"Industrial Internet" entries

What’s a tech company, anyway?

Talk of the "tech sector" is out of date. Every company is a tech company.

Uber has encountered a series of challenges that are notionally unfamiliar to the current generation of tech companies: wrongful-death lawsuits, rent-seeking by an entrenched industry, regulatory scrutiny from local bureaucrats, worker protests. The company admitted to having disrupted a competitor’s operations by calling its cars, then canceling. No matter how explicitly it warns about surge pricing, riders accustomed to a certain way of booking a car ride object.

There’s an established industry that charges people for rides in cars, and it’s been reduced to a set of straightforward points of competition: price, car quality, ease of booking, and — treacherously for Uber and uncharacteristically for “tech companies” in general — the burly and distasteful accumulation of political clout before municipal taxi commissions. Read more…

Toward an open Internet of Things

Vendors, take note: we will not build the Internet of Things without open standards.

Open_19In a couple of posts and articles, we’ve nibbled around the notion of standards, interoperability, and the Internet of Things (or the Internet of Everything, or the Industrial Internet, or whatever you want to call it). It’s time to say it loud and clear: we won’t build the Internet of Things without open standards.

What’s important about the IoT typically isn’t what any single device can do. The magic happens when multiple devices start interacting with each other. Nicholas Negroponte rightly criticizes the flood of boring Internet-enabled devices: an oven that can be controlled by your phone, a washing machines that texts you when it’s done, and so on. An oven gets interesting when it detects the chicken you put in it, and sets itself accordingly. A washing machine gets interesting if it can detect the clothes you’re putting into it and automatically determine what cycle to run. That requires standards for how the washer communicates with the washed. It’s meaningless if every clothing manufacturer implements a different, proprietary standard for NFC-enabled tags.

We’re already seeing this in lighting: there are several manufacturers of smart network-enabled light bulbs, but as far as I can tell, each one is controlled by a vendor-specific app. And I can think of nothing worse for the future of home lighting than having to remember whether the lights in the bedroom were made by Sylvania or Philips before I can turn them off. Read more…

Exploring software, hardware, everywhere

A Twitter Q&A follow-up to my conversation with Tim O'Reilly.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly and I sat down in San Francisco and had a conversation about the collision of hardware and software. The fact that digital entrepreneurs see hardware as part of their available palette now is really interesting, as is the way many companies with traditional manufacturing roots are seeing digitization and software as key parts of their businesses in the near future. Software plus more malleable hardware is like a whole new medium for building products and services. We really are on the cusp of interesting times.

As our time wound down, questions were still coming in via Twitter. Since we couldn’t get to all of them during the time allotted, I thought I’d try to respond to a few more of them here. Read more…

Death to the screen

Is freedom just another word for a smart environment?

You know the “Next Big Thing” is no longer waiting in the wings when you hear it dissected on talk radio. That’s now the case with the Industrial Internet — or the Internet of Things, or the collision of software and hardware, or the convergence of the virtual and real worlds, or whatever you want to call it. It has emerged from academe and the high tech redoubts of Silicon Valley, and invaded the mainstream media.

Of course, it’s been “here” for a while, in the form of intelligent devices, such as the Nest Thermostat, and initiatives like the Open Auto Alliance, an effort involving Audi, GM, Honda , Hyundai, Google and Nvidia to develop an open-source, Android-based software platform for cars.

But we are now tap-dancing one of those darn tipping points again. As software-enhanced objects, cheap sensors, and wireless technology combine to connect everything and everybody with every other thing and person, a general awareness is dawning. People — all people, not just the technologically proficient — understand their lives are about to change big time. This is creating some hand-wringing anxiety as well as giddy anticipation, and rightly so: the parameters and consequences of the Internet of Things remain vague. Read more…

Slo-mo for the masses

Thinking about technology in highly disruptive ways has made high-speed videography affordable.

Edgertronic Evolution

Edgertronic version evolution, from initial prototype A through production-ready prototype C.

The connectivity of everything isn’t just about objects talking to each other via the Internet. It’s also about the accelerating democratization of formerly elite technology. Yes, it’s about putting powerful devices in touch with each other — but it’s also about putting powerful devices within the grasp of anyone who wants them. Case in point: the Edgertronic camera.

All kids cultivate particular interests growing up. For Michael Matter, Edgertronic’s co-inventor, it was high-speed flash photography. He got hooked when his father brought home a book of high-speed images taken by Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton, the legendary MIT professor of electrical engineering who pioneered stroboscopic photography.

“It was amazing stuff,” Matter recalls, “and I wanted to figure out how he did it. No, more than that I wanted to do it. I wanted to make those images. But then I looked into the cost of equipment, and it was thousands of dollars. I was 13 or 14, this was the 1970s, and my budget was pretty well restricted to my allowance.” Read more…

Oobleck security

What is the security model for a world filled with sensors?

