Relieving Pain Points: Case Study of the Human-Powered Matrix Smartwatch

Dealing with data, IT bottlenecks and lack of time for optimization are among the challenges which cause the biggest headaches for marketers, but the reality in the customer-driven economy is that many products and services are rolled out without being fully thought through – this realization generates company “pain points”. ExoConsultancy Marketing Pain Points report assigns a “migraine rating” to 17 different pain points in the IT world. “Digital technology and changing consumer behavior have created a near infinite number of opportunities for marketers to reach and engage customers, while also creating a whole host of new problems for marketing teams to wrestle with. ”

The 10 pain points with the highest migraine ratings are:

• IT and web development teams are a major bottleneck.’ 54%
• There is no time to test and optimize campaigns.’ 47%
• ‘I’ve wanted a single customer view, but failed to give the time, budget or IT resources to build one.’ 42%
• ‘I can’t keep track of customers across different channels and on different devices.’ 41%
• ‘I don’t have enough budget / my budget is decreasing.’ 41%
• ‘I’m struggling with multiple data sources.’ 40%
• ‘I have trouble defining attribution and assessing the touchpoints required to convert a customer.’ 40%
• ‘I struggle to prove the ROI of marketing activities.’ 39%
• ‘I’m in a battle to keep up with marketing technology.’ 33%
• ‘Finding marketers with the right skills is a nightmare.’ 30%

But let’s look at one techno case study (PWC, for one has a long list here):

The Matrix PowerWatch (at $170 retail) is powered by thermoelectric energy, or the conversion of heat into power. FoxTech explains that, “the idea is to eliminate what Akram Boukai, the co-founder and CEO of Matrix Industries (Menlo Park, CA), called a “pain point” in the wearables industry: the fact that if you own an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or something like it, you need to charge it by taking it off.  As soon as you take it off, there’s a barrier to put it back on.” Boukai runs the Laboratory of Innovative Green Energy Research at the University of Michigan and has already raised $350K on Indiegogo with this pitch: “powered by your body heat, it measures calories burned, activity level, and sleep using our advanced thermoelectric technology.”

The term “thermoelectric effect” (explains Wiki) encompasses three separately identified effects: derived from the independent discoveries of French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier and Baltic German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck. Joule heating, the heat that is generated whenever a current is passed through a resistive material, is related, though it is not generally termed as thermoelectric effect. The Peltier–Seebeck and Thomson effects are thermodynamically reversible, whereas Joule heating is not.

Picture Credit: Matrix Industries

The  watch is really just part of a new DevOps field called Enterprise Mobility Management (more from IAI later). Software Development Times (free subscription here) reports that app development is an issue for these devices, even though Arrow Electronics Solution Products is a partner of Matrix Industries. “New devices (such as wearables) and architectures (such as the Internet of Things) are creating opportunities for businesses and innovation points for developers. But they are also creating new and severe headaches. According to a recently released report, 65% of developers and 69% of designers feel wearables and connected devices are already a problem, or will be one in the next year.” The report, “Wearables and Connected Devices: The Next Frontier in Cross-Platform Mobile Development,” was released by enterprise mobility solution provider Kony which offers a free e-Book for enterprise mobility strategy advice here.

Picture Credit: Software Development Times (www.sdtimes.com)

Dynamics Shaping the Future in the “Age of the Consumer” -Forrester

Picture Credit: NASA/ GSFC (artist rendering of solar winds on Mars)

Forrester highlights the dynamics shaping the future (in 2017) of the consumer experience and the changes are coming quickly and overwhelmingly like a the solar wind shown above. Navigating the change is going to require a blend of business reassessment, idea leadership, a focus on the customer experience and intelligent application of technology to transform business. The customer-led, digital-centric market is being driven by widespread adoption of “Millennial-like” behaviors (hooray!). CRM expert Kate Leggett cites Forrester Research that 21% of US consumers are “Progressive Pioneers” that lead the demand for innovation. Cliff Condon declares that Forrester’s  Empowered Customer Segmentation shows that “more than a third all US online adults want new and engaging digital experiences. They will switch companies to find these experiences.” So this signals a tsunami…

