Internet of Things Platforms and IoT Strategies

My friend and colleague, the always opinionated Peter Rogers, shares his latest research on The Internet of Things and the technology and platforms that are used to support it.

There seems to be two main groups of thought as to when wearable technology will become mainstream. The first group are those that believe that wearable technology is here today and are engaging both hobbyists and future entrepreneurs in building all parts of the ecosystem now. These people are creating their own hardware and working with systems to communicate with third party hardware right as we speak. The second group of people are more commercially minded and are looking at creating a full platform for the future. They are looking at big data style real-time analytics, next generation IP, and constrained REST architectures with cast iron security.

Personally I am impatient.  I want to start playing with this IoT stuff today and allow the dedicated platforms to mature over time so they are ready when the market really picks ups.  With that said I believe there are currently two tiers of vendors:

1. Those that have something that works today and that we could build products and services on top of now.
2. Those that have an actual platform that is slowly maturing and we can use in the future 

My advice is to look at combining a selection of low-end propositions to start testing custom products for their effectiveness today.  In my view the best people to start talking with for effective low risk deployments, would be those offering end-to-end solutions based around plugging in any device to a simple Cloud PaaS and with their technology readily available to hobbyists.

I will list a few vendors that I think offer technology ready to go today and then in my next article I will look at those that I consider offer platforms for the future.  The main problem is one of being locked into a proprietary Cloud system that cannot be privately hosted and that only works with embedded client software that is explicitly supported by that vendor. If there is anything the ‘MBaaS v MEAP debate in enterprise mobility taught us is that open standards with flexible Cloud hosting solutions will win out. I don't see a perfect solution at the moment, but I do see a whole lot of very exciting propositions that will get acquired and combined effectively over time.

SkyNet

This open source project aims to let disparate devices communicate via a variety of protocols including MQTT, WS/S, CoAP, HTTPS/REST and WebSockets. It supports UUID authentication and TLS certificates. Eventually non-programmers could use Skynet to create a platform that lets us program the real and online worlds in a way that’s far more powerful than If This Then That (IFTTT) or Zapier. The end result is a flexible piece of open source software that can connect to everything from servers to sensors. SkyNet can be run on a public or private Node.js instance (such as Heroku) and they are even working on an open source home gateway.

IOBridge

ioBridge makes it easy for professionals and enthusiasts to monitor and control nearly anything via their smartphone or web app using a general purpose web gateway. This is a simple gateway that lets you monitor or send commands to anything compatible with the ioBridge through a web interface. It does sound like you can only access ioBridge-manufactured or third-party sensors, that are compatible with the ioBridge web gateway.  It also doesn't sounds like you can set up your own version on a private network just yet. When you purchase one of the ioBridge gateways then you get a free limited subscriptions. For example, if you want to log data faster than every few minutes then you need another subscription.

BergCloud

Berg is a Cloud platform but they also provide hardware with built-in connectivity for faster prototyping. Devshields bring the Device API to Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ARM MBED. The Device API is provided as a client library that runs on your microcontroller, speaking via your wireless connection to the web. If you are prototyping and don't yet have connectivity, then the Devshield developer boards have that bundled too. You can manage and message all your devices using the RESTful Cloud API, built around secure HTTPS. You control the user experience with your own website, and treat your devices like just another web service.

Sense Observation Systems

CommonSense is a platform that helps you to keep track of all your sensor data, store it in a central location, and play with it. CommonSense also processes your raw sensor data into meaningful things like sleep, exercise, or your top locations. With the free CommonSense Dashboard  you gain insights into your behavior. With the free CommonSense Tracker you turn your phone into an advanced tracking device. You can combine them, add in your Fitbit or Twitter data, and you get a powerful self-tracking system. Connections are available now for iOS, Android, Fitbit, and Twitter. They are working on connecting more devices and services.

