Creative Connectivity

Microsoft’s Fear Of Missing Out, or How NOT to design a Smart Thermostat

Last week, with a fair degree of razzmatazz and press coverage, Microsoft launched a smart thermostat called Glas. Except it wasn’t really Microsoft’s. And whilst it might be pretty, it certainly isn’t smart.

If you look behind the promotional video, it’s clear that it’s not really driven by any desire to be smart. It’s come out of Johnson Controls, who have been designing dumb thermostats for many years, and it perpetuates the dumb elements of control, which means it won’t save users as much money as a proper smart device could. However, small things like the truth didn’t stop them headlining it as “reinventing the thermostat”. I suspect the only reason that Glas exists is that Microsoft are currently in a poor third place in getting their Cortana speech recognition capability into the market. I quite like Cortana, but compared with Amazon and Google’s success in persuading consumer product manufacturers to support their offerings, Cortana is definitely an also-ran.

What you see if you watch the video carefully is an outdated control system, a user interface that was probably inspired by Bishop Berkeley and an attempt to break the second law of thermodynamics. All of which details appear to have slipped past the rose-tinted editorial glasses of the technology press, who have just said “Shiny – want one!”. So let me explain why it’s another smart opportunity missed.

Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington…

Noel Coward, the English playwright and actor, described the motivation behind writing his most famous song as: “Some years ago when I was returning from the Far East on a very large ship, I was pursued around the decks every day by a very large lady. She showed me some photographs of her daughter – a repellent-looking girl, and seemed convinced that she was destined for a great stage career. Finally, in sheer self-preservation, I locked myself in my cabin and wrote this song – “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington”.

I know how he felt. As I spend more and more time in meetups, startup conferences, incubators, co-working spaces and accelerators, it feels that our industry has adopted the same rose-tinted spectacles in the belief that every Tom, Dick and Harriet can be trained to be an entrepreneur. Hence the following update:

Don’t let your Children do a Startup, Mrs Worthington.

Hearables attract $50 million of crowdfunding

It’s almost four years since I coined the word “hearables”, so it was pleasant to see it displayed as a headline product category on NXP’s stand at the Mobile World Congress last week, confirming that hearables are taking off as a serious market sector. It was also encouraging to see the range of products that they had on display which are already available, or close to being available to buy, including models from Bragi, Doppler, Earin, Nuheara, MyManu and Jabra.

Most of these still come from start-up companies. With the exception of Jabra and Apple, the majority of companies shipping hearable products started off life through crowdfunding campaigns. I’ve been tracking many of these, and was fascinated to see that at the end of February, the overall total that has been raised for hearable devices passed the $50 million dollar mark, with backers placing orders for over 300,000 products. With major headphone brands starting to weigh in, it’s a good indication that hearables are topping the list of wearable products that consumers want to buy. That’s in stark contrast to other wearable products, where the demise of Pebble and continuing layoffs at Fitbit and GoPro suggest that the initial customer enthusiasm has not translated into a compelling desire to continue wearing them.

Qualkia – Constructing the 5G Myth

I’ve just returned from the Mobile World Congress, and a fairly clear theme this year was the alleged imminent arrival of 5G, with companies promoting the current status variously as 4.9G, the Bridge to 5G or pre-5G. The only problem is that no-one seemed to be very clear about what 5G is going to be.

Up until now, it’s been pretty clear what the “G”s stand for – it’s been the main user application area over and above the basics of voice and text. For 2G they were pretty much confined to Games and Gambling. In other words, applications which relied on timely, but minimal data. 3G gave us Girls, as the porn industry realised that, with higher data rates, they could charge for sending pictures to the most private of our devices. The increased bandwidth of 4G resulted in Gossip – the net curtain twitching of Twitter and Facebook which has glued millions to their smartphones. But the potential killer app for 5G is proving remarkably elusive. Participants at the Global 5G Test Summit event kept on emphasising the importance of early testing for exploring new usage models and applications. That appeared to be because nobody had no idea of what they might be. Judging from the reticence of many network operators at the show, who are obviously struggling to see how they are going to make any money from investing in 5G infrastructure, the fifth “G” may end up bringing little other than Grief and Gloom.

At which point I’d like to highlight a recent book by William Webb, entitled “The Myth of 5G”. In it, he argues that not only does no-one know what 5G is, but there’s no need for it. After which, I’ll tell you about Qualkia.

IoV – The Internet of Voice

Forget the Internet of Things – it’s a bubble. The majority of products currently claiming to be IoT devices are just the same, vertical M2M products we’ve always had, but taking the opportunity to benefit from a rebrand. Most of the rest of the IoT is the wet dream of Venture Capitalists and Makers who think that by overfunding and stimulating each other’s egos in a frenzy of technical masturbation, they can create a consumer market for the Internet of Things. As the IoT slips slowly backwards into the foothills of Gartner’s Hype curve you need to look elsewhere to find the real Internet device opportunity, which is only just emerging. It’s the IoV, or the Internet of Voice.

The problem that the current IoT paradigm has is that it’s mostly about collecting data and then applying algorithms to extract value from the data. That’s a difficult job. You need to make the devices, work out how to connect them and then hope you can find something valuable within the data to engage the customer. The problem is that all of that takes time, not least the time to get a critical mass of products out into the field. The Catch 22 which most business plans ignore is that you need to deploy tens of thousands of devices to accumulate enough data before you can even see if there’s anything of value in it. But without an upfront value, people are loath to buy the devices. Everyone, from wearables manufacturers to smart cities are discovering that it’s not a very compelling business case, not least because it needs fairly technical consumers to install everything in the first place.

The Internet of Voice takes a different route. Instead of expecting users to know anything about the IoT, they just get to ask questions and then get answers. No more buttons, no more keyboards, no more coding, just ask. But it has the power to control everything we come into contact with. It could mark the end of our love affair with smartphones and is probably the biggest threat that Apple faces today.

NB-IoT is Dead. Long Live NB-IoT.

As the old adage goes, “while the cat’s away, the mice will play”. In the case of NB-IOT, “when the spec’s delayed, LPWAN will play”, which is exactly what’s happening in the Internet of Things market today. The problem is that 3GPP (the 3rd Generation Partnership Project), the standards body which has been responsible for the 3G, 4G and 5G mobile standards, dropped the ball as far as the Internet of Things is concerned. Seduced by the slabs of black glass which suck up both our attention and the mobile networks’ spectrum, the 3GPP engineers totally forgot to design something to replace the old 2G workhorse of GPRS, which is responsible for most of today’s machine to machine communications. Instead, they spent all of their time designing high power, high speed, expensive variants of 4G to support an ongoing dynasty of iPhones, Galaxys and Pixels, none of which were any use for the Internet of Things.

Noticing this hole, a number of companies who had been developing proprietary, low cost, low speed, low power communication options saw an opportunity and created the Low Power WAN market. Whilst many perceived them as a group of Emperors with no clothes, the network operators were so desperate to have something to offer for upcoming IoT applications that they started engaging with them, rolling out LPWAN infrastructure. Whether they believed the LPWAN story, or just hoped it would fill a hole is difficult to ascertain, but no-one can deny that LPWAN is now firmly on the map, in the form of Sigfox, LoRa, Ingenu and a raft of others. To address that challenge to their hegemony, the GSM Association (GSMA) directed the 3GPP to assemble their own suit of imperial clothing which would be called the Narrow Band Internet of Things, or NB-IoT.

This is the story of why NB-IOT was too late, why it will fail in the short term, why it will win in the long term, and why the industry will struggle to make any money from it.