Picture Credit: French Senate (senat.fr)

Forrester cites these examples:

• Banks try to innovate before digital banks become formidable competitors;
• Big-branded retailers confront the digital threat with store closings and amped-up omnichannel and mobile efforts;
• Manufacturers get serious about their digital business;
• Relationship-driven investment firms try to adapt to the encroachment of tech titans; and
• Utility companies launch customer experience (CX) initiatives to influence consumption habits and change their operations

IAI believes that the reinvigorated focus of businesses on the consumer is bring driven forcefully by technology firms looking to dramatically re-engineer customer engagement processes. Branding is being deeply embedded in technology data acquisition tools to customize routines but these approaches should all require customer “consent” and “opt-outs” and not collection of privacy-intrusion data. Facilitators offering end user “dashboards” should engage clients like fiduciaries and can embrace anonymized meta data collection approaches to earn client trust, creating a shared trusted advisory network (STAN). IAI believe that the concept of “propagation velocity” can be applied to STAN deployments.

Picture Credit: CORDIS European Union (cordis.europa.eu)

Forrester points out some striking trends underway:

Widespread Restructuring: One third of businesses are restructuring by devolving operational controls to brands and divisions to move closer to the customer experience, at considerable risk;

Customer-driven Matrix Structure: Replacing traditional silo-based functional relationships, these new matrices will “leverage shared functions to protect margin”;

CEO Turnover in Half of Firms: Forrester research shows a clear correlation between the quality of customer experiences and revenue growth and affirms that emotion is a core driver of customer loyalty and spending.

“Whole Brained” CMOS Needed: They must embrace both a right brain understanding of the customer experience and left brain embrace of technology and analytics. Marketing Measurement assessments by Forrester show low adoption of analytics by CMOs (Forrester Wave evaluation) ;

CIOs “Grab the Brass Ring”: B2C and B2B firms will need CIOs to lay out technology adoption strategy paths in an environment where tech budgets are forecast to grow at just 1.4%- a tall order: and

Trust is the core element: CX professionals must build client trust into every process when designing experiences that delight customers and contribute to P&L performance.

To learn more, download Forrester’s predictions guide. This guide is the front-end to 16 unique predictions that executives can use to budget, prioritize, and plan customer-obsessed strategies.

 

 

Verizon’s Tornado Sweeps Up All Outdoor IoT Data with LQD WiFi Buy

Picture Credit: Internet of Things- Wikipedia

Wiki explains: The Internet of things (stylised Internet of Things or IoT) is the internetworking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices“), buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.^[1][2][3] In 2013 the Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Things (IoT-GSI) defined the IoT as “the infrastructure of the information society.”^[3] The IoT allows objects to be sensed and/or controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure,^[4] creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]} When IoT is augmented with sensors and actuators, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyber-physical systems, which also encompasses technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation and smart cities.

IoT Today made it really clear early this year: “From agriculture to industry, IoT is already innately changing the way our world works and it is anticipated that by 2020 there will be 75 billion connected devices, a staggering amount of Internet-enabled technology. “ Modern Sensor-to-Server (S2S) communication networks call for high-speed solutions that support massive amounts of data collection, control and transport. Consumer and  industrial organizations are experiencing high demand for voice, video, data and sensor (VVDS) information in wireless outdoor networks. For semiconductor firms alone, IoT will be a $50B market by 2020, according to the Quartz Group, citing Gartner Group data.

Picture Credit: Gartner Group forecast

Verizon acquired another component to its IoT business by purchasing LQD WiFi, as reported in TechCrunch, “a developer of outdoor interactive displays that provide WiFi connectivity along with news, emergency alerts and community information. They also act as sensors collecting crowd, weather and other data. LQD WiFi, based out of New York, had raised only $1.73 million in funding from unknown investors. Founder and CEO Randy Ramusack is a Microsoft veteran, having worked as the CTO of Microsoft Switzerland and the CIO of Microsoft UK, among other roles and places. LQD’s main service is called Palo, a kiosk-style structure that serves both as a WiFi station as well as a place for people to interact with information on the Palo itself. In this regard, it competes against the likes of Link NYC, which was borne out of Google’s Sidewalk Labs and its Intersection project.”

