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Getting started with IoT

It seems that IoT is easy to talk about but more difficult to do something about. So next time you hear “What can we do with IoT?” at the office, here are some ideas! IoT present a spectrum of opportunities for our business. We can augment our business, products and services with IoT or we can use IoT to transform our business. But regardless what we decide, we need to get started! Here are a couple of suggestions about getting started with IoT: Gain Knowledge: IoT is not difficult, but it has a lot of moving parts – Products/Things, Connectivity, IoT Cloud Computing AND Applications (lots of them). It is unlikely that you or your business has all the knowledge – but you have to have it in order to get started with IoT. Knowledge comes in many forms, especially in IoT. While you may not want to know anything about embedded systems and computing it is an essential part of IoT as are all the other parts. Find some good training or a good consultant or attend a seminar th...
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Stuck in IoT Proof of Concept (POC) Mode

Stuck in POC mode ! Anyone that has been involved with IoT for some time knows that most IoT projects start as a Proof of Concept that in the great majority of cases never evolves to full-fledged business implementations. It is called ‘Stuck in POC’ mode, an all too common ailment in the IoT industry. What are some of the reasons for this? Let us look at a few. Exploratory   Projects: Projects like these are often started with the best intentions – let us put together a small team to explore IoT and what it can do for our business. The problem is that these projects are seldom staffed with the complete IoT stack expertise (Thing – Connectivity – IoT Cloud – Apps) and are underfunded from a lab and equipment perspective, leaving some engineers with limited resources to try to bring up a proof of concept that has no resemblance to a complete IoT solution. Proper Budgeting and Staffing: When a new product or system development project is started, proper budgeting is ke...
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Coming out of the Internet of Things ‘Trough of Disillusionment’!

After reaching the peak of inflated expectations five years ago, IoT spent the last four years in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ before finally coming up the slope of enlightenment where we are today ( Gartner IoT Hype Cycle ). So, what happened during those four years that got us to the point where we are beginning to see IoT projects emerge on a substantial scale? The answers are both obvious and somewhat unexpected. Three key areas of IoT evolved! Semiconductors (Chips) For the last 50 years the semiconductor industry has been driven by Moore’s law, roughly a doubling of processing speed and memory capacity every two years. For IoT this has tremendous impact as what makes a device Smart – or a Thing – is the ‘potential’ addition of processing power AND connectivity to every conceivable product. The reason I say potential is that this is only feasible if adequate processing power and connectivity can be delivered at an acceptable cost – and only drawing power so that devi...
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Towards the $/Year Mobile IoT Connectivity Solution

In the ongoing and ever changing Internet of Things Battle for Connectivity different options gain and loose importance as technologies and deployments change. No convergence on 'connectivity' standards yet to be seen but the field is evolving. One of the unknowns is what final role mobile will eventually play and 'an expected' battle between the world's established mobile carriers using methods like 2G Data and NB-IoT and newcomers like LoRaWAN and sigfox . At a recent IoT gathering I had the opportunity to listen and talk to Michael Orr, sigfox VP Sales/Partners in North American who describe the exciting roll out of sigfox network in the US where they now cover about 20% of the populated areas with their solutions. Worldwide sigfox has partner network covering 100's of devices and chip support from Texas Instrument, Silicon Labs and ON Semiconductors. Needless to say, we are talking about very low data rates and 140/4 uplink/downlink messages per da...
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The Economic Value of IoT - Re-Architecting your Business!

One of the lesser discussed economic values of IoT is using it as an opportunity to re-engineer your business - 'Re-Architecting It' to use one of the current buzz words. By their nature, most business organizations that have been around for more than a couple of years become stale. Mini-empires have been formed, incremental budgeting ensures existing structures, managers want to expand rather than contract their responsibilities and 'historic' functions refuse to recognize their historic nature preferring to continue along well worn tracks. Surprising? NO! We are after all dealing with humans, human nature and established managerial and executive teams. In order to change things 'change agents' or 'change motivators' are needed. These can be anything from new executives to disastrous quarterly results demanding immediate change. Less seldom discussed is how new technologies or technology 'influences' can be used as agents of change to ca...
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The Economic Value of IoT - Data?

Last year I attended one of these IoT networking events with speakers from a couple of IoT industry players. The discussion suddenly turned tense when one of the speakers categorically stated that the main value of IoT was the data collected. Yes, I participated in that discussion by stating along the lines of my previous blog that there was plenty of product margin to be derived from IoT and that this was just as important as any data derived. So what is the value of IoT data? Well, it depends on what the data is, how it is collected and 'what it means'! In a previous consulting engagement I worked with a company that collected a tremendous amount of data on a daily basis. The company was flooded by requests from then 'hot' data analytics companies who wanted to 'partner' and explore the data. The fact that this data belonged to customers did not seem to ever have entered their thoughts nor the fact that this data may simply be useless static data collected...
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The Economic Value of IoT

Lost in the current blog and conference discussions about IoT is talk about the potential economic value of IoT. Like with most evolving technologies it takes a while for the true economic value to clearly appear so instead discussions abound about potentials and examples pulled from the real world or the imaginary world of conference rooms and offices. As most companies are very private about their detailed budgets and financial statements, real world examples have to be guessed or depend on public statements by corporations and individuals. Which leaves us with the imaginary world of opinion, exaggerated statements and outright hyperbole. The current IoT world is filled with a combination of experts, consultants, studies delivering a steady stream of exaggerated consulting reports (I love those press releases stating that so-and-so predicts the IoT market will be $X Trillion by 2025), opinion blogs (like this one?), papers and presentations created in conference rooms (four walls m...
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