Integration of AI, IoT and Big Data: The Intelligent Assistant

Five years ago, I wrote a post on this blog disparaging the state of the Internet of Things/home automation market as a “Tower of Proprietary Babble.” Vendors of many different home and industrial product offerings were literally speaking different languages, making their products inoperable with other complementary products from other vendors. The market was being constrained by its immaturity and a failure to grasp the importance of open standards. A 2017 Verizon report concluded that “an absence of industry-wide standards…represented greater than 50% of executives concerns about IoT. Today I can report that finally, the solutions and technologies are beginning to come together, albeit still slowly.

The Evolution of These Technologies Is Clearer

The IoT Tower of Proprietary Babble Is Slowly Crumbling

The Rise of the Intelligent Assistant

Five years ago, I wrote a post on this blog disparaging the state of the Internet of Things/home automation market as a “Tower of Proprietary Babble.” Vendors of many different home and industrial product offerings were literally speaking different languages, making their products inoperable with other complementary products from other vendors. The market was being constrained by its immaturity and a failure to grasp the importance of open standards. A 2017 Verizon report concluded that “an absence of industry-wide standards…represented greater than 50% of executives concerns about IoT.” Today I can report that finally, the solutions and technologies are beginning to come together, albeit still slowly.

One of the most important factors influencing these positive developments has been the recognition of the importance of this technology area by major corporate players and a large number of entrepreneurial companies funded by venture investment, as shown in the infographic above. Amazon, for example, announced in October 2018 that it has shipped over 100 Million Echo devices, which effectively combine an intelligent assistant, smart hub, and a large-scale database of information. This does not take into account the dozens of other companies which have launched their own entries. I like to point to Philips Hue as such an example of corporate strategic focus perhaps changing the future corporate prospects of Philips, based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I have visited Philips HQ, a company trying to evolve from the incandescent lighting market. Two years ago my wife bought me a Philips Hue WiFi controlled smart lighting starter kit. My initial reaction was disbelief that it would succeed. I am eating crow on that point, as I now control my lighting using Amazon’s Alexa and the Philips Hue smart hub. The rise of the “intelligent assistant” seems to have been a catalyst for growth and convergence.

The situation with proprietary silos of offerings that do not work well or at all with other offerings is still frustrating, but slowly evolving. Amazon Firestick’s browser is its own awkward “Silk” or alternatively Firefox, but excluding Google’s Chrome for alleged competitive advantage. When I set up my Firestick, I had to ditch Chromecast because I only have so many HDMI ports. Alexa works with Spotify but only in one room as dictated by Spotify. Alexa can play music from Amazon Music or Sirius/XM on all Echo devices without the Spotify limitation. Which brings me to another point of aggravation: alleged Smart TV’s. Not only are they not truly “smart,” they are proprietary silos of their own, so “intelligent assistant” smart hubs do not work with “smart” TV’s. Samsung, for example, has its own competing intelligent assistant, Bixby, so of course, only Bixby can control a Samsung TV. I watched one of those YouTube DIY videos on how you could make your TV work with Alexa using third-party software and remotes. Trust me, you do not want to go there. But cracks are beginning to appear that may lead to a flood of openness. Samsung just announced at CES that beginning in 2019 its Smart TV’s will work with Amazon Echo and Google Home, and that a later software update will likely enable older Samsung TV’s to work with Echo and Home. However, Bixby will still control the remote. Other TV’s from manufacturers like Sony and LG have worked with intelligent assistants for some time.

The rise of an Internet of Everything Everywhere, the recognition of the need for greater data communication bandwidth, and battery-free wireless IoT sensors are heating up R&D labs everywhere. Keep in mind that I am focusing on the consumer side, and have not even mentioned the rising demands from industrial applications. Intel has estimated that autonomous vehicles will transmit up to 4 Terabytes of data daily. AR and VR applications will require similar throughput. Existing wireless data communication technologies, including 5G LTE, cannot address this need. In addition, an exploding need for IoT sensors not connected to an electrical power source will require more work in the area of “energy harvesting.” Energy harvesting began with passive RFID, and by using kinetic, pizeo, and thermoelectric energy and converting it into a battery-free electrical power source for sensors. EnOcean, an entrepreneurial spinoff of Siemens in Munich has pioneered this technology but it is not sufficient for future market requirements.

