June 1, 2015
Dear readers, I have to apologise for not having posted more than a couple of posts this year. The reason is that I have worked really hard together with Linda, Carolina and Pär to build THINGS™, our new 2000 m2 co-working space for start-ups with hardware as part of their solutions, at KTH Campus dow
ntown Stockholm. We started last spring and opened our house officially March 26 with a great party with over 300 people. It’s been a fantastic journey and we already have 21 start-ups in our house, and five industry partners: Assa Abloy, ABB, Husqvarna, NCC and SP.
This is a fantastic project, trying to exploit the perfect storm created when the two mega-trends IoT and Makers Movement meet. The best way of following us is by signing up to THINGS NEWS, visiting our web thingstockholm.com from time to time and following us on twitter @sthlmthings.
I remain devoted to IoT and my alliance for Swedish IoT start-ups, SMSE, now has 41 members and 13 partners. I’m now working on our annual IoE For Real™ event in Stockholm June 17 and the International IoT Get Together at THINGS the night before (sign up for free using code “connectcompute”).
From now on I will start focusing on my blog again. Nobody knows how IoT will develop and I believe it is really important with original views, thoughts and opinions from people spending their lives working with IoT. Today, on top of the Gartner hype curve, everybody want to be part of IoT and there are 13 announcements and competitions on a dozen right now. We need to put these right and put them into context. Most recently Google announced Brillo and Weave. I’m not very impressed and I will come back to that very soon in my blog.
Avanti!
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Posted by magnusmelander
March 18, 2015
Adding things to the Internet will make extraordinary impact on industries, businesses, nations and people’s lives. And I hope it will make us take better care of our globe too. The three major deliverables of IoT – safety, sustainability and efficiency – together with convenience will do the trick. In essence IoT fuels digitization of processes and allows us to base decision-making on better, often real-time, data. Applications like preventive maintenance and scheduled repairs will make us tremendously more efficient to name one example. And one day “if it aint broken don’t fix it” might be hard to understand. The Internet of Everything is rapidly coming together and I believe we’re leaving the teens already 2016.
Another rapidly developing major trend is the Makers Movement. Equipment and tools have become much easier to use and really affordable. And new types of equipment like 3D printers together with a host of new materials and techniques complete the opportunity to democratise manufacturing. In other words a couple of people could easily get together and buy what it takes to make at least prototypes of their ideas. And that is exactly what has happened – there are makers everywhere, in more or less organised and specialised organisations, sharing tools, skills and facilities, training each other and building new micro startups en masse.
FabLabs,
TechShops and Makerspaces are popping up everywhere and 3D printing and scanning by itself promise massive changes on how we design and produce things, e-business, healthcare and so on.
It is hard to predict what will happen when these two mega trends meet but let me share a couple of observations to get going:
– It’s more difficult and resource consuming to design, manufacture, market and service hardware than just software
– Hardware requires more money and a wide range of expertise
– Working with hardware requires more physical interaction and relevant facilities
– Early stage investors are often reluctant to invest in hardware today
– Crowdfunding services like
Kickstarter and
Indiegogo are already loaded with hardware, often with great innovative design compared to mainstream products
– Apple combines gorgeous things with ease of use and Internet bringing continuous innovation and record profits
I find the meeting of these two mega-trends very interesting and have worked for a year with some friends trying to figure out how to turn this into serious solutions and big business. One important conclusion is that successfully making solutions with things included require great engineers, great designers, great entrepreneurs and internationally successful enterprises with things part of their solutions to collaborate with. That makes it a perfect fit for Sweden and I will do my best to help the Swedish hw start-up community become successful. We have started to use #sthlmthings for our community and I would welcome other communities to gather around similar hash tags to make it easier to follow and interact in and between “things communities”.
Things matter!
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Posted by magnusmelander
October 30, 2014
Gartner certainly got it right when they put IoT on the top of the hype curve. This many people have never been interested in what I am working with, not even when I worked with Wi-Fi. Last week for example, Stockholm Business Region, an agency promoting Stockholm, organized a breakfast meeting. But this one was about IoT and 150 people signed up within one hour! Since they had room for 80 persons in the venue they had to shut down the registration and find a bigger place. They ended up with the largest cinema in Stockholm, some 600 registered people, exhibitors in the entrance hall and a strong line-up of speakers.