Remember: There is no such thing as a “Lee Frunch” (or a free lunch…). Link NYC (soon on in London) explains coyly in its FAQ that:

LinkNYC is one of the first free public Wi-Fi services in the country to offer an encrypted network connection between your device and the hotspot, securing all wireless communications between devices and the Link. LinkNYC will generate anonymized and aggregate data to develop insights on system usage and diagnostics to improve your Link experience, and to inform advertising that appears on the 55” displays of the Link kiosks. LinkNYC ads on the kiosks do not target individuals and there is no LinkNYC-generated advertising when browsing the web.

Picture Credit: Pinterest

Verizon Wireless CTO – More Services Coming Like Flying Cows!

Why are Wireless firms like Flying Cows ?

Picture Credit: Tumblr- The flying cows in Twister were created using the wire frame models of flying zebras from Jumanji

Update: Verizon purchased LQD WiFi on 14 November, 2016, a developer of outdoor interactive displays that provide WiFi connectivity along with news, emergency alerts and community information. They also act as sensors collecting crowd, weather and other data. This is the fourth acquisition this year made by Verizon to build up its Internet of Things business, which is a complement to Verizon’s other acquisition strategy based around consumer-focused media companies (among those, it’s in the process of buying Yahoo and last year acquired AOL, which owns TechCrunch). Other acquisitions in IoT have included Sensity Systems to add LED light controlling technology; telematics company Fleetmatics for $2.8 billion in August; and Telogis for more connected car technology.

Verizon Wireless just released a study here about their outlook for the Internet of Things (now “legitimate”) and the role their broadband wireless service offering will play in IoT. The wireless industry is likely to consolidate following the conclusion of the ongoing FCC incentive auction of 600 MHz airwaves. And the role of Chief Technology Officer or CTO at wireless firms has been challenging this year with key issues of:

• Phone Safety – Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and Apple iPhone (?) fires
• Wide Net National Security – AT&T’s BIG NSA business at your expense
• Privacy – the FBI tried to get the master encryption key for iPhones
• CyberSecurity – the staggering lack of security for Android users like Google’s Pixel phone

FierceWireless has a fabulous series featuring network CTOs, part of a larger focus on CTOs in technology.

Picture Credit: Pinterest

Here’s a quick synopsis of Verizon’s CTO but the common thread is that they are Tracking You! Surprised? That will be the central element of “Customer-focused” service delivery under fixed broadband wireless next year. Prepare to feel like a stormchaser dodging flying cows bundled as BIG Apps! CEO Lowell McAdam said fixed 5G services will be profitable enough for Verizon to pursue regardless of an eventual move to mobile 5G. “The use case for me that gets you over the hump on investing in the technology is the one that’s right in front of us right now and that’s a fixed wireless play,” he pledged at the May 2016 J.P. Morgan Conference.

Verizon- Roger Gurnani:

A. Experienced hand: “He was a founding officer of Verizon Wireless and until 2005 served as the carrier’s vice president and CIO, helping to oversee the integration of the domestic wireless operations of Bell Atlantic, Vodafone AirTouch and GTE.”

B. Broad Roles: His tasks includes network and technology planning, development of architecture and roadmaps, continued evolution of digital platforms and oversight and direction for the CIO and CTO teams across Verizon.

C. Run the Factory: Gurnani focuses on IT and digital technologies aimed at increasing customer engagement plus the core function to “run the factory,” as he described it in a Forbes interview here.

D. Densification: Gurnani charted his team’s path to best expand and densify Verizon’s LTE network through carrier aggregation, small cells and other techniques with its public launch of “LTE Advanced technology”.

E. 5G Deployment: Seen as an extension of LTE, Verizon has been outspoken about its intention to be the first U.S. wireless carrier to deploy 5G in 2017. The extenders include “network design concepts” such as C-RAN, low/tight RF design via small cells, self-optimized networks, virtualized core networks and various IoT-centric flavors of LTE as well as NB-IoT will all pave the way for technical evolutions toward 5G. Verizon is also focused on massive MIMO beam forming and unlicensed spectrum to add capacity.