Fortunately, work has already begun on both higher throughput wireless data communication using mmWave spectrum, and energy harvesting using radio backscatter, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla’s dream of wireless electrical power distribution. The successful demonstration of these technologies holds the potential to open the door to new IEEE data communication standards that could potentially play a role in ending the Tower of Babble and accelerating the integration of AI, IoT, and Big Data. Bottom line is that the market and the technology landscape are improving.

My IEEE Talk from 2013 foreshadows the development of current emerging trends in advanced technology, as they appeared at the time. I proposed that in fact, they represent one huge integrated convergence trend that has morphed into something even bigger, and is already having a major impact on the way we live, work, and think. The 2012 Obama campaign’s sophisticated “Dashboard” application is referenced, integrating Big Data, The Cloud, and Smart Mobile was perhaps the most significant example at that time of the combined power of these trends blending into one big thing.

READ MORE: Blog Post on IoT from July 20, 2013

The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media. But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication, like Internet communication, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets, is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home, in your car, everywhere: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. It has also been called home automation. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so-called machine to machine or M2M communication. The data communication can also terminate in a compute server where the information can be acted on automatically, or made available to the user to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet-connected device.

Another key concept is the promise of automated energy efficiency, with the introduction of “smart meters” with data communication capability, and also achieved in large commercial structures via the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design program or LEED. Some may recall that when Bill Gates built his multi-million dollar mansion on Lake Washington in Seattle, he had “remote control” of his home built into it. Now, years later, Gates’ original home automation is obsolete. The dream of home automation has been around for years, with numerous Silicon Valley conferences, and failed startups over the years, and needless to say, home automation went nowhere. But it is this concept of effortless home automation that has been the Holy Grail.

But this is also where the glowing promise of The Internet of Things (IoT) begins to morph into a giant “hairball.” The term “hairball” was former Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy‘s favorite term to describe a complicated mess. In hindsight, the early euphoric days of home automation were plagued by the lack of “convergence.” I use this term to describe the inability of available technology to meet the market opportunity. Without convergence, there can be no market opportunity beyond early adopter techno geeks. Today, the convergence problem has finally been eliminated. Moore’s Law and advances in data communication have swept away the convergence problem. But for many years the home automation market was stalled.

Also, as more Internet-connected devices emerged it became apparent that these devices and apps were a hacker’s paradise. The concept of IoT was being implemented in very naive and immature ways and lacking common industry standards on basic issues: the kinds of things that the IETF and IEEE are famous for. These vulnerabilities are only now very slowly being resolved, but still in a fragmented ad hoc manner. The central problem has not been addressed due to classic proprietary “not invented here” mindsets.

The problem that is currently the center of this hairball, and from all indications is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. It is the problem of multiple data communication protocols, many of them effectively proprietary, creating a huge incompatible Tower of Babbling Things. There is no meaningful industry and market wide consensus on how The Internet of Things should communicate with the rest of the Internet. Until this happens, there can be no fulfillment of the promise of The Internet of Things. I recently posted “Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win,” which discusses the need for open standards in order for a market to scale up.

A recent ZDNet post explains that home automation currently requires that devices need to be able to connect with “multiple local- and wide-area connectivity options (ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, RFID/NFC, GPS, Ethernet). Along with the ability to connect many different kinds of sensors, this allows devices to be configured for a range of vertical markets.” Huh? This is the problem in a nutshell. You do not need to be a data communication engineer to get the point. And this is not even close to a full discussion of the problem. There are also IoT vendors who believe that consumers should pay them for the ability to connect to their proprietary Cloud. So imagine paying a fee for every protocol or sensor we employ in our homes. That’s a non-starter.

The above laundry list of data communication protocols, does not include the Zigbee “smart meter” communications standards war. The Zigbee protocol has been around for years, and claims to be an open industry standard, but many do not agree. Zigbee still does not really work, and a new competing smart meter protocol has just entered the picture. The Bluetooth IEEE 802.15 standard now may be overtaken by a much more powerful 802.15 3a. Some are asking if 4G LTE, NFC or WiFi may eliminate Bluetooth altogether. A very cool new technology, energy harvesting, has begun to take off in the home automation market. The energy harvesting sensors (no batteries) can capture just enough kinetic, peizo or thermoelectric energy to transmit short data communication “telegrams” to an energy harvesting router or server. The EnOcean Alliance has been formed around a small German company spun off from Siemens, and has attracted many leading companies in building automation. But EnOcean itself has recently published an article in Electronic Design News, announcing that they have a created “middleware” (quote) “…to incorporate battery-less devices into networks based on several different communication standards such as Wi-Fi, GSM, Ethernet/IP, BACnet, LON, KNX or DALI.” (unquote). It is apparent that this space remains very confused, crowded and uncertain. A new Cambridge UK startup, Neul is proposing yet another new IoT approach using the radio spectrum known as “white space,” becoming available with the transition from analog to digital television. With this much contention on protocols, there will be nothing but market paralysis.

