Tuesday 19 August 2014
Tuesday 29 July 2014
The Internet Of Small Things Spurs Big Business
IoT scenarios that appear consumer-centric and disposable hold broad business opportunities.
In a recent InformationWeek column I opined that smart sensors would soon find their way into many disposable products -- like a soda can, which when opened triggers a contest. Initially these won't be very sophisticated, but as sensor prices fall and technologies improve, extreme connectedness across the Internet of Things will inspire new business opportunities.
One example is start-up LIFX, based in Melbourne Australia, which has raised $12 million in series-A venture capital funding, for guess what? A lightbulb. Not your standard bulb, but rather a WiFi-enabled, multi-colored, energy-efficient LED smart bulb controlled from a smartphone app.
Big deal you might say -- just another gimmicky case of IoT presented in a niche consumer context but with no place in big business, right?
Wrong.
If the humble light bulb can be managed from a mobile app to control energy output, color, and ambience in the home, then why not apply the same smarts in a commercial setting. Imagine controlling retail store lighting from the touch of an app or changing hue to accentuate products. Want a holiday mood theme for the store or restaurant? Just tap the app -- a simple, cost-efficient way to differentiate your products from something that's pretty much been the same since Edison stumbled upon the light bulb idea.
Beyond light bulbs, we're seeing other IoT applications that appear consumer-centric but have broad business implications. Consider the Nest Labs home thermostat. Nest has no doubt made a tidy sum selling its smart device (40,000 to 50,000 units per month, according to reports), but there are bigger forces at play. It's really more about very smart business than smart technology.
An Austin, Texas-based utility company is working with Nest to manage power demand by remotely turning down air conditioning (AC) systems at peak times. On hot days, AC accounts for half of Texas's energy usage and drives up wholesale energy costs. So any mechanism that conserves power is good business. It's also great for the consumer too, with customers offered energy rebates if they allow the company to dial-back AC usage using Nest.
Business models like this rely on Internet of Things smarts, but the real value comes because customers buy into an intelligent application and service. Nest, for example, gathers data from sensors (temperature, humidity, and light) together with behavioral consumer analytics that learn residential habits in order to program AC settings automatically. Add the ability to combine weather data and a mobile app and Web portal to control the system and everyone stays cool -- physically, environmentally, and financially.
What's apparent from both the LIFX and Nest examples is that applications and services are the real powers behind the Internet of Things. Sensors gather the data (lots of it), but analytics and mobile apps are the secret sauce.
Developing these types of apps and services will require smart thinking from technical teams. New business model opportunities will put pressure on development teams to deliver cool new apps to consumers rapidly. But new features will become almost as disposable as the physical products themselves. As such, teams will be continuously adding, testing, refining, and removing functionality to address immediate opportunities, but with the flexibility to pivot when business models change.
As IoT makes the consumer-to-commercial crossover, key data acquisition and storage challenges will also need to be reviewed. As yet, smart systems and sensor networks can't process massive amounts of data at the point of capture -- meaning cloud becomes the offload point and intermediary for big data and analytical applications. For businesses, this means addressing persistent cloud security issues and building high-performance networks needed to support a much more diverse set of applications.
Apps of course will change too. Today, the smartphone is the focal point for control in many Internet of Things use-cases. But as standards emerge and technologies improve, more intelligence and control will be incorporated within the actual smart-sensor networks themselves.
Thinking back to light bulbs, I'm not quite ready to fork out $100 for something I see as disposable, but as a pseudo geek I probably have too much emotional investment in the tech wizardry to throw one away.
However, as prices fall and smarts improve, the act of discarding something with more compute power than the Apollo spacecraft will become commonplace. But before things are sent to the scrap pile, smart businesses will have leveraged a new generation of applications to extract every last drop of business value from the IoT tech.
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/the-internet-of-small-things-spurs-big-business/a/d-id/1279141?_mc=sm_iwk_editor_shaneoneill
Tuesday 22 July 2014
Half a cheer for depression's end
On Friday we will have - depending on how you look at it -
either the most symbolically important or the most pointless economic event of
recent times.
Namely, official confirmation that the depression caused by the mother of all
banking and financial crises is finally over. UK output or GDP has finally
exceeded its pre-recession peak (the technical definition of a depression is the
period during which GDP remains below that peak).
On the official government stats, GDP fell by 7.2% between its peak in the
first quarter of 2008 and its trough in the second quarter of 2009.
Since then recovery has been unusually - some would say lamentably - slow,
and national output in the first three months of this year was still 0.6% below
that peak.
But that recovery has been picking up considerable momentum over the past
year. The UK is now the fastest growing economy of all the world's rich ones.
So in the quarter to the end of June, quarter-on-quarter growth is bound to
have been more than 0.6%. The respected National Institute for Economic and
Social Research predicts growth of 0.9% in that period.
Which means - hooray hooray hooray - that the depression is officially over,
and that we are now once again earning more than we did before the banks got us
into our pretty pickle by starving us of credit.
All of which is terribly exciting. And we can expect the Tory chancellor,
George Osborne, and his Lib Dem treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, to
shout from the rooftops that this economic renaissance is all down to their
sagacity and tough actions.
Except, as is usually the way with blinkin' economic statistics, it isn't
quite as straightforward as that.
For one thing, the Office for National Statistics is in the process of
reworking how it calculates GDP. And it has already admitted that the number I
gave you above, about how far output fell from its peak between 2008 and 2009,
is wrong.