F. Wireless High-Speed Broadband: With LTE, Verizon expects to offer 50% faster peak wireless data speeds to more than 288 million pops in 461 cities. As such, expect A LOT of FIOS advertising over the holidays (even to taunt sociopaths). During the summer, it conducted tests in New Jersey showing fixed wireless speeds of up to 1.8 gigabits per second. Verizon is using a point-to-multipoint solution, with equipment transmitting in the 28 GHz spectrum band – gaining over 100 licenses in the band as part of its purchase of XO Communications.

Picture Credit: SBC Hubspot

With any wireless carrier (or public network in general), AVOID exposing account numbers and passwords on your wireless phone at all times, advises Digital Guardian with 101 tips here.  ZDNet has a cautionary note about the “Year in Hacks”:

• MySpace hack puts another 427 million passwords up for sale
• A hacker claims to be selling millions of Twitter accounts
• One of the biggest hacks happened last year, but nobody noticed
• 171 million VK.com accounts stolen by hackers
• Hacker puts 51 million file sharing accounts for sale on dark web
• Ubuntu Forums hack exposes 2 million users
• Oracle investigating data breach at Micros point-of-sale division
• Epic’s forums hacked again, with thousands of logins stolen
• Millions of Steam game keys stolen after hacker breaches gaming site
• Hackers stole 43 million Last.fm account details in 2012 breach

Common Threads of Wireless CTOs – Tracking YOU!

Picture Credit: Pinterest

The wireless industry is likely to consolidate following the conclusion of the ongoing FCC incentive auction of 600 MHz airwaves. And the role of Chief Technology Officer or CTO at wireless firms has been challenging this year with key issues of:

• Phone Safety – Samsung Galaxy and Apple iPhone (?)fires
• Wide Net National Security – AT&T’s BIG NSA business at your expense
• Privacy – the FBI tried to get the master encryption key for iPhones
• CyberSecurity – the staggering lack of security for Android users

FierceWireless has a fabulous series featuring network CTOs, part of a larger focus on CTOs in technology.

The Internet of Things as Seen by Venture Capitalists – Massive and Inevitable

 

 

Connecting billions of objects to the Internet—a process that we call “Instrumenting The Real World”—is going to have a transformative impact on the enterprise and on society, and we’re still only in the very early stages of this change.

Martin Giles, Partner at Wing Venture Capital (San Francisco, CA)

Kudos to Martin and his team for his excellent outlook on the Internet of Things (and for generously sharing the slide deck here) and for keeping us up-to-date on the Wing blog here. Wing built a database of 2335 accelerator and venture capital funding deals for IoT startups from the start of 2013 to the end of August 2016, drawn from helpful services like Mattermark, Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

“Gaurav Garg, one of Wing’s co-founders, draws an insightful parallel between the Internet of Things and the spread of electricity to US households in the 1900s. As electrical power made its way into more and more homes, entrepreneurs set to work developing new products to take advantage of this phenomenon. But it took decades for some of the most innovative applications to appear. Many of these, from the television to the microwave, were simply impossible to conceive of in the early days of electricity. The Internet of Things is at the same stage today as electricity was in the early 1900s: we can see the potential of this new wave, but only a small fraction of things are currently connected to the internet.” Here are the key findings of Wing Capital:

Grassroots entrepreneurial activity still appears moderately healthy, though there are signs of a slowdown.

GitHub is a pretty good temperature gauge of early project activity, and the number of GitHub code repositories that have IoT as a keyword is on track to more than double this year according to publicly available data. Successfully funded IoT-related projects on Kickstarter are also set to rise again in 2016, but the pace of growth is slowing.

Industrial/Enterprise IoT accounts for the largest number of funding deals over the past few years, followed by Wearables.

The Industrial/Enterprise category came out on top (over all verticals) with almost 600 deals (stemming from) the “Factory or Industry 4.0” era, in which a combination of sensors, software and back-end cloud compute and storage is giving companies new insights into the performance of their physical assets. On the Enterprise front, we saw a reasonable amount of activity in sub-categories such as building management services, healthcare and retailing.