Is everyone following all of these acronyms and data comm protocols? There will be a short quiz at the end of this post. (smile)

The advent of IP version 6, strongly supported by Intel and Cisco Systems has created another area of confusion. The problem with IPv6 in the world of The IoT is “too much information” as we say. Cisco and Intel want to see IPv6 as the one global protocol for every Internet connected device. This is utterly incompatible with energy harvesting, as the tiny amount of harvested energy cannot transmit the very long IPv6 packets. Hence, EnOcean’s middleware, without which their market is essentially constrained.

Then there is the ongoing new standards and upgrade activity in the International Standards Organization (ISO), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Special Interest Groups (SIG’s”), none of which seem to be moving toward any ultimate solution to the Tower of Babbling Things problem in The Internet of Things.

The Brave New World of Internet privacy issues relating to this tidal wave of Big Data are not even considered here, and deserve a separate post on the subject. A recent NBC Technology post has explored many of these issues, while some have suggested we simply need to get over it. We have no privacy.

Stakeholders in The Internet of Things seem not to have learned the repeated lesson of open standards and co-opetition, and are concentrating on proprietary advantage which ensures that this market will not effectively scale anytime in the foreseeable future. Intertwined with the Tower of Babbling Things are the problems of Internet privacy and consumer concerns about wireless communication health & safety issues. Taken together, this market is not ready for prime time.

https://www.slideshare.net/mayo615/ieee-talk-integrated-big-data-the-cloud-smart-mobile-big-deal-or-not/mayo615/ieee-talk-integrated-big-data-the-cloud-smart-mobile-big-deal-or-not

The Internet of Things: The Promise Versus the Tower of Hacked Babbling Things

The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media. But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication, like Internet communication, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets, is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home, in your car, everywhere: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. It has also been called home automation. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so called machine to machine or M2M communication. The data communication can also terminate in a compute server where the information can be acted on automatically, or made available to the user to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet connected device.

But this is also where the glowing promise of The Internet of Things (IoT) begins to morph into a giant “hairball.” The term “hairball” was former Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy‘s favorite term to describe a complicated mess. In hindsight, the early euphoric days of home automation were plagued by the lack of “convergence.” I use this term to describe the inability of available technology to meet the market opportunity. Without convergence there can be no market opportunity beyond early adopter techno geeks. Today, the convergence problem has finally been eliminated. Moore’s Law and advances in data communication have swept away the convergence problem. But for many years the home automation market was stalled.

Is everyone following all of these acronyms and data comm protocols? There will be a short quiz at the end of this post. (smile)

Yesterday’s Internet Outage In Parts of U.S. and Canada You Didn’t Hear About

A year ago, a DDoS attack caused internet outages around the US by targeting the internet-infrastructure company Dyn, which provides Domain Name System services to look up web servers. Monday saw a nationwide series of outages as well, but with a more pedestrian cause: a misconfiguration at Level 3, an internet backbone company—and enterprise ISP—that underpins other big networks. Network analysts say that the misconfiguration was a routing issue that created a ripple effect, causing problems for companies like Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, and RCN across the country.

How a Tiny Error Shut Off the Internet for Parts of the US and Canada

Reposted from Wired

Lily Hay Newman13 hrs ago

a group of computer equipment

Level 3, whose acquisition by CenturyLink closed recently, said in a statement to WIRED that it resolved the issue in about 90 minutes. “Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services,” the company said. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error.” Comcast users started reporting internet outages around the time of the Level 3 outages on Monday, but the company said that it was monitoring “an external network issue” and not a problem with its own infrastructure. RCN confirmed that it had some network problems on Monday because of Level 3. The company said it had restored RCN service by rerouting traffic to a different backbone.

a close up of a map

The misconfiguration was a “route leak,” according to Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at the DDoS and network-security firm Arbor Networks, which monitors global internet operations. ISPs use “Autonomous Systems,” also known as ASes, to keep track of what IP addresses are on which networks, and route packets of data between them. They use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to establish and communicate routes. For example, packets can route between networks A and B, but network A can also route packets to network C through network B, and so on. This is how internet service providers interoperate to let you browse the whole internet, not just the IP addresses on their own networks.

