Creative Connectivity

All I want for Christmas is Smart Energy

Have the girls and boys who have been working hard to make Smart Energy happen been good this year? Will Santa bring them what they want? It’s looking less than likely. Despite promises that specifications would be complete, progress has inevitably slipped. What’s worse, the elves in some of the utilities didn’t pay attention to the lists the boys and girls stuck up their chimneys last year, and instead of sending them energy savings, it turns out that they actually sent them higher utility bills.

Of course, things were never going to happen as quickly as projected, even with the amount of stimulus money being thrown at the companies involved. If anything that’s resulted in things slowing down as everyone has concentrated on scrabbling around for a part of the pie, insisting that their toys are better than anyone else’s, and that they deserves the biggest box under the tree.

However, the story of the year is probably the level of consumer resentment that has built up towards smart metering deployments. Much of that seems to have been unnecessarily self-inflicted. In the Netherlands we’ve seen programs delayed because of privacy issues, and in the US there has been major customer resentment at higher bills. And that’s before we get into the ridiculous paranoia about the meters irradiating the population.

It’s interesting to contrast what’s happening within the UK. Not only are they taking a lead in deployment of real smart metering, with British Gas’ decision to roll out 2 million gas and electricity meters. There’s also the UK Government’s highly detailed consultation and a growing level of consumer education. It will be interesting to see whether that results in more customer satisfaction, and a bigger change in energy usage? That level of up-front education may be the most significant initiative of all the Smart Energy deployments that are happening around the world.

Ten Wireless Standards, Sitting on the Wall…

The Smart Metering industry is deperate to decide on a standard for short range communication. The UK Goverment has rushed through its consultation with a deadline for a technical standard by the end of next year, and in the US, SGIP’s PAP02 group wants to do it even faster. Whilst we need to start deploying devices, it concerns me that there’s a rush to make decisions with very little consideration of the relative merits of the different contenders.

There’s no shortage of contenders. At the last count I came across ten short range wireless standards that all think they should be the winner. Those include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Wavenis, Dash7, wireless MBUS, wireless KNX, DECT, Z-Wave and Bluetooth low energy. And they’re just the industry developed standards.

What worried me even more than the obvious rush was a off-hand comment made in a European standards meeting that I attended earlier this year. One of the people responsible for deciding on a common standard for Europe made the comment that “we’re not going to give any time to industry standards”. The subject of her venom was ZigBee, but it’s a charge that I’m increasingly hearing levelled at all of the “industry” standards. It appears there’s a perception amongst members of the older established Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) that because industry standards have not been produced by their traditional specification process, they’re not as good. That’s a very dangerous approach to take.

mHealth in the NHS – Everywhere and Nowhere

If you follow the mHealth blogs and groups on LinkedIn you’ll see a constant debate about where mHealth is in out existing health services. I’ve been looking at some of the applications which are already in use within the NHS. As yet, there’s no central policy for mHealth, and it’s debatable whether much of the good practice using mHealth is even acknowledged, but that doesn’t mean it’s not providing benefit.

Much of mHealth is invisible. It’s not the high tech monitoring that we find in glossy medical device brochures, but far simpler, everyday applications. Many of these use SMS, but mHealth extends through voice and video, and we’re already seeing local use of applications on iPhones and Android. However, there is little coordination of deployment, and almost all that is happening is as a result of local initiatives.

Let’s look at some of the examples.

RF4CE – The wireless remote control that keeps coming back

The consumer electronics industry has always had something of a love-hate relationship with remote controls. It’s painful to design and ship a new remote control with every product, but attempts to come up with an interoperable standard have been plagued with problems. As a result our homes are littered with lost and unused remote controls. A few independent companies have tried to solve the problem by producing decent, but generally expensive universal controls, but they’re still a rarity around the home.

In the early days of remotes, the dominant technology was ultrasonic, but they’ve evolved to the point today that almost all use infra red (IR) transmitters. IR is cheap and directional; the latter feature being useful in a world where there is limited interoperability and interference can be mitigated by pointing the remote control in the right direction. However, it’s a one way connection, as keeping a photo diode alive to look for a signal coming back from the TV would decimate the battery life.

As the audio-video equipment we buy has become more sophisticated, manufacturers have been looking for an alternative technology that would allow low power, two-way communication between equipment and remote. The obvious solution is wireless, but the question is which one? A few years ago chip vendors who were looking for customers for their 802.15.4 radio ICs, decided to put together a standard to try and sell a few more of their chips. (802.15.4 is underlying radio standard used by ZigBee and other specialist wireless stacks, none of which are shipping in the volumes required to make chip manufacture very profitable.) That standard became known as RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics) and was eventually embraced by the ZigBee Alliance. The Japanese AV industry bought the story and have recently begun shipping RF4CE handsets into their local market. As the volumes have ramped up, rumours are growing that an increasing number are being returned because they don’t work. It’s too early to be sure what the reason is, but when you delve into the detail of the RF4CE standard it looks a bit flaky. That could herald a golden opportunity for Bluetooth low energy, which is charging onto the remote control scene like a wireless knight in shining armour.

Unexpectedly Welcome Back – UWB

Mark Twain famously said (or almost said) “rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. Just when you thought it was safe to stay at home and live with slow speed wireless data transfer, UWB has performed a similar reincarnation, appearing to rise, Lazarus-like, from its grave with the announcement of two new chipsets from Samsung and CSR.

UWB has had a chequered history of ups and downs. Last year, when I started writing my book “Essentials of Short Range Wireless”, I planned a chapter on it as it seemed to be experiencing something of a renaissance. Half way through writing the book, a number of the key chip companies folded and I removed the chapter. It looks as if I may have acted prematurely.

Why the resurgence of interest? UWB has had a turbulent history, with many of the start-up companies supporting it going bust as the industry embarked on its love affair with ever faster variants of Wi-Fi. The answer comes back to the classic divide between the PC and mobile phone industries and the feature that separates them more than anything else: one has a power cord and the other doesn’t.

Social Media, Crowdsourced Reviews and the Edinburgh Festival

As usual, I spent the last few weeks of August at the Edinburgh Festival. For those who have never been to the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s billed as the world’s largest arts event. This year there were over 40,000 performances from 2,453 companies throughout the course of the month, selling over 2 million tickets. However, I think that’s only around 40% of the potential tickets that could be sold. As a result, throughout August, Edinburgh is consumed by a mad scramble of promotion, with companies handing out flyers, sticking posters all over the City and engaging in all manner of publicity stunts. This year I expected to see companies starting to use social media and mobile phone apps to help promote themselves. Sadly, few appeared to use these at even the most basic level.

2010 was the year when the Internet finally overtook the local press. For many years the main guide to what’s worth seeing has been the star ratings given by professional reviewers, notably from the Scotsman’s daily review section. Over the past few years a growing number of web based review sites have emerged, with reviews contributed by audience members (and quite often by cast members). As a result, anyone can post their own four or five star review, irrespective of the quality of the show, or their competence as a reviewer. So every company capable of performing a Google search has been able to plaster their posters and handbills with a five star review, even though they may have submitted it themselves. Seemingly unaware of the existence of the Internet, this triggered the Scotsman to pen a splenetic tirade about how people voicing their own opinion is devaluing the review process.

As someone who is working with emerging location based social networking, it was disappointing to see how little has emerged at the Festival. I came across no references to Foursquare, Gowalla or Loopt, surprisingly limited use of Facebook and Twitter and no Bluetooth marketing. However, the growth of public reviews and the start of social media promotion by a few companies suggest that 2011 might be the year when things change and the position of the professional reviewer is finally undermined. So what happened this year, and what do companies need to do in the future?