Picture Credit: Dell Automation

Ranked by average deal size in dollars, the Auto/Transport category comes out on top

Auto/Transport sector yielded the largest ave $/deal with an average of almost $8M a deal (yet the fewest number of deals.). Yet companies such as Tesla and Uber have inspired startups working on connected car and autonomous driving technologies, the two biggest sub-categories within the Auto/Transport field. This year has seen some big exits in the form of General Motors’ acquisition of Cruise Automation, a connected vehicles startup, and Uber’s purchase of Otto Motors, a driverless truck startup.

In the Drones category, hardware deals still dominate, but we also saw a lot of startups working on applications for aerial surveying and mapping, as well as inspection and monitoring

The Drone category is really open territory, at least in the non-military arena: hardware, drone-level innovation to optimize enterprise services (like aerial surveying and monitoring), software and analytics. 3D Robotics, pivoted towards offering drone-based services to enterprises after facing intense competition in consumer hardware from DJI, its main Chinese rival.

In 2016 four IoT categories are likely to see fewer deals than the prior year, while four others will see an increase over 2015

The number of deals in all of the high-level categories that we tracked rose every year from 2013 to 2015. This year will break that trend. Four of the categories—Industrial/Enterprise, Wearables, Home, and Robotics—will see a decline in deal activity in 2016. Meanwhile, four others—Drones, Infrastructure (which covers startups developing building blocks for the IoT, such as low-power wireless connectivity), Health and Auto/Transport—will grow again.

In terms of funding activity, the number of IoT startup deals in the sub-$2M range will decline in 2016, while the number of those in the $2M-to-$20M range and the $20M+ range will increase

The number of larger deals is expanding, which is an encouraging sign that at least some of the startups founded over the past few years have developed business models that are inspiring follow-on financings. The growth in deals above $20M is especially notable: there are likely to be five times more of these this year than in 2013.

The number of large M&A exits involving IoT businesses is set to expand again in 2016

Pitchbook (data) showed that the number of M&A deals over $200M is set to increase again in 2016, as a sign that incumbent firms who see the Internet of Things as an opportunity are willing to commit significant sums of money to acquisitions. This year has already seen some billion-dollar-plus M&A exits. Sensus, a smart meter company, was bought by Xylem for $1.7Bn, and Jasper, an IoT connectivity management platform, was acquired by Cisco for $1.4Bn.

There’s been a proliferation of IoT platforms and this outbreak of ‘Platformitis’ is likely to lead to a shakeout over time.

“Platform” deals totaled 707, or almost a third of our entire data set, with the largest number of platform deals were in the Industrial/Enterprise category, which is understandable given that customers there are looking to connect a wide variety of devices at scale. The second largest category was the home: people want the smart devices in their homes to work together seamlessly.

There have been relatively few deals for IoT-focused security startups

In our overall database of over 2300 deals, we found just 45 that were for IoT security startups. That is a surprisingly low number given all of the risks associated with connecting billions of new devices to the internet—risks that have been highlighted yet again by recent events, such as the use of IP cameras and other connected objects like home routers to launch a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack against Dyn, a domain name service provider, and another case in which hackers were able to take control of a Tesla Model S from 12 miles away.

Wing’s Peter Wagner adds, “data-first services are starting to emerge in many of the major enterprise-application categories. Companies such as Vlocity in customer relationship management (CRM), Moogsoft in IT operations and Kanjoya (now with Ultimate Software) in human resources are among startups driving the new, data-first approach.” These data-first applications are: flexible, architected on a scalable data-centric core, heavily reliant on embedded algorithms, and are iterative – creating “a virtual breeder reactor of business-process optimization and insight generation.” Wow, that’s a tech endorsement !

 

Inspiring New Designers as Envisaged by Foundation Capital Partner Steve Vassallo

Picture Credit: Justin Sullivan/ Getty Images

Foundation Capital Partner Steve Vassallo writes in FastcoDesign (a pretty cool alternative design feature) a tribute to the late Steve Jobs who he celebrates as the father of approachable design.