In a “route leak,” an AS, or multiple ASes, issue incorrect information about the IP addresses on their network, which causes inefficient routing and failures for both the originating ISP and other ISPs trying to route traffic through. Think of it like a series of street signs that help keep traffic flowing in the right directions. If some of them are mislabeled or point the wrong way, assorted chaos can ensue.

Route leaks can be malicious, sometimes called “route hijacks” or “BGP hijacks,” but Monday’s incident seems to have been caused by a simple mistake that ballooned to have national impact. Large outages caused by accidental route leaks have cropped up before.

“Folks are looking to tweak routing policies, and make mistakes,” Arbor Networks’ Dobbins says. The problem could have come as CenturyLink works to integrate the Level 3 network or could have stemmed from typical traffic engineering and efficiency work.

Internet outages of all sizes caused by route leaks have occurred occasionally, but consistently, for decades. ISPs attempt to minimize them using “route filters” that check the IP routes their peers and customers intend to use to send and receive packets and attempt to catch any problematic plans. But these filters are difficult to maintain on the scale of the modern internet and can have their own mistakes.

Monday’s outages reinforce how precarious connectivity really is, and how certain aspects of the internet’s architecture—offering flexibility and ease-of-use—can introduce instability into what has become a vital service.

Too Many Apps. Too Little Money

Hopefully this comes as no surprise to many, but for some, alas, I am afraid they have yet to get the email. It’s yet another case of the 1% versus the 99%. Only one percent of Web app developers have made any real money, the other ninety-nine percent are SOL. Forty-seven percent of those, make absolutely no money or less than $100 on their app. Not surprisingly there are now over a million apps on the Apple store, and when you add all of the other sources for apps, you can see that the problem is coming to a head. I saw this coming over two years ago and wrote about the problem on this blog, citing a New York Times story published about that time, describing the dark underbelly of the Web app development culture. In a satire of the problem, last year The Onion published a gag story about a new app called “Squander” that enabled users to “geolocate others nearby who had also wasted $2 on the same app.”

Hopefully this comes as no surprise to many, but for some, alas, I am afraid they have yet to get the email. It’s yet another case of the 1% versus the 99%. Only one percent of Web app developers have made any real money, the other ninety-nine percent are SOL. Forty-seven percent of those, make absolutely no money or less than $100 on their app. Not surprisingly there are now over a million apps on the Apple store, and when you add all of the other sources for apps, you can see that the problem is coming to a head. I saw this coming nearly two years ago and wrote about the problem on this blog, citing a New York Times story published about that time, describing the dark underbelly of the Web app development culture. In a satire of the problem, last year The Onion published a gag story about a new app called “Squander” that enabled users to “geolocate others nearby who had also wasted $2 on the same app.”

Read more: App development boom’s depressing underbelly, November 18, 2012

Read more: Silicon Valley’s misguided love affair with an app for everything, March 4, 2013

Reblogged from ValleyWag, July 25th, 2014

There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making

Money

The new American Dream was going so well: drop out, make an app for sending emojis that disappear after 5 seconds, and collect your check. But it turns out the app gold rush is brokenfor almost everyone.

A new, giant survey of 10,000 app developers from around the world reveals a hugely depressing reality: your app will almost certainly not succeed. Maybe it’s a given that in such a crowded market, standing out is a tough feat. But the numbers are terribly dismal: 2 percent ofall app developers pull in over 50 percent of all app revenue—”The revenue distribution is so heavily skewed towards the top that just 1.6% of developers make multiples of the other 98.4% combined.” A staggering 47% of app developers either make literally no money, or less than $100 per month, per app. Hardly Instagram money, or even decent-Instagram-knockoff money.

It’s easy to understand why. There are well over a million apps in Apple’s App Store alone, and unless you’re in the tippy-top of tippiest-top, odds are nobody will even notice you exist. Of course, the fact that it’s considered gauche to even try to make money as a software business doesn’t help:

VisionMobile, which conducted the study, concludes that “It seems extremely unlikely the market can sustain anything like the current level of developers for many more years.”

