Creative Connectivity

Pressure grows to stop GB Smart Metering

It’s taken a long time for the bubble to burst, but there are signs that reality is starting to break through the Panglossian fixed grins of the British smart metering establishment. As readers of this site will know, I’ve been critical of the GB programme. I have no issue with smart meters per se, but what is being proposed for deployment in Britain before 2020 is unlikely to offer any of the cited benefits. Instead it’s likely to add over £11 billion to the energy bills of English, Welsh and Scottish consumers.

DECC, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, have spent much of the last five years fending off criticism and fighting Freedom of Information requests to explain how they came up with their figures justifying the British smart metering programme. Until recently they’ve managed to pull the wool over the eyes of ministers and the National Audit Office, but that strategy finally unravelled with the recently released report from the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, which concluded that “without significant and immediate changes to the present policy, the programme runs the risk of falling far short of expectations. At worst it could prove to be a costly failure.”

A further nail in the coffin of DECC optimism came today, when the highly respected Institute of Directors’ Policy Unit issued a scathing critique of the programme in “Not too clever: will Smart Meters be the next Government IT disaster?”, which goes as far as to suggest the best course may be to abandon the programme altogether.

Further evidence suggests that the programme is considerably further behind than many of those involved realise. There is also a growing concern about its cost within utilities, many of whom would be happy to abandon some or all aspects of it. The first task of whoever is elected in May could be to make the decision to kill it.

Apple’s revolutionary ResearchKit deserves a better audience

I’ve just sat through Tim Cook’s Apple announcement, and amongst the shiny stuff was something really important – ResearchKit. Most smartphone users probably don’t realise how much data their devices are capturing all of the time, or that some of it is quietly being used to influence apps such as the games they play. The point is, that for the first time ever, aspects of our health and lifestyle can be captured easily. For medical researchers, access to this personal data could transform the way we perform research on disease and aging. Even where research projects are able to monitor patients today, the sensors are often unwieldy and it’s difficult to get volunteers to sign up and stay engaged. To be effective, medical research needs data – not just from ill people, but from those at all stages of the continuum of health and illness. The issue has always been how to get hold of it.

MWC – Men Want Connections

Don’t worry – it’s not a blog about Tindr or Grindr. The connections we’re talking about here are mobile subscriptions and the men are those at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is still mostly men. Despite the best efforts of the GSMA with sub-events like the Connected Women’s Summit and France’s promotion of its exhibiting companies as “La France Tech” (which must have had the members of the Académie Française heading to their graves for some early turning), MWC remained defiantly male. In the opening keynotes around 85% of the audience were men. Telecoms, for all of its populist marketing, is still largely a suited profession.

What was exercising the males of the species this year was numbers. Back in 2009, Ericsson predicted that there would be 50 billion mobile connections by 2020. At the time it seemed possible; phone usage was growing and everyone expected that the things around us would follow suit by getting their own mobile connections, leading us to that kind of number. It’s now beginning to strike the CEOs within the industry that five and a half years have passed and we’re half-way there. Yet we’ve still only connected a few tens of millions of machines. That’s why they’re getting so excited about wearables and the Internet of Things as the only way to make those predictions come true.

Smart Metering 2.0

Over the last few months it’s been interesting to look at the coverage of smart meter deployments, as people are starting to question as to what the benefits have been? Did the billions of dollars invested in them help either the grid or consumers? The pace of deployment has certainly slowed in the US and Europe and in recent months there seem to have been as many headlines about smart meters being replaced with old analogue ones as there have about new deployments. At the same time the interest of energy suppliers in smart metering has been waning. Instead they’ve fallen in love with smart thermostats as the way to woo consumers with energy savings. British Gas’ recent purchase of AlertMe for £44 million (a tad short of the $3.2 billion that Google paid for Nest) is the latest example of that trend. And with energy prices falling, any claim that smart metering will engage customers in energy saving is looking increasingly spurious.

But that’s a malaise specific to the North American and European energy suppliers, who are probably beginning to feel that they’ve been mugged by meter manufacturers into deploying white elephants that have turned out to be little more than an overpriced AMR system. If we look at the next generation economies, like Brazil and India, they have a very different set of problems. The most important of which is the amount of electricity which simply disappears. In India around 25% of electricity “goes missing”, equivalent to almost $20 billion of revenue every year. In Brazil around 11 GW is stolen, equating to 20% of generation. The effect of this is not only lost income, but power outages associated with illegal connections and tampering. It is a level of disruption that calls for a very different approach to the one provided by the expensive, over-specified meters of the Western world.

These problems require a far more pragmatic approach to smart metering – generating a new breed of solutions which I refer to as Smart Metering 2.0. Whilst the western deployments should have been about data, they ended up being little more than new billing solutions because the systems were designed from the wrong perspective. That’s largely because they were designed by people who didn’t really understand the architecture of end-to-end systems and were hung up on a legacy approach. In effect they made the meter more complex so the head end could stay simple. That was all about not rattling the cage of the utilities’ IT departments, most of which don’t want to have to deal with more data. The new meters are taking the correct view of keeping the meter as a simple source of data and adding value in the comms and head end. It’s no surprise that these are being spearheaded by companies with a background in comms who understand how M2M and the Internet of Things systems work. It’s an approach which drastically reduces the cost of deployments and allows utilities to upgrade their capabilities as they need them, rather than trying to do everything from day one.

Smart Wearables – a $30 billion dollar opportunity

Over the past year I’ve been following the hype around smart wearable technology. Fuelled by the enthusiasm of the big players to embrace this market, analysts are falling over themselves to define and inflate the size of the wearable market opportunity, predicting a market worth over $30 billion by 2020. That belief is driven by a desperate need for major companies to find something to follow on from laptops, tablets and PCs, all of which are being commoditised. In his seminal book on technical disruption “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton Christiansen warns that “no one can learn from market research what the early market will be. I can hire consultants, but the only thing I can know for sure is that their findings will be wrong”. As I look at the current predictions, that warning feels worryingly appropriate.

The problem is that most of the models being used to estimate the consumer appetite for wearable technology are built around technology push, with manufacturers trying to shape their technology to fit what they believe consumers will buy. It’s a strategy that is likely to fail, as wearable technology is more personal than any product they’ve ever made before. To try and see whether there is a market, I’ve put together a report that looks at the market opportunity from the contrary viewpoint, building it up from known consumer behaviour and preferences. Whilst there’s no guarantee that doesn’t fall into the same Christiansen trap, it suggests the market could still reach $30 billion in 2020, but with a very different mix of products being made by some very different companies. You can download the report here.

A Happy New Hear

Last year I coined a new term – “Hearables“, for things you put in your ear. Much of what’s happening in that space is being driven by developments in hearing aids. Hearing aids have made immense technical progress since the first electronic ones were introduced to the market over fifty years ago. Few people remember those early ones – they involved large battery packs and amplifiers which people strapped underneath their clothing. But the benefits of better hearing were so great that people were prepared to do that. Today hearing aids are so small that you hardly notice them, whether you’re the wearer or an observer. The technology within them has also made incredible strides. They may contain multiple microphones, which, along with clever digital signal processing lets you focus on sound coming from in front of you, behaving much like your ear. They can also adjust the way they amplify sound to cope with different locations, from noisy streets to the office, restaurants and the home. The amount of technology which has been squeezed into such a small space is incredible, surpassing other high tech products like tablets and phones for the sheer density of electronics.