Creative Connectivity

Google Glass, Robot Surgery and Drones

There’s a lot of hype around the first Google Glass operation, performed last week at the Clinica Cemtro in Madrid. Although Glass was used in this instance for training purposes, it doesn’t take much imagination to see its potential for guiding a surgeon. That’s a step which fulfils much of the original promise of remote robot surgery, which we now see in a somewhat emasculated form in the Da Vinci robots, which are arguably adding more glamour than technology to routine procedures.

If we take that mental step towards guiding and assisting surgeons through Google Glass, it leads us to ask the more important question of how we select and train surgeons, and what patients should expect of them. If we want the best manual technicians we may not want to retrain our current surgeons, but look for a new breed. That resonates with George Brandt’s play Grounded, which won awards at Edinburgh this year. It looks at the issues in reassigning fighter pilots to operate drones. It has a magnificent performance from Lucy Ellison and has relevance to many other areas, particularly the brave new world that Clinica Cemtro are letting us glimpse. If you’re in London before 3^rd Oct, go and see it at the Gate Theatre.

Let’s look at how those three things come together.

Smart Wrist Good. Smart Home Bad.

Or so it appears if you look at where the funding’s going. This week Jawbone, maker of the Bluetooth headset and more recently of the UP wristband, managed to raise $93 million in debt financing based on sales of its new products, with the rumour of a further $20 million in VC funding to come. It’s not alone. Earlier this year Fitbit, founded on clip-on devices, but now another player in wrist real estate had VCs falling over themselves to give it an additional $43 million.

In contrast, the smart home market has begun to look decidedly unexciting. After the Nest love-in, which raised them $80 million at the start of the year, their German rival tado only managed a measly $2.6 million from its previous investors. I’d always tended to discount the Nest fundraise, not because of the product, but because of their heritage. Ex-Apple staffed start-ups in California with slick products seem to get VCs wetting themselves in much the same way as followers of the cult of Apple do at the launch of a new iPhone.

If you take a look at the media coverage, it’s also pretty obvious where everyone considers the action to be. It not what we live in – it’s what we wear on our wrist. Investing in Smart Home looks rather dumb.

Zombie Wireless Standards

Back in 2010, Mark Thomas, the head of PA Consulting’s Strategy and Market practice published a book called The Zombie Economy. In it he defined a Zombie company as one which is generating just about enough cash to service its debt, so the bank is not obliged to pull the plug on the loan. The issue with such companies is that they can limp along, and just about survive, but as they don’t have enough money to invest, they fall over once the economy picks up, as they become uncompetitive. The problem they pose is that by continuing to exist in this Zombie state they threaten the development of other companies, acting as a damper to more sustainable businesses.

It struck me that there’s a close analogy in the area of wireless standards where we have what are effectively Zombie wireless standards. There’s not necessarily anything fundamentally wrong with these individual standards, other than that they have failed to get traction and so limp along. Here, the problem is that they tend to jealously claim a particular application sector or market segment, blocking other more successful standards from entering. That has a damping effect on product development, creating silos which keep putting off innovation in the hope that one day the standard will gain traction, constantly delaying growth and interoperability. Because they’re not being incorporated into enough products, they have effectively lost their ability to function and have become half-dead, half-alive ‘Zombies’.

I think it’s time to recognise the damage that this is doing. Rather than pursuing multiple parallel paths, the industry needs to concentrate on a far smaller number of short range wireless standards. They in turn need to embrace the requirements of a wider range of sectors.

Mobile Operators, Utilities and Customer Segmentation

For many years the best way to insult a mobile operator was to suggest to them that they were just a pipe for voice and data. They’d foam at the mouth and point out that they were a brand, not a utility. They’d justify this by pointing out that they had marketing people and that they offered differentiated products. It took a far more expert brand in the guise of Apple to make the commercial point with the iPhone, which was offered to mobile operators on the “stick it up your pipe and smoke it” principle, giving the consumers to Apple and ultimately forcing the operators into a price war in supplying a largely undifferentiated consumer data pipe.

At the same time, utilities were beginning to think that they might be more than a pipe. Particularly in areas where the market is deregulated, allowing consumers to switch energy supplier, they’ve been toying with ways to attract customers through segmentation and selling other services.

On the same day this week, in the UK, we’ve seen two interesting examples of this playing out. O2, which had been chasing the health market with their Help at Hand and Health at Home products, unexpectedly pulled out. At the same time, British Gas launched an initiative to become the energy supplier of choice to young renters. It’s useful to consider what these say about the potential to gild your pipe and rise above the status of utility. As we enter the era of the Internet of Things, the market will need service providers who can aggregate services and who have trusted relationships with consumers. These moves suggest that although utilities and network operators ought to be well placed to extend their relationships, they may lack the skills to do so.

UK Smart Metering Plan Delayed

Today in Parliament, the UK Secretary for State for Energy and Climate Change – Ed Davey, announced that there would be a one year delay in the GB deployment of smart meters. That’s not a great surprise to anyone. Rather than copy what has been deployed in other countries, the UK industry has been developing specifications to make our smart metering system the most complex (and expensive) of any deployment anywhere in the world, and complexity takes time.

However, the timing is not great. Anyone following smart meter deployment will have noticed a distinct slowdown over the past few years. Some of the larger US utilities have already rolled out smart meters, helped by $83 billion of stimulus funding. A significant chunk of Australia has them as well. But as stimulus funds have dried up, so have the bulk of smart meter deployments.

The one remaining gung-ho project was the UK one, where previous ministers had been keen to pull it forward. A lot of the rest of the world, particularly other countries within Europe, who are working out how to address the EC directive on smart metering, have been waiting and watching to see how we’re doing. On the surface it’s looked good. Underneath there are conflicting interests which have been building up delays. Unfortunately the timing of today’s announcement plays to quite a lot of those underlying politics, which could further derail the future of the program.

Bluetooth Smart and the Growth of Appcessories

Most people have never heard of Appcessories, but they’re set to become one of the biggest growth areas of the decade, with a potential market value of over $130 billion by 2020, as shown in the new report “To Ubiquity and Beyond”. Most analysts have missed them, as they’re made possible by the convergence of a set of disparate elements coming together, most notably the incorporation of Bluetooth Smart in mobile phones and tablets, low cost and easy to use silicon for hardware developers, and published APIs which allows developers of phone Apps to talk to connected devices. Throw in the innovation that is arising out of crowd-funding initiatives like Kickstarter and indiegogo and you have the ingredients for a new revolution in connected consumer goods.

What is an Appcessory? Think of a cuddly toy for your three year old which interacts with the story on her tablet. Think of the stylus you use for sketching on your iPad, where squeezing it changes the thickness or colour of the lines you’re painting. Or a motor and rudder you clip on a paper plane which lets you control its flight by tipping your smartphone from side to side. LED lights that come on when you enter the room, which you can program the colour of, or which even sense your mood from the way you’re walking. Armbands that know you’re about to point at the TV and tell it to change channel before you even move your finger. Clothes that tell you they need washing. Many things that until recently were the preserve of science fiction, but are about to become possible and eminently affordable.