Good. The fewer people chase dreams of becoming the next Yo (a sentence that makes me want to sever my fingers, one by one), the more young talent can dedicate itself to building the next Washboard.

The Internet of Things: The Promise Versus the Tower of Babbling Things

The term “Internet of Things” is being loosely tossed around in the media. But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication like the Internet, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so called machine to machine or M2M. The data communication can also terminate in a home compute server where the information can be made available to the homeowner to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet connected device.

The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) is being loosely tossed around in the media. But what does it mean? It means simply that data communication, like Internet communication, but not necessarily Internet Protocol packets, is emerging for all manner of “things” in the home, in your car, everywhere: light switches, lighting devices, thermostats, door locks, window shades, kitchen appliances, washers & dryers, home audio and video equipment, even pet food dispensers. You get the idea. It has also been called home automation. All of this communication occurs autonomously, without human intervention. The communication can be between and among these devices, so called machine to machine or M2M communication. The data communication can also terminate in a compute server where the information can be acted on automatically, or made available to the user to intervene remotely from their smart mobile phone or any other remote Internet connected device.

But this is also where the glowing promise of The Internet of Things (IoT) begins to morph into a giant “hairball.” The term “hairball” was former Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy‘s favorite term to describe a complicated mess. In hindsight, the early euphoric days of home automation were plagued by the lack of “convergence.” I use this term to describe the inability of available technology to meet the market opportunity. Without convergence there can be no market opportunity beyond early adopter techno geeks. Today, the convergence problem has finally been eliminated. Moore’s Law and advances in data communication have swept away the convergence problem. But for many years the home automation market was stalled.

The other problem is currently the center of this hairball, and from all indications is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. It is the problem of multiple data communication protocols, many of them effectively proprietary, creating a huge incompatible Tower of Babbling Things. There is no meaningful industry and market wide consensus on how The Internet of Things should communicate with the rest of the Internet. Until this happens, there can be no fulfillment of the promise of The Internet of Things. I recently posted “Co-opetition: Open Standards Always Win,” which discusses the need for open standards in order for a market to scale up.

Is everyone following all of these acronyms and data comm protocols? There will be a short quiz at the end of this post. (smile)

Multidimensional Mobile Market War: Silicon Rust Belt

In this, my third post on the dramatic and fascinating developments, shifts, and impacts of the Multidimensional Mobile Market War, the precipitous decline of the leading personal computer industry competitors, has become even more pronounced than anyone suspected. Last week, IDC and Gartner were in more or less violent agreement that the bottom had very suddenly dropped out of the PC market.

Winners and Losers: Tech’s Hot or Not List

In this, my third post on the dramatic and fascinating developments, shifts, and impacts of the Multidimensional Mobile Market War, the precipitous decline of the leading personal computer industry competitors, has become even more pronounced than anyone suspected. Last week, IDC and Gartner were in more or less violent agreement that the bottom had very suddenly dropped out of the PC market.

In my previous post I speculated that Michael Dell‘s attempt to take Dell Computer private was in major trouble. Carl Icahn and the Blackstone Group had already thrown a monkey wrench in Dell’s effort to buy back personal control of Dell. Then came the SEC disclosure statement that showed that Dell’s situation was more dire than previously known. This week the Blackstone Group announced that they no longer had an interest in Dell and were pulling out. The final chapter of this may be that Dell Computer will run out of cash and simply be forced to shutter its doors. Please keep in mind that Microsoft is a key strategic investor in Michael Dell’s privatization plan.

Then we turn to Microsoft itself and its problems. Microsoft has been grappling with major strategic problems as it attempts to transition away from personal computers into smart mobile. Windows 8 has been a disappointment. I gave my wife a Windows 8 laptop, and she immediately complained that the “Start” button was gone, and nothing was intuitive. Microsoft has just announced that Windows 8.1 will include the return of the “Start” button. You can’t make up stuff this dumb. Nokia is struggling to re-establish a survivable market share in mobile using Windows 8 as its OS… IDC has been forecasting that Microsoft is unlikely to establish more than a 8% mobile OS market share by 2015. This is catastrophic for Microsoft. Facebook‘s decision to implement an HTC Android device is yet another nail in Microsoft’s attempts to reinvent itself.

