Creative Connectivity

Hearables. A Lust for Translation

And lo, they spake in many tongues. And verily, some of them even began to ship.

So beginneth the first chapter in the Book of Hearables. We have reached the point where you can buy a device that you put in your ear, which can translate what someone is saying to you in another language in real time. After several years of marketing and hype, consumers are suddenly spoilt for choice, with Waverly’s Pilot, Mymanu’s Clik and Google’s Pixel Buds all appearing within a few weeks of each other. It’s Google recent announcement which has caught the public imagination, but that’s mainly a result of the scale of their marketing machine. With less media attention, other startup companies have been quietly beavering away, mostly in the crowdfunded arena.

Anyone who’s been following the evolution of earbuds over the last few years will have been aware of the trend. After Bragi invented the hearable category with their Dash earbuds, others started to experiment with different features and applications, looking for ways to make the things we stick in our ears do more exciting things than just play music. A startup called Waverly Labs was the first to concentrate on translation, back in June 2016, when they launched a campaign on Indiegogo for their Pilot earpieces, which promised to translate between five languages – English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Others weren’t far behind, with Doppler (sadly deceased), Mymanu, Human, Inspear, Bragi, Lingmo, TimeKettle and a host of others joining in the race to wean us off Spotify and Pandora and start us talking to our fellow mortals. (Although if we’d rather listen to music than talk to people who speak the same language, it’s questionable whether there’s a massive market in wanting to talk to those who don’t.)

Is Sigfox the Uber of the IoT?

I’ve been wondering for some time how long it will be before Sigfox ditches their own proprietary protocol and adopts a different standard, probably going for NB-IoT. Whilst many may question why they’d do it, making the assumption that the Sigfox protocol is their crown jewels, I’d question that assumption. Last week, at the Sigfox World Expo in Prague, they made an announcement that suggests that that day may not be too far away. I firmly believe that it has to happen, because Sigfox’s business model is looking a lot like Uber’s, which means going for global domination by any means possible. The means to that end is probably not based on their own proprietary protocol.

It’s been a bad day for Smart Meters in Britain

This evening, the BBC’s Watchdog Live programme did a follow up to its previous investigation on fires that have potentially been caused by poorly executed installations of smart meters. Since the original investigation they’ve been contacted by more people affected and tonight showed the devastating consequences for two families, whose homes had been gutted by fire – one from a faulty gas meter installation, and the second attributed to a faulty electricity meter installation.

The UK may need to replace 20 million smart meters

The fact that 20 million smart meters may need to be replaced may sound bizarre, especially given the fact that so far only around eight million have been installed as part of the GB Smart Metering deployment, but unfortunately it looks as if it could be true. It’s yet another indication of the scale of mismanagement within this programme, which reminds you of a line from Steve Aylett’s “Bigot Hall” – “Ignorance run like a well-drilled army”. Ministers and civil servants are trying to deny the fact, but the project is starting to unravel. Unless it is cancelled, the only thing it will produce is an inexorable rise in consumer bills as energy companies install wave after wave of obsolete meters.

BEIS (the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy), which gobbled up DECC last year, has been trying to assume a brave face, using their PR mouthpiece – Smart Energy GB, to put out the message that everything is going well in the world of smart metering. However, there has been a growing number of questions being asked. The national press is regularly reporting cases of dangerous installations which have caused fires, smart meters which don’t work and cases where consumers are receiving bills which are vastly more inaccurate than from their old dumb meters. The trade press has highlighted other issues – notably concerns about a lack of experienced installers and the more important questions about whether the current smart meters will need to be replaced.

The need to replace the meters currently being installed is a question that the industry has been keen to sweep under the carpet. Cracks started to appear in that approach at the end of April, when the DCC – the company run by Capita and which will receive data from the smart meters finally admitted to the BBC’s Money Box programme that none of the six million smart meters that had then been installed were likely to work with its software. If that is true, it means they will need to be replaced. It’s the first time that anyone involved in the project had been prepared to break rank and admit the truth. Within the industry, it’s been a well-known fact that the meters currently being installed are obsolete and likely to need to be replaced, but like the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, no-one has dared to point out that the whole programme is built on a succession of fictions, lest it all comes toppling down. What no-one is yet admitting, is that these numbers may just be the tip of the iceberg. The final count could well be over 20 million.

Microsoft’s Fear Of Missing Out, or How NOT to design a Smart Thermostat

Last week, with a fair degree of razzmatazz and press coverage, Microsoft launched a smart thermostat called Glas. Except it wasn’t really Microsoft’s. And whilst it might be pretty, it certainly isn’t smart.

If you look behind the promotional video, it’s clear that it’s not really driven by any desire to be smart. It’s come out of Johnson Controls, who have been designing dumb thermostats for many years, and it perpetuates the dumb elements of control, which means it won’t save users as much money as a proper smart device could. However, small things like the truth didn’t stop them headlining it as “reinventing the thermostat”. I suspect the only reason that Glas exists is that Microsoft are currently in a poor third place in getting their Cortana speech recognition capability into the market. I quite like Cortana, but compared with Amazon and Google’s success in persuading consumer product manufacturers to support their offerings, Cortana is definitely an also-ran.

What you see if you watch the video carefully is an outdated control system, a user interface that was probably inspired by Bishop Berkeley and an attempt to break the second law of thermodynamics. All of which details appear to have slipped past the rose-tinted editorial glasses of the technology press, who have just said “Shiny – want one!”. So let me explain why it’s another smart opportunity missed.

Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington…

Noel Coward, the English playwright and actor, described the motivation behind writing his most famous song as: “Some years ago when I was returning from the Far East on a very large ship, I was pursued around the decks every day by a very large lady. She showed me some photographs of her daughter – a repellent-looking girl, and seemed convinced that she was destined for a great stage career. Finally, in sheer self-preservation, I locked myself in my cabin and wrote this song – “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington”.

I know how he felt. As I spend more and more time in meetups, startup conferences, incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators, it feels that our industry has adopted the same rose-tinted spectacles in the belief that every Tom, Dick and Harriet can be trained to be an entrepreneur. Hence the following update:

Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington.