Pressure grows to stop GB Smart Metering

It’s taken a long time for the bubble to burst, but there are signs that reality is starting to break through the Panglossian fixed grins of the British smart metering establishment.  As readers of this site will know, I’ve been critical of the GB programme.  I have no issue with smart meters per se, but what is being proposed for deployment in Britain before 2020 is unlikely to offer any of the cited benefits.  Instead it’s likely to add over £11 billion to the energy bills of English, Welsh and Scottish consumers.

DECC, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, have spent much of the last five years fending off criticism and fighting Freedom of Information requests to explain how they came up with their figures justifying the British smart metering programme.  Until recently they’ve managed to pull the wool over the eyes of ministers and the National Audit Office, but that strategy finally unravelled with the recently released report from the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, which concluded that “without significant and immediate changes to the present policy, the programme runs the risk of falling far short of expectations. At worst it could prove to be a costly failure.”

A further nail in the coffin of DECC optimism came today, when the highly respected Institute of Directors’ Policy Unit issued a scathing critique of the programme in “Not too clever: will Smart Meters be the next Government IT disaster?”, which goes as far as to suggest the best course may be to abandon the programme altogether.

Further evidence suggests that the programme is considerably further behind than many of those involved realise.  There is also a growing concern about its cost within utilities, many of whom would be happy to abandon some or all aspects of it.  The first task of whoever is elected in May could be to make the decision to kill it.

Read More

Apple’s revolutionary ResearchKit deserves a better audience

I’ve just sat through Tim Cook’s Apple announcement, and amongst the shiny stuff was something really important – ResearchKit.  Most smartphone users probably don’t realise how much data their devices are capturing all of the time, or that some of it is quietly being used to influence apps such as the games they play.  The point is, that for the first time ever, aspects of our health and lifestyle can be captured easily.  For medical researchers, access to this personal data could transform the way we perform research on disease and aging.  Even where research projects are able to monitor patients today, the sensors are often unwieldy and it’s difficult to get volunteers to sign up and stay engaged.  To be effective, medical research needs data – not just from ill people, but from those at all stages of the continuum of health and illness.  The issue has always been how to get hold of it.

Read More

MWC – Men Want Connections

Don’t worry – it’s not a blog about Tindr or Grindr.  The connections we’re talking about here are mobile subscriptions and the men are those at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  It is still mostly men.  Despite the best efforts of the GSMA with sub-events like the Connected Women’s Summit and France’s promotion of its exhibiting companies as “La France Tech” (which must have had the members of the Académie Française heading to their graves for some early turning), MWC remained defiantly male.  In the opening keynotes around 85% of the audience were men.  Telecoms, for all of its populist marketing, is still largely a suited profession.

What was exercising the males of the species this year was numbers.  Back in 2009, Ericsson predicted that there would be 50 billion mobile connections by 2020.  At the time it seemed possible; phone usage was growing and everyone expected that the things around us would follow suit by getting their own mobile connections, leading us to that kind of number.  It’s now beginning to strike the CEOs within the industry that five and a half years have passed and we’re half-way there.  Yet we’ve still only connected a few tens of millions of machines.  That’s why they’re getting so excited about wearables and the Internet of Things as the only way to make those predictions come true.

Read More