Some articles and blogs have argued that Intel is also at a “strategic inflection point,” as Andy Grove would have said, with its legendary reputation grounded in the PC business, as with Microsoft. While this is true, Intel’s short term results belie the historically volatile and cyclical nature of the semiconductor market. What is clear, is that Intel saw the future some time ago, and that it has a coherent long term strategy. Intel has been diligently plowing its profits back into research and new market development programs. Most important in these new markets is the Atom low power chip for mobile, and perceptivity computing. The Intel Hillsboro facility we used to call “Jones Farm,” the Intel Labs, is famous for leading the industry efforts on the Universal Serial Bus (USB), Universal Asynchronus Digital Subscriber Line (UADSL), PCI bus, Bluetooth, and now a host of new market efforts, including energy harvesting technology.

I speculated last week that Lenovo must be rethinking the wisdom of it’s decision to buy IBM‘s PC business. This appears not to be the case. It has been reported this week that IBM is now in talks to sell its server business to Lenovo. This revelation is also important in understanding IBM’s strategy. IBM appears to be completely disconnecting from its legendary past in computing hardware, and exclusively embracing “The Cloud” and software as a service (SAAS).

Then we must consider the case of Hewlett Packard. Over the last two years, HP has engaged in a schizophrenic death dance with the PC business, that has damaged the credibility of the HP brand, something many of us could never have imagined. HP’s bizarre decisions to purchase the Palm OS for over $2 Billion, and British software company Autonomy, for over $11 Billion, which some have described as the greatest business blunder in history, surpassing Time Warner‘s blunder in purchasing AOL, leave observers shell shocked. But even more bizarre in my humble opinion (IMHO) is HP’s repeated blunders and reversals in the PC and tablet businesses. HP has been in and out of the PC and tablet businesses so often that the HP brand credibility has been completely trashed. With IBM now apparently getting completely out of hardware and concentrating entirely on The Cloud and SAAS, via IBM Global Services, it forces HP to yet again rethink its PC business, if it is to compete successfully with IBM.

Finally we must consider the situation of Oracle, a perennial big player in enterprise software and services. It’s CEO and America’s Cup sailor, Larry Ellison, recently acquired Sun Microsystems, its traditional hardware partner. The logic of Ellison’s decision to acquire Sun escapes me. Based on the fringe SPARC proprietary semiconductor architecture, Sun was never able to achieve the cost/volume advantages of Intel. Oracle should have focused on becoming hardware independent, as IBM seems to doing. Instead, Oracle’s financial performance is under pressure, and they are lumbered with Sun hardware.

The spectre of a Silicon Valley Rust Belt seems to be one likely outcome of the Multidimensional Mobile Market War. Who will be a victim and who will be a survivor is not yet clear. If only from a historical point of view, I would put my bet on IBM and Intel, who both have decades long reputations for reinventing themselves. I would also be looking at the strategic directions both IBM and Intel are taking, as potentially good indicators of the future.

IEEE Seminar, February 6th, 5PM, EME 1151

IEEE Okanagan Subsection
Presents
Mr. David Mayes
Faculty of Management, Global Internet Group, LLP
Big Data, the Cloud, and Smart Mobile: Big
Deal or Not?
Time & Date: 5pm-6pm, February 6, 2013
Location: EME 1151, UBC Okanagan campus
Talk Abstract: We are hearing regularly in the media about so-called “Big Data.” Is Big Data so
transformational that it will change our everyday lives, or is it just another evolutionary advance
that may improve productivity but not much else? The same arguments may apply to the concept
of “The Cloud,” and “Smart Mobile,” the other two major trends. I say that the three, taken together,
are coalescing into the most important new force in information technology in decades. They will
drive further innovation and productivity enhancements into the foreseeable future. The talk will
explore all three trends and pose questions for the future.
Speaker Biography: Mr. David Mayes is a full-time Lecturer in entrepreneurship, communication,
negotiation, IT and strategic management at The University of British Columbia, Faculty of
Management, and Master’s degree program. Mr. Mayes was founder and spokesperson for the Intel,
Microsoft and Compaq initiative for high speed consumer “universal” DSL Internet access. Mr.
Mayes also led a number of other major industry initiatives: Vendors’ ISDN Association, V.92
modem consortium. Mr. Mayes joined with Microsoft as an author of the IETF security protocol
PPTP (point to point tunneling protocol), creating secure “virtual private networks” across the
Internet. Mr. Mayes formed solar energy company, Sola Renewable Energy Ltd., and was
Executive Director and Chairperson of the Okanagan Environmental Industry Alliance (OEIA),
which works directly with local, regional, provincial and federal Canadian government groups.
Mr. Mayes began his career at Intel Corporation in California, Oregon and Europe. He left Intel
while based at Intel’s European HQ, to form his first entrepreneurial venture, 01 Computers Group
Ltd., based in London. Its corporate clients included the BBC, British Telecom and Imperial
Chemical Industries. Recently, Mr. Mayes was Vice President of Business Development at P-Cube,
iBEAM Broadcasting, and Director of Business Development at Ascend Communications. Mr.
Mayes was directly involved in a variety of multinational venture investments, public, private
mergers, acquisitions, corporate partnerships, and sales, including Ascend’s acquisitions of NetStar
and Cascade Communications.
Pizza and drinks will be provided after the talk. For further information please contact:
Julian Cheng (email: julian.cheng@ubc.ca)

