Creative Connectivity

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.

Is Google and Nest’s Thread a ZigBee Killer?

Today Google and Nest launched the Thread Group – a new wireless network for home automation. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last, but it has some important names behind it. The big two are Google and Nest, not least because Nest’s products may already be using it. But others in the consortium are interesting. ARM is there. Today they power most of our mobile phones, providing the IP behind the processors in billions of chips. But they have a vision of being the microprocessor architecture of choice for the Internet of Things. They processors will be smaller, cheaper and lower powered, but will provide the first opportunity for chip vendors to think about trillions. ARM’s inclusion in the group is an obvious step in their process of acquisition and investment in IoT companies.

Samsung are there (aren’t they always), but so are some very large names in home automation, such as Big Ass Fans and Chubb. And what must be worrying the ZigBee community is that Freescale and Silicon Labs complete the list of founder members.

The important point here is that Thread is not ZigBee. It works in the same spectrum and can use the same chips. It is also a mesh network. But it is not compatible. As the Thread technology backgrounder says, they looked at other radio standards and found them lacking, so they started working on a new wireless mesh protocol. To put it more crudely, it’s Google and Nest saying “ZigBee doesn’t work”.

FATZ and DECCY – the UK’s cartoon approach to Smart Meters

The UK Government has enlisted two cartoon characters – FATZ and DECCY to explain the need for smart meters to a sceptical public. FATZ – the corpulent blue one, represents the cold, uncaring fat cat executives of the energy industry, eager to take still more of your money, while the manic yellow DECCY represents the seriously scary civil servants of the Department of Energy and Climate Change who have been tasked with dreaming up the world’s most complicated and unworkable smart metering specification. Their bulging eyes and demented smiles tell the average consumer all they need to know about the UK smart metering plan and the mentality of the people behind it.

Claire Maugham, director of communications at Smart Energy GB, who’s responsible for the campaign said: “FATZ and DECCY are embodiments of what we’ve heard about consumers’ experiences about buying gas and electricity. We heard time and time again that people are anxious because they don’t know what they’re spending, they don’t know if they are on the right tariff or with the right supplier. It’s almost like they are out of control, causing chaos around the house like two naughtily children.” So it’s fitting that they’ve chosen utility bosses and DECC employees as models for their chaos and out of control metering specification.

The aim of the campaign is two-fold. Firstly to try and persuade consumers to allow a smart meter to be fitted, secondly to try to convince them they that might save money, not least because if they don’t it exposes the alleged consumer savings trumpeted by DECC as pure fiction, relegating the whole project into another expensive Government IT fiasco. Achieving either of Smart Energy GB’s aims looks increasingly difficult.

When Smart Meters get Hacked

There‘s a lot of talk about grid security and data privacy in the energy industry, but very little about the consequences of what happens if smart meters go wrong.By going wrong, I don‘t just mean people attempting to hack their meters to reduce their bills.That will probably happen.I‘m more interested in the nightmare scenario when several million electricity meters suddenly disconnect.

Whenever I’ve asked a utility about what they’d do if a million meters disconnected, the only response I’ve had is a puzzled look and the reply that “that can’t happen”. It probably won’t, but it could. If it does, the economic effect on the country would be disastrous. It’s probably the most effective terrorist attack available. And the worrying thing is that with the current design of UK smart meters, it could happen.

I wonder whether the right risk analyses have been done about the consequences of such an attack, versus the benefits to utilities of specifying meters which make it possible?

Acquire a Tech Visionary for just $3 billion

Today Apple announced their purchase of Beats Electronics for a spectacular $3 billion. It’s left many industry analysts scratching their heads. Although a little shy of the original, anticipated $3.2 billion price tag, it’s surprising how close it is to the amount that Google paid to acquire Nest earlier in the year. So what’s behind the new $3 billion price point?

There are some interesting similarities in the two acquired companies. Both were started for similar reasons – their founders were exasperated with the quality of products which were currently on the market. In the case of Nest, Tony Fadell wanted to design thermostats and other household products which were intuitive and worked, whereas at Beats, Dr Dre was exasperated that expensive music players and smartphones shipped with low quality earbuds which cost less than $1 and failed to reproduce the music. (The Register has a nice opinion piece on whether they succeeded.) Both companies have produced high profile, high end products to address these deficiencies along with very high media profiles for themselves and their founders in industries which have historically had little branding.

A Tale of two Thermostats

Once upon a time there was a start-up in California that thought that the world needed a smarter thermostat. Headed up by some ex-Apple executives, they raised over $80 million for their company and three years later sold it for $3.2 billion. That company is Nest Labs.

Four years before Nest was formed, two experienced technology start-up executives in Cambridge thought that the world would benefit from energy use reduction. Their solution was to design a smart in-home display which showed householders how much energy they were using. They’ve sold almost 1.5 million of these. From that experience they also decided that the world needed a smarter thermostat. Because they had limited funds to complete its development (largely because DECC had constantly delayed the UK smart metering market for their IHDs), they decided to use the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise enough to make the first prototypes. They didn’t raise $3.2 billion. They didn’t raise $80 million. They only just scraped together $32,000 before the Kickstarter campaign finished. To put it into perspective, that’s equivalent to the UK retail cost of just 80 of Nest’s smart thermostats. This company is GEO.

I don’t know whether GEO’s smart thermostat – called Cosy, is any better or worse than Nest’s. They both look attractive, competent products from companies that know what they’re doing. GEO’s appears better suited for a Northern European climate, where most energy expenditure goes on heating in winter. Nest’s is probably better for homes with air conditioning as well. But the one hundred thousand times difference between $32k and $3.2 billion that investors are prepared to put into two different smart thermostat companies suggests that certain sectors of the smart thermostat market may be at serious risk of overheating.