The data is stored in their Cloud, which happens to be in The Netherlands and has been certified with according to medical device regulations (NEN-7510). It does seem to have a good focus on Health Care and the Environment. CommonSense is currently in Private Beta and it sounds more like a real-time analytics platform at the moment.

Electric Imp

Electric Imp offers a complete end-to-end solution that makes it simple to connect almost any product to the Internet through an innovative and powerful cloud service tied closely to leading-edge hardware. The Electric Imp connectivity platform, featuring fully integrated hardware, software, OS, APIs, cloud servers, makes it possible to effectively empower your devices with intelligence, scalability and flexibility. If you’re a developer, hobbyist, or maker, then you can get started with one of their development kits and bring connectivity to your project, idea or concept.

Electric Imp offers a comprehensive solution designed to connect your product or project to the Internet quickly, easily and effectively. The platform includes:

• Imp Hardware: The Electric Imp platform starts with the imp, a powerful module containing WiFi and a processor that acts as the gateway to connect your device or service to the Internet
• Imp OS: The software foundation for the imp’s features and services that allows your code to concentrate on bringing your product’s functions to life.
• Imp Cloud: Their cloud allows you to run agents - server side code that runs in a secure environment - that are used to provide HTTP I/O and cloud-side processing, and easily connect your products to anything with Internet access. Agents can act as a central hub to your products, apps, third-party services, and even your own servers.
• Imp Open API: Enrich your customer experience and build your business by developing enhancements like messaging, monitoring, and much more.
• Imp BlinkUpTM: The proprietary Electric Imp setup solution (BlinkUp) integrates seamlessly into your apps, letting you and your customers connect products in seconds using just a smartphone or tablet.
• Imp Services - IDE and Ops Console: Maintain your software, push new code and features easily to devices anytime, ensuring that your users always have the latest features. The Ops Console enables you to gain more insight into your factory production lines and scale to millions of devices.

1248.io

1248.io offers Geras, which is a scalable time-series database for your sensor data with quick storage for your Analytics. They also offer HyperCat, which is an open, lightweight JSON-based hypermedia catalogue format for exposing collections of URIs. HyperCat is simple to work with and allows developers to publish linked-data descriptions of resources. HyperCat is designed for exposing information about IoT assets over the web. It allows a server to provide a set of resources to a client, each with a set of semantic annotations.

Geras offers the following:

• HTTPS support for strong security and per-user API keys
• Standard HTTP/HTTPS support allowing sensors to traverse firewalls and proxies
• Sensors can supply data over HTTP POST or very lightweight MQTT publish
• Supports modern standards for posting, getting and discovering data: HTTPS; JSON; RESTful; SenML; MQTT; and HyperCat
• Built on a fault-tolerant, distributed database
• Data can be stored in the country of your choice with an option to buy Geras as software and host the data yourself

If you have an IoT platform or technologies that you want Peter Rogers to be aware of please email him at Peter-2.Rogers-2@cognizant.com.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Interview: Ved Sen on Enterprise Mobility in Europe

This week I am working and teaching in London.  While here I had the opportunity to interview my colleague at Cognizant, Ved Sen on the state of enterprise mobility in Europe.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJwYxJAMYQ8&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw&feature=share

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Enterprise Mobility, Digital Transformation and Work Spaces

I had the opportunity to spend some time recently with Asure Software's VP/GM of EMEA and APAC, Nigel Clarke, and to discuss how digital transformation is impacting work spaces and the mobile workforce.   In years past I attended facility management conferences and developed mobile apps to help manage facilities, assets, rooms, inspections, materials and supplies.  We were counting and inspecting physical objects.  Today, however, there are digital transformations taking place in this industry.

Today, companies less often require employees to work in the physical office (sorry folks at Yahoo!). Often equipment is not associated with a location, but moves to where it is needed at any given time. When people do come into the office there is a need to find a desk, conference room, video or projection equipment and to use additional services to ensure their use of the office is optimized and efficiently managed.

