will adapt the most to the transformation requirements needed to create, operate, and service the smart, connected devices of the IoT. For those that get it right, the future represents a huge opportunity to create advantageous products and services.

According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, the IoT has the potential to unleash as much as $6.2 trillion in new global economic value annually by 2025. The firm also projects that 80 to 100 percent of all manufacturers will be using IoT applications by then, leading to potential economic impact of as much as $2.3 trillion for the global manufacturing industry alone.

Improved Service, Happier Customers

Nowadays, most Internet of Things devices in the market serve consumers and allow us to have a “connected life” we could of only dreamed of a decade back. From tapping on our smartphones miles away from our home we can control heating and air conditioning, switch the lights on or off, and see if someone has really broken into our place when the alarm went off or if its just the neighbor’s cat sneaking into our kitchen. Although this undoubtedly is pretty cool, and makes us, normal consumers, feel as we’re living in the age of the Jetsons, the power of the IoT goes way, way beyond the confines of our personal lives, and is of great use for enterprises, especially service providers. Devices connected to the Internet will allow these kind of companies to closely monitor how much of their service we actually consume, and constantly and immediately modify their offer according to our behavior.

Progressive Auto Insurance, in the United States, is one of these companies that have capitalized on the IoT. As its name implies, Progressive sells car insurance, and used to calculate consumers’ insurance premium based on their credit score, assuming that those of us who were responsible spenders, were also responsible in other areas of our lives, including how we drive. This represented losses to Progressive every time they insured a person smart with their money but wreckless with their driving, and also led them to overcharge a person burdened by loans on a house they just bought, but great at the wheel. The solution:  yes, ladies and gentlemen, the IoT!

When Progressive realized that credit score and driving behavior were not always correlated, they began to offer their clients a “Snapshot”, which consists on having a small device plugged into the USB port of their car, and monitoring how they drive in order to calculate a more accurate insurance premium. This device is in constant interaction with Progressive’s Control Center, where they keep track of how you’re driving. Things such as distance driven, how many times you hit the brakes hard, and the number of miles you drive between midnight and 4am, make you a higher risk client, and increase the premium they will charge you next year. But, for example, if you mostly use your car for your short, daily commute to the office, and are, in general terms, a responsible driver, the IoT could represent a saving of up to 30% on your car insurance. And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to save some cash without drastically changing their daily habits?

The question now being asked is if this will become an industry standard. Assuming we’re responsible drivers, we will be lured by the possible discount we can get from our insurance company if they monitor our driving. But, even though Progressive says that they are not tracking your speed or your location, the fact that if they wished they could makes us a little iffy about it.  In the end, as with most debates concerning IoT, it all boils down to how protective we are with our privacy. But, if we trust the companies with which we do business, as we have been doing for centuries, the IoT will allow them to tailor their product offering to our specific need; which, in the end, will do more good than harm in our daily lives.

eHealth - ‘Humanization of Technology’

Since 2008 there are more objects connected to the Internet than people in the world and this figure will hit 50 billion by 2020. This phenomenon could not have been more aptly named - ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), as it has made the virtual Internet we know more physical and tangible than ever. This is the ‘humanization of technology’. Finally, after years of people struggling to make use of unfamiliar technologies, technology in healthcare will become mobile, miniature and more effective.

In healthcare, the possibilities are so great, that we really need to imagine a few finite use cases to prioritize and illustrate likely, near-term scenarios. Today, more than one billion adults worldwide may be classified as obese, a condition in which their weight imperils their health. Imagine a wrist or armband that senses vital signs such as pulse, blood pressure, red blood cell counts, and glucose and cholesterol levels—can even monitor activity levels. If walking is a prescribed benefit, the user might be reminded to do so. If medications should be taken at intervals, the user might be alerted to optimal timing. Home, office or mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers might provide the robust connectivity needed for accessing a patient’s medical history, uploaded by a medical professional or fitness advisor, where the medical device could synthesize it into health advisories or alerts.