More than ever, we live in the design-minded world Steve Jobs helped usher in. No individual has more greatly influenced the role of design in tech, or is more responsible for raising consumer expectations for thoughtfully made products, than the late Apple co-founder. In the half decade since Jobs’s death, design has come into its own as competitive lever for businesses, a set of practices for solving important problems, even a method for optimizing your life.

Now, co-founder Steve Wozniak above deserves some credit too as he points out that Walter Isaacson 2011 biography adaptation by Aaron Sorkin over-amps Jobs’ role in certain settings- like a lot, Woz says. He notes that he spoke to CEO John Scully to defend the Apple II team, not Jobs, when the team threatened to quit. Woz also encouraged the famous ‘1984’ ad for the Super Bowl even when the board rejected it – even offering to split the $800K ad cost. Woz was recruited to return to Apple by Jobs but declined, though he still admires Apple, which has rallied due to the continued problems Samsung has had with the Galaxy 7 (market value impact of over $20B today from the recall, Bloomberg reports).

Now Vassallo does lay out some excellent design lessons from Jobs’ Apple tenure including:

1. Be Wildly Ambitious.
First, you need colossal ambition. It’s rare that massive new product categories are launched at established companies. But after Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he did it five times. (This summer’s sale of the 1 billionth iPhone) demonstrates people’s insistence that their interactions with technology be frictionless and delightful.

2. Think Big And Small.
The stories that get told about Jobs are always of how exacting he was, down to the type of wood tables he wanted for the Apple Stores. So, there’s no doubt that Jobs was a designer’s designer down to his marrow, and these sorts of stories make for good copy. But the under-reported feature of his success was how adept he was at switching focal points and letting go of his fixation on simply the product.

3. Tell Persuasive Stories.
Another aspect to being Steve Jobs was his gift for storytelling—his uncanny skill at reading the audience, finding the right way to frame a story, and galvanizing others around a shared (re: his) vision. The “one more thing” teaser that Jobs used to drive journalists and Apple enthusiasts wild with at big keynotes wasn’t a function of his charm—it was an old narrative trick called a cliffhanger. Great storytelling can be your most powerful tool for disseminating and scaling your vision.

4. Let The (Other) Geniuses Thrive.
Lastly, Steve Jobs is remembered as a singular genius, but a key component to his genius was his ability to find talented people and rally them around his cause. Without Steve Wozniak’s engineering prowess, Jony Ive’s keen design acumen, or Tim Cook’s gift for building out unrivaled supply chains—Jobs would not have been able to produce the first Apple computer or the iPod, or manufacture an iPhone that didn’t retail for $4,000. Healthy as his ego was, Jobs wasn’t deluded about this fact. He once said, “Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” Steve Jobs’s true brilliance was in designing a system for repeatable genius.

Google Guns after the $400B Mobile Phone Market- And ALL YOUR DATA

Picture Credit: Google, the Android Open Source stack

So Alphabet released the Pixel and Pixel XL smart phones today, in competition with fellow Android open source operating system suppliers LG Electronics and Samsung, but IAI decided that further investigation could show the motivation. Google used to operate in a fully outsourced hardware model under the Nexus Program, which DigiTrends lays out in great detail covering the release of 14 devices since 2010. Here is the hardware

A). Apple Threat: “Google is now the seller of record of this phone,” said Rick Osterloh, chief of the company’s new hardware division, crowed on Bloomberg – identifying this as a direct threat to Apple.  With the AI aide “Assistant” to compete against Apple’s “Siri”, “The goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google. First, the here’s the G or Gravity featureset and Google’s role which does not leave much of a foodchain (see an overview of Porter’s seminal value chain):

• First mobile phone conceptualized, designed, engineered and tested in-house,
• The Pixel phones feature a Siri-like virtual Google Assistant,
• A high resolution 12.3 Mega Pixel camera with picture quality correction features,
• Employs Android’s new Nougat 7.1 operating system,
• Unlimited Google Cloud storage,
• Expect Pixel-branded smartphones, Google Home, a new Chromecast, Daydream VR,
• Google now managing inventory, building relationships with carriers, sourcing components, making supply chain deals and managing distribution, and
• Google is making accessories, including cases and cables.