Every day the office layout and who is using the office and rooms may differ.  This requires several different strategies:

1. Real-time communications with on site teams
2. Agile building, parking and network access
3. Digitization of a physical building into digital spaces
4. Digitization of time that can be carved into increments that can be manipulated and reserved
5. Associating digital times with digital spaces
6. Agile room layouts
7. Collaborating with third parties to provide services for particular spaces and times
8. Mobile apps for the mobile workforce

All of these changes must be supported on mobile apps.  Time, space, temperatures, resources, equipment, access, parking, networks and services can now be reserved and managed from thousands of miles away in a cloud computing environment.  This requires a real-time system and an office layout conducive to agile use that can quickly be transformed to meet different needs on different days.

These can all be coordinated digitally via mobile apps.  But that is just the beginning.  You could also arrange caterings services and reserve special equipment and car services associated with time and space from thousands of miles away.

Can you imagine trying to support this kind of environment without online and mobile apps?  What a nightmare.  Some companies may think their industry is not being impacted significantly today by digital transformation, but they're probably wrong.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Internet of Things - Under the Covers

My colleague, the always opinionated Peter Rogers, provides us with an "under-the-covers" look at how Android plans to power the Internet of Things.  Pull down your geek hat and hold on!!!
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In previous articles I predicted that wearable technology would be powered by light-weight operating systems, citing Samsung’s decision to go with Tizen instead of Android. This decision was apparently based on battery life and user interface considerations. However, just after the article hit the Internet, Google executive Sundar Pichai announced the Android SDK for Wearables.  Android is used in many different ways as demonstrated by Kindle and Nokia X (Nokia X seems to have deployed a Windows 8 look and feel on top of Android). Indeed, for this very reason Android 4.4 has moved a lot of key APIs into the Cloud.

Wearable device developers are interested in the APIs available to them. If we turn the clock back to the J2ME days there was a dedicated API for user interfaces (UI) called javax.microedition.lcdui. This was a small UI library compared to today's Android libraries. Indeed you wouldn’t run Java Swing on Android, and likewise a wearable device needs a more constrained API for the UI. Even though a wearable device may be supporting a full operating system, it will most probably have a constrained UI and that means a slightly different programming style.

Recently there was an interesting post in the Washington Post supporting my claims that Wearable Devices and the Internet of Things requires different skill sets. The article listed the new skills required as data analytics and enterprise data analysis. Basically you need to know how to capture the data, read the data and then apply the data to your specific business domain. Surely real-time analytics and visualisation tools will become critical in the wearable space and this is where a new term called Fog Computing has been introduced by Cisco.

“Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. The distinguishing Fog characteristics are its proximity to end-users, its dense geographical distribution, and its support for mobility. Services are hosted at the network edge or even end devices such as set-top-boxes or access points. By doing so, Fog reduces service latency, and improves QoS, resulting in superior user-experience. Fog Computing supports emerging Internet of Everything (IoE) applications that demand real-time/predictable latency (industrial automation, transportation, networks of sensors and actuators). Thanks to its wide geographical distribution the Fog paradigm is well positioned for real time big data and real time analytics. Fog supports densely distributed data collection points, hence adding a fourth axis to the often mentioned Big Data dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity).”

In trying to predict what will be in the Android Wearable Software Developer Kit (SDK) then it is very interesting to note that Google acquired Android Smartwatch vendor WIMM Labs last year. WIMM Labs released its first Smartwatch back in 2011, the WIMM One, which ran Android and included an SDK for developers. Interestingly the WIMM website has removed all of the documentation for the SDK but a lot of WIMM One developers downloaded it before it got taken offline and so were able to get a potential glimpse of what Google is planning. WIMM had a Micro App Store which featured the following categories: entertainment; productivity; health;  shopping; travel; utilities; watch faces; and games.  As well as a Software Developer Kit there was also a Hardware Developer Kit which allows you to make accessories that wrap around the WIMM module.

