Creative Connectivity

The best Mobile Health Application of 2014

Every year I get to sit through a large number of presentations from people who have developed new products or applications. Whilst lots of them are interesting, it‘s rare to see one that jumps out. This year I was fortunate to sit through one of those. It was given by Andrew Bastawrous from the London School of Tropical Medicine, describing a smartphone adaptor and application he and his colleagues had designed to help diagnose sight problems. It was a master class in how to make decisions about hardware and application development.

Andrew has now set up Peekvision – a company planning to make and distribute their product. They’ve started an IndieGoGo campaign to fund it, which will let them supply them to community workers around the world who have been selected by their partners Médecins sans Frontières and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. For £60 you can pay for a device to be given to a healthcare worker. I can’t think of a better Christmas present to give.

What was so good about Andrew’s talk was the pragmatic approach to product design. It started by identifying a real problem that needed to be solved and then addressing the challenges of rolling it out in a way that made sense to patients, the local community and health workers. So many developers would have just reached for their iPhone and started to write code. This brilliantly demonstrates why that would have been the wrong approach.

UK Smart Meters Delayed. Again.

Last week the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change announced that the UK’s smart metering deployment was facing another 12 months delay. That’s 18 months after they announced that the UK’s smart metering deployment was facing another 12 months’ delay. This is not all bad news. It means that the growing population of consultants within DECC can look forward to what is fast becoming a never-ending gravy train of consultancy work, public consultations and project reviews. For the consumer it’s likely to mean even more unnecessary costs heaped onto future energy bills. But not until after the next election, so nobody in Westminster really cares.

Despite the charade of one step forward, one step backwards, we still don’t know whether the deployment will have any practical value. There is no EU mandate for it – individual countries need to show that smart metering is cost effective. The first DECC survey showed it was not, but DECC mandarins then fudged the numbers (not my phrase, but that of an involved MP), since when they’ve spent a considerable amount of time and effort in concealing what’s behind their calculations. The approach of “DECC knows best” has resulted in the most complex and expensive smart metering scheme in the world, which appears to be beyond the ability of both suppliers and utilities to deliver.

What is 5G? And do we need it?

The mobile industry loves hype. Now that 4G phones have reached the market, suppliers are keen to promote the next dollop of “jam tomorrow” by offering the world 5G – something that’s still rather nebulous, but as always in this industry, allegedly better than what we have today. Most users have still to experience 4G, but that’s par for the course. The industry loves something new, preferably with a bigger number. It begs the question of whether we need it, and even what it is? To try and answer these questions it’s instructive to look back at the history of mobile to see just what the “G”s mean.

How Apple has changed the Smart Watch market

A few months ago I wrote a report about the wearables market. At the time I was sceptical about the future of the smart watch. That was before the Apple Watch announcement. I didn’t think I’d find it very interesting. Now I’ve seen it, I’ve changed my mind – I think they’ve redefined the market by turning the concept of the smart watch on its head.

The prospect of Apple owning the wrist galvanised many other manufacturers into pre-empting them, of which the most notable contenders were Pebble, Motorola, Asus and Samsung. All want to seize the wrist, in what might be described as a case of carpus diem. Many in the industry want to believe in these products, predicting massive sales volumes and revenue. Few have bothered to ask customers what they want. Two who did were Kantor and Apple Insider. Kantor’s panel suggested up to 60% of iPhone owners would buy one, Apple Insider found “as many as 4%” of iPhone users would be early adopters, translating that finding into an estimate of sales between 5 and 10 million units in the first twelve months”. So what’s the truth?

When the Apple Watch announcement came, it only generated a muted whimper of excitement. It wasn’t what most commentators had expected. That was hardly surprising given the level of hysteria which had been whipped up prior to its unveiling. Whilst a lot of subsequent reviews have complained about its lack of functionality I found that I warmed to it, or at least its potential. It’s not just clever packaging of technology, which is what exemplifies the Asus, Motorola and Samsung watches – it’s a redefinition of the purpose of the wrist. I think it may be more of a game-changer than has been reported, but not necessarily in a positive way for the rest of the smart watch industry.