B). Cloud Services Proliferation:  In addition to the direct challenge to Apple, the new hardware division is clearly linked to the “G Services” and the exploitation of their “cloud services” which PC Magazine profiled on September 29, 2016 as all being subject to name changes for business-focused services, applications, technical infrastructure, and even its cloud.

Google’s cloud platform—”our user facing collaboration and productivity applications”—is now known as Google Cloud  spanning all the company’s cloud technologies and products: business productivity suite;  machine learning tools; application programming interfaces; enterprise maps APIs; and all Android phones, tablets, and Chromebooks that access the cloud. Google also announced new cloud technologies and machine intelligence capabilities, along with eight new Cloud Platform locations: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland, and Frankfurt.

C). Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure for the “Internet of Things”: The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) map clearly points to a dramatic ramp in establishing the infrastructure for artificial intelligence deployments under the framework of the Internet of Things. A key focus of the Google push is “big data analytics”  In the new Oregon facility, Google claims to have achieved an 80% improvement in latency which improves application performance but especially in industrial sensors and IoT network performance. WirelessWeek goes deeper:

1. Managing and coordinating real-time performance in the IoT will pose a host of new challenges. First and foremost is the problem of scale: this will be a lot more data, coming from lots of different devices. IoT applications still must detect and react in close to real-time. This means that data must be collected and processed continuously and with controlled latency – batch processing models are ruled out.
2. Secondly, these applications are by definition highly distributed, which means you need to correlate information from many different places to understand what happened even within a single transaction. And the role of the networks that connect devices and systems together cannot be ignored. Distance-related network latency can be reduced by pushing data and processing closer to users where possible, but applications will remain susceptible to poor routing decisions and network congestion.
3. High-value IoT services will often involve systems from different firms and organizations working together to complete a task. Maintaining a system such as this involves collaboration between at least three IT teams in different firms (the parking utility, the bank and the advertiser network), each with its own ‘pool of visibility’ into one segment of the end-to-end application. Without effective data-sharing and cross-correlation, it’s all too easy for each team to conclude that it’s not their problem when things go wrong.

Well respected tech journalist Walt Mossberg explains in The Verge:

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a column laying out five reasons it was time for Google to make its own hardware. I missed the AI angle. Google didn’t. The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, called AI “a seminal moment in computing” on a par with the personal computer, the web, and the smartphone going mainstream, at roughly 10-year intervals. “It’s clear to me,” he said, “that we are moving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world.” But, even with AI merely in its infancy, Google’s move to becoming a full-fledged maker of the most important consumer tech hardware is a huge deal. It will finally give the search giant the chance to match the advantages long enjoyed by the champion of vertical integration, its arch-rival Apple.

Hold on, Google is talking about end-to-end control on its own GCP blog. CEO Eric Schmidt urges all businesses to move to real time analytics (RTA) relying on Google’s ETL (extract, transform and load) processes – that is full device control. InfoWeek explains the corporate RTA pitch: “Organizations need actionable insights faster than ever before to stay competitive, reduce risks, meet customer expectations, and capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.” But, they counter, we accept a “multi-cloud world” – “Kubernetes, the open source container management system that we developed and open-sourced, reached version 1.4 in September 2016, and the Google Container Engine (GKE) to this new version (by year end).”

In the spring of 2015, the European Union charged Google with restraint of trade practices against consumers, but another suit emerged in 2016 requiring a mandate for hardware suppliers to commit to exclusive use of the Google search engine and other applications, but PCWeek pointed out that the complaint list was redacted (!) in the EU release provided to Reuters. “The European Union’s antitrust authority filed a so-called statement of objections against Google in April, accusing it of forcing smartphone makers to exclusively use its search engine if they want access to the Play Store, through which phone users can download and purchase other apps.”