Silicon Valley Rock Star Geoffrey Moore: The Tide Has Turned

Geoffrey Moore is the author of the classic book on Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Crossing the Chasm, and now a number of other great books. I first met Geoff when he was working for Regis McKenna, Intel’s legendary PR guru in the early years. I think of Geoff as one of the best marketing minds in high tech. I strongly recommend that my UBC Faculty of Management entrepreneurship students follow Geoff on LinkedIn. In the piece below, Geoff argues for a resurgence of Big Ideas in IT, and for us to stop wasting time with low end consumer markets (translation=”already way too many apps for that!”). I had forgotten the Steve Jobs quote at the very end. Priceless!

Geoff is also a great public speaker. His use of humour is one of his greatest assets, as he makes important points. See him on YouTube as well. This short excerpt of Geoff is from the Stanford eCorner site.

Reblogged from LinkedIn

Follow Geoffrey Moore on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter

The Tide Has Turned

It is a fool’s errand to call the top of anything in an investment context, so please keep my cap and bells ready to hand. But there are all kinds of signals these days that the consumer IT boom has peaked, not the least of which was the deep fog of underwhelm that settled across the latest CES in Las Vegas. Add to that Apple down 30% from its highs, Google tracking pretty much to the NASDAQ, Facebook working its way back to its IPO price, Zynga 50% under water, and you see what I mean.

Obviously this was to be expected. Nothing goes up forever except analyst extrapolations to justify a BUY stock rating. And no one should think about a retreat from our universal conversion to all things digital. Instead, they should turn their eyes to the enterprise.

2013, in my view, will be the first of five to seven very productive years for IT vendors serving the enterprise, as sector after sector in our economy and around the world capitulates to digital transformation. Retail is in the chute at present, following a path already trod by financial services, media, advertising, travel and leisure, Telco, and high tech. Automotive is right behind, and consumer packaged goods is on deck. But the really big plays will come from the social services sector—education, state and local government, and health care. Here, by one means or another, there will be a breakthrough in the “hostage crisis” that holds an entire nation in check to preserve legacy interests in each profession. There is simply not enough money and not enough trained professionals to stay the current course.

IT makes its money by releasing trapped value and enabling next-generation value add. Social services represent a “target rich” opportunity for both. Some of this will come from the public coffers, some from private enterprise, but either way the returns on IT investment will be compelling. At the low end, they will come from automating and commoditizing services that today are provided manually or in person, often by fiat of regulation or labor contract. This will free up time, talent, and management attention to attack the middle of the price-performance curve, where productivity gains translate into better faster deployment of routine but high-value interactions, typically one on one, whether that be in teaching, patient care, or citizen services. And at the high end, we will continue venture style investments, again both public and private, to exploit the amazing powers of big data analytics, massive simulations, social networking, and mobile applications, seeking out new trends, new levers, and new therapies.

In all these areas, as we have argued at length elsewhere, systems of engagement will take precedence of systems of record. But as many have pointed out, it actually requires a synthesis of the two to deliver on the promises made above. And that will take talent. And that is what is out of position at the present moment. Too much talent is still hanging out at the consumer IT water holes—time to migrate over to the enterprise side, whether that be to boutique consultancies specializing in the new IT, or next-generation services teams within established IT vendors, or pockets of enlightenment in enterprise IT organizations themselves. Regardless of the venue, the user experience design challenges will be just as demanding as on the consumer side, and the societal returns will be much, much higher.