Probably the biggest, and most pragmatic, use is telemedicine, specifically for ‘wellness management,’ or actively monitoring patients 24/7. Top health conditions where telemedicine is already playing a role is active heart monitoring and blood pressure monitoring for at-risk patients, automated glucose monitoring for diabetes patients, prescription compliance applications to eliminate wasteful re-prescribing, and sleep apnea support for investigatory and direct courses of treatment. When you start thinking about connected medical devices, the world of “what’s possible” really does open up. In the case of prosthetic limbs, for example, embedded devices could deliver proactive maintenance alerts to patients and surgeons, as well as provide manufacturers with new information about how prosthetics “really” get used, what kind of wear and tear they experience and where the stress points are. The outcome here is to continuously improve how artificial limbs get made. There’s another curious opportunity for telemedicine in supporting the trend towards “Medical Tourism.” Many first-world patients are already going abroad for surgical procedures. While counterintuitive, certain pockets of the Third World offer extremely high-quality, low-cost surgical specialties. India is renowned for heart and lung procedures for example; Eastern Europe has a reputation for high-end orthopedics. Telemedicine can help make this process more of a managed experience for patients and provide greater psychological comfort by connecting them with their actual doctors both pre- and post-procedure. Eventually, telemedicine may allow for data integration directly to the patients’ primary care physicians. Better management of congestive heart failure alone could reduce hospitalization and treatment costs by a billion dollars annually in the United States.

The likely outcome of these advancements is greater access to better patient care, reduced costs and, ultimately, longer, healthier lives due to the disease prevention and management. As no one entity will have the expertise or capital to develop this emerging vision of the IoT and its application across so many vertical markets, an ecosystem of partners must evolve to bring products and services to market. But there’s little doubt that advancements now in the works will revolutionize medicine, as it has computing and communications. Finally, the “humanization of technology” will offer that longer, better life we’ve all dreamed of.

The Internet of Things

Let’s kick off the first of many blog posts on the internet of things with a quick definition, and an even quicker and less educated projection on the future. The internet of things is the cute turn-of-phrase the whole world simultaneously decided to use to describe traditionally network-free stuff which has been retrofitted to connect to a larger network we all know as the interweb. I know, traditionally everything was disconnected not too long ago, but nobody is all that impressed with your Blackberry email checking abilities, so just think of the things that you wouldn’t normally consider to be wifi enabled and go with it.

Now we’re cooking with gas. Speaking of gas, do you know how much you used last month? Well, maybe, but only if you got a bill or had the sudden undeniable urge to go read your meter and compare it with last month’s numbers. Actually, does your gas company even know how much you used? Unless they send somebody around to read the meter, probably not. Enter the IOT. A connected gas meter could just keep track of your usage at all times. Want to know how much you’ve used this month? Just check the logs? Want that creepy guy in the white van with tinted windows and a good inch of crack out of your life for good? The gas company doesn’t have to send any more future criminals into your basement; the meter just sends them the reading at the end of the month. This is your life improved by the IOT.

Okay, great. No more sketchy dudes in your basement. Theoretically a bit more control over your gas using habits (although really does anybody care that much?). Life is good right?

The elephant in the room is, of course, privacy. Not just privacy, but security. Not just privacy and security, but the potential destruction of the human race by sentient gas meters. There’s a whole herd of elephants in the room. Suffice it to say that this is an issue. I’m not suggesting that your gas usage is all that interesting to all that many people, but for that very reason the information probably isn’t very secure. Let’s extrapolate out and think about a whole house of connected stuff. Your medicine cabinet keeps an inventory and you just added fungicide to the mix, is that information you want out there in the world?

So there are kinks. On the upside your medicine cabinet would send you a reminder to buy more fungicide when you started running low.

Like most (all?) new tech, the internet of things will have serious pros and cons. It’s up to users to make the most of the best, mitigate the worst, and above all prevent an apocalyptic uprising of self-aware refridgerators.