The current officially recorded contraction of GDP exaggerates, a bit, the
magnitude of the decline in output. Which implies that the previous peak for
output was almost certainly surpassed some time ago - so long, that is, as there
aren't significant offsetting revisions to subsequent growth.
Chances are, however, that this terrible depression actually ended some while
ago, probably last year. Fingers crossed we will know more about this - I won't
say the truth of it (nebulous concept in economics) - in September.
So on Friday we will basically be doing the equivalent of celebrating a World
Cup victory that may or may not have actually happened some months earlier.
This could only happen in the wonderful world of economics.
Which brings me to my second and third reasons why you may not need to put
out the "Britain is booming again" bunting on Friday.
For one thing, the industrial experience of the past few years has been
variegated.
So we are certain that the service industries, which dominate our economy,
are already producing more than they did before the great crash, whereas
manufacturing is still generating considerably less - 7.6% less in the first
quarter of this year, on those questionable official figures.
The vaunted rebalancing of the economy between intangible services and
tangible making has not remotely happened - and probably never will.
Perhaps more importantly, it is very unlikely that you personally - yes, I am
talking to you - feel any richer than you did at the beginning of 2008.
Because whichever way you cut it, most people remain poorer, largely because
the population has increased considerably faster than output has recovered.
How much poorer?
Well the acknowledged brainboxes on this are the Institute for Fiscal
Studies.
And they say that a year ago real median income - that is adjusted for the
impact of inflation - was still 5.8% below its peak for a typical individual
(the median calculation) or 8.5% lower on average (the mean assessment).
There are various other ways of cutting these figures, according to which
measure of inflation is used or whether housing costs are incorporated.
But the relevant point is that living standards for most British people
haven't yet recovered to their pre-crisis levels - and probably won't for two or
three years yet.
Tuesday 15 July 2014
Young hit hardest by recession, says IFS
Young people were hit far harder by the recession than older generations, a report has found.
People aged 22-30 saw their household incomes fall by 13%
between 2007 and 2013, while those between 31 and 59 saw a 7% drop,
according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Employment prospects for the under-30s were also hit harder.
Living standards are set to be a key issue in the run-up to next year's general election.
While the government has focused on the economic recovery,
the opposition Labour party says living standards have yet to improve
for too many people.
'Hardest hit'
The IFS report, based on government figures part funded by the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, also found that the employment rate among
22-30 year olds over the period fell by 4%, while that among 31-59 year
olds remained stable.
The over 60s saw almost no impact on either houshold incomes or employment rate.
"Pay, employment and incomes have all been hit hardest for
those in their 20s," said Jonathan Cribb, research economist at the IFS.
"A crucial question is whether this difficult start will do lasting damage to their employment and earnings prospects."
The report also concluded that was "no clear North-South
divide" in the impact of the recession. It also noted that home
ownership among the young had fallen sharply in recent decades.
Only 21% of people born in the 1980s had bought their own
house by the age of 25, compared with 34% of those born in the 70s and
45% of those born in the 60s.
The Treasury said the report showed "just how hard Labour's
great recession hit young people and why it's vital we keep working
through our long-term economic plan to cut the deficit, create jobs and
equip people with the skills they need for the future".
Labour Treasury spokeswoman Catherine McKinnell said: "While
David Cameron denies there is a cost of living crisis, these figures
show people have seen a substantial fall in their incomes since 2010".
Monday 14 July 2014
FTSE rebounds, Shire hits record
A man walks past the London Stock Exchange in the City of London October 11, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth
Shire said it was ready to recommend a new offer from AbbVie, which returned with a fifth bid valuing the London-listed drugmaker at 31.3 billion pounds.
AbbVie, which wants to buy Shire to cut its tax bill and diversify its product line-up, made the offer of 53.20 pounds per share on Sunday after the Dublin-based group asked for an improvement on the previous 51.15-pound-per-share offer.
But traders were cautious.
"What we're doing this morning is basically closing down per client half of the exposure, so we're banking something good on the bounce and leaving the other half on just in case (it climbs to 53)," Galvan's head of trading, Ed Woolfitt, said.
Shire shares rose 2.6 percent to 4,998 pence, with trading volume at 90 percent of its 90-day daily average after about an hour's trade, against the FTSE 100 index on just 6 percent.
The FTSE 100, which dropped 2.6 percent last week to post its biggest weekly drop since March, had climbed 52.13 points, or 0.8 percent, to 6,742.30 points by 0918 BST.
Investors put aside concerns about euro zone banks and looked ahead to corporate earnings, traders said.
"Corporate earnings have started to trend to the upside and momentum indicators suggest we are going to continue to see forward-looking estimates improve alongside EPS estimates," Guardian Stockbrokers' director of trading, Atif Latif, said.
Solid gains were also seen from sports retailer Sports Direct, up 4.4 percent, after it announced plans to launch in Australia and New Zealand by forming a partnership with MySale Group. MySale rose 4.8 percent.
Elsewhere among the risers, Rolls-Royce tacked on 1.4 percent as European planemaker Airbus kicked off the Farnborough Airshow with confirmation it would sell revamped versions of its A330 wide-body jet powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 7000 engines.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/14/uk-markets-britain-stocks-idUKKBN0FE0SG20140714
Thursday 10 July 2014
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