In 1986, Steve Jobs famously challenged John Sculley, asking him if he wanted to keep on making sugar water or help Apple change the world. While that did not quite work out the way either of them intended, the challenge itself still holds. Do you want to spend your next decade developing more digital distractions to amuse people while they stand in line at Starbuck’s, or do you want to take the human race to the next plateau?

Your call.

_________________________________________________________________________

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Follow Geoff here….

Geoffrey Moore | Escape Velocity | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube

Marshall McLuhan Was At Least Half Right

As an undergraduate student of Speech-Communication, I vividly recall learning about Marshall McLuhan, and the day we all watched the short video The Global Village, a short kaleidoscopic film, and read the very brief pictorial paperback book, “The Medium is the Message,”multiple times. Both were way ahead of their time. These were heady times in the academic world. As this was at least 15 years before the advent of the Internet, we were all grasping at the profundity of what McLuhan was saying to us….not realizing that this guy was predicting the World Wide Web.. Holy Shit! We tried reading his books but found that they were so dense as to be impossible to read… What we could “sorta” get was “the medium was the message” visual representation and that weird little book.. I recall thinking that what McLuhan was saying was so cool, and chuckling about it, though I still could not fully grasp it.. I was experiencing the “cosmic giggle” that became the tag line for Rolling Stone magazine at that time. And then, of course, Woody Allen immortalized McLuhan, by putting him into that scene in Annie Hall, where McLuhan walks up and tells the guy next to Allen and Diane Keaton, that he is completely full of shit, and understands nothing about his work. Whew!

Today, I look back on that time, struggling with McLuhan’s vision, and shake my head in utter awe.. It was as if we were sitting at the feet of Einstein desperately trying to explain relativity to us, and we just couldn’t quite get it.

We certainly get it now. Marshall McLuhan is my personal choice for intellectual giant of the second half of the 20th Century. This gives full due credit to Einstein.

But something interesting is happening with the Medium and the Global Village. It is bifurcating, at least for now. The World Wide Web is continuing on its happy way, morphing over and over again as we go, now becoming only three important threads: The Cloud, Big Data, and Smart Mobile…The efforts of China, Iran, North Korea and others to control the Web, in my view, and the view of others, may be pathetic wastes of time, effort, money and technology. On the other hand it could be the beginning of “balkanization” of the Internet. The Berlin Wall came down and the Great Wall is nothing more than a tourist attraction. Efforts to stop the Web may be like King Canute trying to stop the waves, or it may be the beginning of a new Internet era. But nothing else matters anymore, and for now nothing can stop it.

But on the more tangible side, financial, economic and political globalization things are retrograde. The Economist this week reported that the World is less economically connected than it was in 2007, indeed less than it was in 2005. It is an extraordinary contrast with the evolution of the WWW. The Global Interconnectedness Index, rather like the index of consumer confidence, is reporting that people around the World believe that we are more globally interconnected economically than we actually are. Foreign Direct Investment is way down, and my guess is that it may not recover soon.. A whole raft of global political issues are beginning to emerge that are restraining economic globalization, rather like mercantilism in the 18th Century and how it evolved and morphed over time.

The World is not yet ready.. Years ago, the University of California at Santa Cruz had a graduate program entitled The History of Consciousness, led by Professor Cesar Grana. I met with Professor Grana at the time, and was fascinated at his approach to McLuhan’s vision. Everything is connected: art, science, music, theology, and it has evolved as the human race has evolved.

What we have with the current pull back from economic globalization is the fact that the human race is simply not ready to embrace a complete Global Village. We are on the edges of it with World Music, and the World Wide Web, but it appears that full economic and political realization of Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog....as described by Steve Job’s in his now famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford…is just not here yet, though some of us have been waiting for years. Jobs passed on and some of us may as well before this chapter is closed.

As Steve Jobs told us, the last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog advised us to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

The Evolution of These Technologies Is Clearer

The IoT Tower of Proprietary Babble Is Slowly Crumbling

The Rise of the Intelligent Assistant

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Sam Biddle

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