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas details the real goal of Alphabet – ALL YOUR INFORMATION from A to Z (what 4th Amendment? – asks the Harvard Law Review). “At its hardware launch event in San Francisco, Alphabet showed the sweeping breadth of its ambition to own consumers’ personal data, as computing continues to accelerate away from static desktops and screens, coalescing into a cloud of connected devices with the potential to generate far more data — and data of a far more intimate nature — than ever before”

• Along with two new “Google designed” flagship Android smartphones (called Pixel), the first Androids to be preloaded with the company’s AI assistant (the Google Assistant) and also including fully unlimited cloud storage to suck users’ photos and videos into Google’s cloud.
• Then there were Google Wifi routers, designed to be bought in bundles to plug all those pesky in-home internet blackspots;
• The Google Home always listening connected speaker, which is voice-controlled via the Google Assistant and has limited support for third-party IoT devices (such as Philips Hue lightbulbs);
• An updated Chromecast (the Ultra) to ensure any legacy TV panels are internet-enabled; and
• Google’s less disposable mobile VR play, aka the soft-touch Daydream View headset — just in case consumer eyeballs seek to stray outside the data-mined smart home by escaping into virtual reality.

 

 

 

NYT Profiles Amazon Drone Testing Sites in the UK and Canda

Picture Credit: Amazon’s Prime Air: Last (Few) Mile Delivery or Instant Gratification at a Price ?

This past July, Amazon’s Jeremy Clarkson, formally detailed plans for its drone delivery service, Amazon Prime Air, but started testing it in the UK too.The drone has a 15 mile range, a5 pound payload limit, and uses “Sense & Avoid” technology to avoid obstacles (See video here). DigitalSpy explains, “Topping an altitude of 100 metres and capable of hitting speeds close to 100kph, the drones will have to return to base after each delivery for recharging. Designed as a last resort in the delivery hierarchy – you’re not supposed to use them for every order, just the emergencies – they’re likely to be costly to use.” Multiple drone systems are being tested in the US, Canada and Isreal but they are all likely to be VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) capable and require a customer-sited landing pad with an identifiable beacon or market (possibly equipped with a locator device or digital ID). Maybe service in 2017? The concept of VTOL dates back (at least) to the brilliant inventor, Leonardo da Vinci !

Picture Credit: Squarespace- Leonardo’s Aerial Screw ca. 1493

From Amazon’s Corporate Site: We’re excited about Prime Air — a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using small unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones. Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system. Putting Prime Air into service will take some time, but we will deploy when we have the regulatory support needed to realize our vision.

Of course, in the U.S., Amazon is still awaiting regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) policy is now, at least, a framework which was established August 29, 2016. FAA states, ” the following are examples of possible small UAS operations that can be conducted under the framework in this rule:”

• Crop monitoring/inspection;
• Research and development;
• Educational/academic uses;
• Power-line/pipeline inspection in hilly or mountainous terrain;
• Antenna inspections;
• Aiding certain rescue operations;
• Bridge inspections;
• Aerial photography; and
• Wildlife nesting area evaluations.

A Peek at the Secret English Farm Where Amazon Tests Its Drones.(Featured in NYT- 2 October, 2016)

Amazon, the giant e-commerce company, began secretly testing unmanned aircraft this summer at an undisclosed location in Britain (its largest outdoor test site, according to an Amazon executive). I set out to find the top secret site, wanting to see how we all may one day receive online deliveries. There was the warning to pilots that unmanned aircraft would be flying in the area, about an hour north of London, until early October; the uncharacteristically fast cellphone reception in such a remote area — a must when processing drone data; and the growing list of jobs and openings at Amazon’s research and development site in Cambridge related to Prime Air, the company’s ambitious plan to use drones for everyday deliveries.

In Britain, Amazon is working with local authorities to test several aspects of drone technology like piloting the machines beyond the line of sight of operators, a practice still outlawed in the United States. (UK) Regulators first authorized the commercial use of drones in 2010 — years before the Federal Aviation Authority eased its restrictions on remotely piloted aircraft in June. Amazon settled on Britain after the United States initially denied it approval for such tests.

Read more if you like- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/technology/britain-amazon-drone-test-delivery.html?_r=0)