IoTgnosis

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...

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...

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...

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...

All new technologies go though fits and starts cycles as they are introduced into the market place. It takes many attempts and different approaches and tenacity to bring new successful technology based products to teh market place. Consumer IoT is no different. At a time when some people thought there would be 100s of different consumer IoT products we are only seeing a few categories that can show any signs of success as far as sales volume. So what is the problem with consumer IoT? In some cases we can point at technology weaknesses - chip, battery and application technology does not have quiet what is needed and we need to wait a Moore's law cycle or two before we have required product usability attributes. In other cases it is early entrants that establish initial product presence and then fail to pursue traditional market penetration strategies of lower price and differentiated product models. Google's Nest consumer IoT product lines are examples of this. Basically sitt...

Out of the 'new challenges' that IoT presents reliable connectivity is surely one of the larger ones. Differing from the Internet where, thanks to $Billions of investments by Internet Providers, LAN and WiFi equipment suppliers and Mobile Operators over the last 20 years, we have reliable connectivity solutions the IoT world is filled with additional connectivity solutions where easy setup, security and reliability has not been fully established. This is particularly true in the low power area where the promise of multi-year battery powered devices end up using connectivity solutions that are far from proven to function over years, months, days or even hours. Add to this IoT use cases where low power networks need to function over larger geographic distances like building control, production monitoring or any other local area applications. For many years ZigBee and associated 802.15.4 standards provided technical solutions although for various reasons, ZigBee never really took ...

When I as a practitioner survey the current landscape of IoT I am surprised by the continuous state of 'infancy' of the IoT industry. Five years ago IoT was full of promise and hope and there was a lot of activity by critical components for creating this new industry - startups, established companies, semiconductor manufacturers, cloud services, new industrial devices and consumer products. Yes, IoT was ascending towards the top of Gartner's 'hype cycle' as research reports, consultants and conferences were touting the Internet of Things as the next new 'revolution' in high tech! Five years later the euphoria has disappeared and the 'wind seems to have gone out of the IoT sails'. During the last three years the IoT industry has been at a virtual stand-still (with a couple of key exceptions). What happened? What happened is that reality set in - IoT was not just an extension of the Internet where any individual or business could set up a web sit...