Daniel Obodovski explains IoT

My good friend Daniel Obodovski wrote a very good book, The Silent Intelligence, that provides an excellent overview of the internet of things phenomenon. He and his partner, Daniel Kellmereit, discuss topics such as connected cities, connected homes, connected healthcare, connected cars, and various other connected things, both industrial and commercial.

There are some key points that Daniel and I have discussed often which are well summarized in this video interview he did last year. The day Google acquired Nest (yes, the smart thermostat company!) for over $3 Billion Dollars, made everyone start pay attention to IoT, even though Daniel and I have been involved in this high tech area for over 5 years now!

 

 

IoT: To Be Open or To Be Closed?

I love all my Apple products, I really do! Our Apple TV was so easy to set up, and works seamlessly with my iTunes, and my iPad and iPhone all work in lovely harmony! Not to mention my old and tired, yet still perfectly happy Macbook! Yes, in 2009 I drank the Koolaid, and have not looked back. Occasionally I will try another system, like the Samsung Galaxy mini-tablet, and discard it for it’s poor user experience. But still, I do use Google apps, Google Maps being far superior to Apple’s, and Chrome is a much better browser than Safari or IE! And I’m sure that most of my mobile devices have Qualcomm’s chips in them!

But back to IoT… Apple recently announced their new IoT platform or standard, HomeKit. I suspect that like iTunes, it will be closed for just it’s own ecosystem developers and users. Google in the meantime, with the acquisition of Nest (the smart thermostat and fire alarm gadgets) now has it’s own IoT platform, which they will use for attracting developers to create cool apps for the IoT in Google’s image!

But wait, that’s not all! There are now also various consortiums being started for the IoT. One of them is based on Qualcomm’s own Alljoyn! Qualcomm decided to make it into an open source framework, now part of the Allseen Alliance and is is a project of the Linux Foundation. It has attracted quite a “who’s who” as members, such as LG, Ciscos, and most recently Microsoft. What does all this mean? Well, it means that IoT is becoming mainstream! Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Cisco need to sell more devices, and now that between 2013 and 2017, mobile phone penetration will rise from 61.1% to 69.4% of the global population, they need the consumers to use these devices to manage all the other devices they want us to integrate into our lives. The vision that Ericsson painted in their video not too long ago, “Social Web Of Things” is almost here.

What is Google up to now?

Although I have been involved in mobile area now for almost 10 years, I still try to keep up with what is happening in the software development world in general. For that reason, I have been helping the San Diego chapter of the Google Technology Users Group and last week we had our re-start kick-off meeting which focused on Google’s App Engine.

We had quite a turn out that included engineers, students, entrepreneurs and VC’s! The room at Cooley was packed. The presenter was Chris Schalk, Google’s Developer Advocate in this area, and he gave an overview presentation on App Engine’s various API’s and coding methods. As Cloud computing is growing in popularity, and Software as a Service is now mainstream, Google is now moving into what they call PAAS – Platform as a Service (not to be confused with IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service), where you can do application prototyping and development in the cloud. I was most fascinated by the Prediction API included in the App Engine which allows developers to tap into Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze historic business data and predict likely future outcomes.

Another interesting point is that in order to appeal to enterprise developers, Google’s storage and service has been SAS 70 certified! This means that they are in compliance with various standards that ensure safety of user data.