The Wearable SDK itself will obviously have changed from its origins of the WIMM One SDK but it is certainly interesting rooting around through the API. The comm.wimm API extends the Android 2.X API and it is assumed that only the WIMM API itself can be used. There are some very interesting features offered for sure: notifications; custom watch faces; widgets; network services; sync services; calendars; broadcast events; weather; world clocks; location fixes; audio beeps; and various simple UI element.

One of the most interesting features is location information being retrieved from one or more sources, including built-in GPS, network based IP-location lookup, or a paired Android or Blackberry smartphone. This demonstrates that the Wimm One was able to perform even when not paired to a device and it was equally able to pair with a Blackberry.

If we look at the Android Wearable SDK then it is heavily rumoured to support Google Now, the voice control feature. It will also have to support Bluetooth Low Energy integration for communication with mobile devices for pairing and indeed detecting other sensors. It is also worth looking at the Google Glass Developer Kit (GDK) for a few hints at what may be revealed. The GDK was the alternative to the Mirror API which only really supported REST calls to a Google Cloud Service. The GDK is an add-on that builds on top of the Android SDK and offers the following: voice; gesture detector; and cards. It is safe to assume that voice control, local networking, touch control and potentially gesture control are all on cards. Google will show their hand at Google I/O and Samsung have already shown their Gear 2 devices at MWC. Next it is time for Apple to finally show their hand and we have to wonder if it will be a decisive one, quite possibly if history has taught us anything.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Impact of Digital Transformation and Mobility on Learning and Publishing

Have you ever considered how the traditional author, teacher, textbook and student relationship will change when digitally transformed and mobile device enabled?  What if writing a textbook is no longer enough for an author?  What if all textbooks, in order to be widely sold and used, also required a mobile app, audio and video editions and an integrated social platform?  In other words SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) enabled.

What if the content in textbooks were digitally enabled and viewable on a tablet computer that was GPS enabled?  Could you tap into data from Google Field Trips, http://www.fieldtripper.com/, to make the textbook location-aware.  Could the study of a period in history automatically identify nearby historical points of interest, photos or videos related to the content?  Could your surroundings, now digitized, augment your reality?

What if before reading the book, you took a short assessment to determine which learning styles are most suited to you?  What if that learning style followed you across all online textbooks?  What if all content and presentations changed based upon your assessed and recorded learning styles or the recorded preferences of the reader?  Code Halos, the data about each teacher, tutor and student could be saved and used to help students learn better and faster, and for teachers and tutors to be more efficient and effective. Could there be six different versions of each textbook based upon the different learning styles?

Could gamification be introduced into textbooks to motivate assignment completion and compliance? Could better scores unlock levels in an associated learning game?

What if an online AILA (Artificial Intelligent Learning Agent) followed you across all textbooks and online content and helped present the content in a manner most suitable to your learning style?

What if every online textbook was automatically socialized, and students could discuss each page and subject and link out to additional information?  What if there were all kinds of complementary content and tutorials available that were both free and for a fee?  Everything from videos, podcasts and additional help notes.

For teachers, what if suggested assignments, quizzes and tests (and optional online automatic grading) were available for use by registered teachers.  This would make the textbook more appealing if the teachers could be more efficient with their time when they used it.

What if AI (artificial intelligent) learning agents helped the teacher remember the student’s details, and the student’s most suitable learning style and history each time an assignment was reviewed?  Could this intelligence help the teacher better adapt his/her teaching style to the individual student?

What if the textbook was really just a platform for learning.  One that included text, images, audio, video, games and assorted other learning tool?

Could students with the same learning styles be aligned with online teachers and tutors that specialize in those styles?

I hope these questions will help you ponder the incredible impact that the transformation from physical to digital will have in the learning and publishing industries and in others.

It is important for every company to be thinking through digital transformation and how it will impact their specific company, market and industry in the very near future.

*************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.