I shall vote YES – the vote for Scottish Independence

As usual in August, I’ve been in Edinburgh for the Festival. This year there’s been the added frisson of the debate about Scotland’s vote for independence. However, debate seems to be the wrong word. The vote that could result in Scotland becoming independent from the United Kingdom seems to centre around a very limited number of unsubstantiated claims from either side, with almost no critical analysis of what it might mean for the future of the nation.

The proposal put forward by the SNP is that Scotland will control its own destiny, funded by a belief that tax revenue from North Sea oil will grow. It’s a bit like an established company saying that it is about to embrace a fundamentally different business model, for example M&S announcing to the City that they’re going to stop selling food and revert to just being an underwear retailer. If that happened it would come with a strict warning that future performance could go down as well as up. The independence debate has no such caveat for Scotland’s populace, seeing only a future upside. So it seemed appropriate to update Christopher Logue’s poem “I shall vote Labour” to help the undecided:

I shall vote YES

I shall vote yes because
I believe in wind farms.
I shall vote yes because
Tartan is my favourite colour
I shall vote yes because
I’ll have had my tea before I get a chance to vote.
I shall vote yes because
Alex Salmond kissed my sister Mary’s baby.
AND
I shall vote yes because
My hairdresser told me to.
I shall vote yes because
My Jamie found an image of Sean Connery in his deep-fried Mars bar.
I shall vote yes because
I love Edinburgh’s trams.
I shall vote yes because
I believe Greggs can solve Scotland’s obesity problem.
I shall vote yes because
I want my pension and my children’s pensions to be paid for by oil taxes, and
Alex has promised that oil will be $150 a barrel by Christmas;
I shall vote yes
Even though my milkman thinks the oil will run out;
AND
I shall vote yes because
I believe in saving the NHS.
I shall vote yes because
Peter Capaldi is the best Doctor Who.
I shall vote yes because
I think Scotland should keep the pound, but mostly
I shall vote yes because
Deep in my heart
I want to be English.

Wanted – the Infrastructure of Things

The Internet of Things has a problem. Unless we start looking at a new infrastructure, it may peter out after the first fifty billion devices. Everyone seems to be so excited about predicting whether it will be 20 billion or 50 billion or 1.5 trillion that they’ve forgotten about how the connectivity and business models will scale.

There’s a general consensus that we’ll get to between 25 and 50 billion connected devices by 2020. The first 25 billion of these is foreseeable. Around a quarter of it will come from personal devices – mobile phones, tablets, laptops, gaming devices, set-top boxes and even cars, using cellular or broadband connections. They need moderately expensive broadband contracts, but we’ll pay as we can stream lots of data. The same again will come from machine-to-machine (M2M) connections where broadband or cellular connectivity is embedded in commercial products to monitor their performance. That covers everything from telematics, connected medical devices, asset tracking, smart buildings and everything from vending machines to credit card readers. In this case the service contracts are justified by improved business efficiency.

The second 25 billion is likely to come from locally connected devices – generally personal products which connect to smartphones. Eighteen months ago I wrote a report on these appcessories, predicting that they could grow to an installed base of around 20 billion in 2020, getting us close to the total of 50 billion. These will piggy-back on existing broadband contracts, so most won’t have a service model. At best, there may be an opportunity for selling apps or subscription services.

However, at that point, future growth may start to slow. Although these products all get referred to as the Internet of Things, they’re only that in the loosest sense, as they rely either on personal user setup, or professional installation. Both are time consuming and a barrier to ubiquitous deployment. To achieve the real Internet of Things we need products which can be taken out of their box and which connect and work autonomously. Without that, we’ll never get past the tens of billions. Despite all of the IoT hype around, no-one is really addressing the hole that needs to be filled. We need an Infrastructure of Things – a new Low Power, Wide Area, end-to-end wireless Network (LPWAN), along with a new approach to data provisioning for life. This article explains why and what the options may be.