I’ve been thinking (and writing) a lot lately about the intersection of hardware and software, and how standing at that crossroads does not fit neatly into our mental models of how to approach the world. Previously, there was hardware and there was software, and the two didn’t really mix. When trying to describe my thinking to a colleague at work, the best way to describe the world was that it’s becoming “oobleck,” the mixture of cornstarch and water that isn’t quite a solid but isn’t quite a liquid, named after the Dr. Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck.  (If you want to know how to make it, check out this video.)

One of the reasons I liked the metaphor of oobleck for the melding of hardware and software is that it can rapidly change on you when you’re not looking. It pours like a liquid, but it can “snap” like a solid. If you place the material under stress, as might happen if you set it on a speaker cone, it changes state and acts much more like a weird solid.

This “phase change” effect may also occur as we connect highly specialized embedded computers (really, “sensors”) to the Internet. As Bruce Schneier recently observed, patching embedded systems is hard. As if on cue, a security software company published a report that thousands of TVs and refrigerators may have been compromised to send spam. Embedded systems are easy to overlook from a security perspective because at the dawn of the Internet, security was relatively easy: install a firewall to sit between your network and the Internet, and carefully monitor all connections in and out of the network. Security was spliced into the protocol stack at the network layer. One of my earliest projects in understanding the network layer was working with early versions of Linux to configure a firewall with the then-new technology of address translation. As a result, my early career took place in and around network firewalls. Read more…

More 1876 than 1995

Jim Stogdill explains how the Internet of Things is more on par with the Industrial Revolution than the digital revolution.

Corliss_Engine

Photo: Wikipedia Commons. Corliss Engine.

Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition of 1876 was America’s first World’s Fair, and was ostensibly held to mark the nation’s 100th birthday. But it heralded the future as much as it celebrated the past, showcasing the country’s strongest suit: technology.

The centerpiece of the Expo was a gigantic Corliss engine, the apotheosis of 40 years of steam technology. Thirty percent more efficient than standard steam engines of the day, it powered virtually every industrial exhibit at the exposition via a maze of belts, pulleys, and shafts. Visitors were stunned that the gigantic apparatus was supervised by a single attendant, who spent much of his time reading newspapers.

“This exposition was attended by 10 million people at a time when travel was slow and difficult, and it changed the world,” observes Jim Stogdill, general manager of Radar at O’Reilly Media, and general manager of O’Reilly’s upcoming Internet-of-Things-related conference, Solid. Read more…

Why Solid, why now

We are on the cusp of something as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution.

A few years ago at OSCON, one of the tutorials demonstrated how to click a virtual light switch in Second Life and have a real desk lamp light up in the room. Looking back, it was rather trivial, but it was striking at the time to see software people taking an interest in the “real world.” And what better metaphor for the collision of virtual and real than a connection between Second Life and the Portland Convention Center?

In December 2012, our Radar team was meeting in Sebastopol and we were talking about trends in robotics, Maker DIY, Internet of Things, wearables, smart grid, industrial Internet, advanced manufacturing, frictionless supply chain, etc. We were trying to figure out where to put our focus among all of these trends when suddenly it was obvious (at least to Mike Loukides, who pointed it out): they are all more alike than different, and we could focus on all of them by looking at the relationships among them. The Solid program was conceived that day. Read more…

Four short links: 5 February 2014

Four short links: 5 February 2014

Graph Drawing, DARPA Open Source, Quantified Vehicle, and IoT Growth

  1. sigma.js — Javascript graph-drawing library (node-edge graphs, not charts).
  2. DARPA Open Catalog — all the open source published by DARPA. Sweet!
  3. Quantified Vehicle Meetup — Boston meetup around intelligent automotive tech including on-board diagnostics, protocols, APIs, analytics, telematics, apps, software and devices.
  4. AT&T See Future In Industrial Internet — partnering with GE, M2M-related customers increased by more than 38% last year. (via Jim Stogdill)

The Industrial Internet of Things

The opportunity no one's talking about.

WeishauptBurner

Photo: Kipp Bradford. This industrial burner from Weishaupt churns through 40 million BTUs per hour of fuel.

A few days ago, a company called Echelon caused a stir when it released a new product called IzoT. You may never have heard of Echelon; for most of us, they are merely a part of the invisible glue that connects modern life. But more than 100 million products — from street lights to gas pumps to HVAC systems — use Echelon technology for connectivity. So, for many electrical engineers, Echelon’s products are a big deal. Thus, when Echelon began touting IzoT as the future of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), it was bound to get some attention.

Admittedly, the Internet of Things (IoT) is all the buzz right now. Echelon, like everyone else, is trying to capture some of that mindshare for their products. In this case, the product is a proprietary system of chips, protocols, and interfaces for enabling the IoT on industrial devices. But what struck me and my colleagues was how really outdated this approach seems, and how far it misses the point of the emerging IoT. Read more…