I am managing an
IoT Idea Challenge for an EU organization, EIT ICT Labs, and we set our target to 100 submissions. The submission period was September and with one day to go we had received 72 cases. The last day we received 91! For IoT to change our society, businesses and lives the way we want, everyone has to be involved. Therefore I’m glad that 18% of the submissions came from women – at least a good start. Today we announced the
eleven finalists – all amazingly interesting young companies who will
pitch in Stockholm November 13.
Well, now when a lot of people got the first part right – it is time to look into IoT – let us start prototyping and testing in order to get the whole thing right.
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Posted by magnusmelander
September 11, 2014
History repeats itself. Social robots have appeared in books and movies for years and always felt far out. But all of a sudden they say hello to you! I participated in a panel at Digital Health Days in Stockholm and one of the speakers was a blue Giraff with the avatar of their CEO Stephen von Rump, present in Saint Lewis, Missouri. They have been developing their social robot focusing on home care. It can sit, stand, talk, nod, move etc, and in our case it was Stephen’s face and voice talking to us. In their concept the Giraff becomes the gateway for all sensors and devices needed in a particular home as well as for all service providers involved including family and friends. Today the price for a Giraff is in the ball park of 10K$ but Stephen mentioned there is more to be done on the hardware.
In May I met Francesca Iannibelli, COO at
Hands company, who presented their cute social robot Adam. She gave a great presentation and left me with a feeling that they will deliver well.
Philip’s iCat,
eMuu,
KASPAR,
Furhat,
Leonardo,
Maggie,
Tico,
Anthropos,
PROBO, the stair climbing
ARTI and
Double are other examples of social robots.
It is easy to just reject the idea of using social robots but given the huge global challenge to provide desired care given the resources available I am convinced careful and clever use of social robots is one of the core components of care 2.0. Needless to say I’m glad we have
Robotdalen here in Sweden!
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1 Comment | Healthcare, IoE, IoT, M2M, User Interaction | Tagged: Adam, Anthropos, Arti, Double, eMuu, Furhat, giraff, iCat, Internet of Everything, Internet of Things, IoT, Kaspar, Leonardo, Maggie, Probo, social robots, Tico, usability, User interaction | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
July 31, 2014
Less is more! A young team in Sweden, Shortcut Labs, are developing a small really useful generic BLE-connected button called flic which you can program to do almost anything with your smartphone. OK? Well, there are three ways to use it: click, double-click and keep pressed. And so what? It’s easily programmable. And what should I use it for? A remote trigger to take photos with your smartphone. Call home from your car with a single click on a button. Turn on Spotify and one of your three favorite playlists on your MC. Tell your family where you are walking if you don’t feel hundred percent safe. Start Siri. And so on.
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Posted by magnusmelander
July 26, 2014
The creation of the Internet of Everything has been going on for a while now. It is easy to find estimates of the number of connected devices some years from now and how much the market will be worth but still hard to find the evidences that it actually happens and in which pace. A year ago I declared that we entered the teenage phase meaning that early moving customer started to go from power point and plans to pilot trials and roll-out. I still believe we are in the teenage phase but another important indicator – mergers and acquisitions – is starting to show that we are coming closer to the real take off. Because of this I will try to track relevant M&A deals in my blog onwards.
Intel recently acquired
Basis Science with their advanced health tracker,
Google has spent about $5B acquiring
Waze,
Nest and
Dropcam but PTC’s recent acquisition of
Axeda for $170 million in cash following their $112 million
Thingworx acquisition in December are even more interesting to me.
PTC provides systems and solutions to a long list of very large companies globally and they obviously believe being a leader in IoT system and service enablement is key. I believe the Internet of Everything will be grown-up in less than two years from now and insist that the key difference from when people and companies were connected to the Internet is that ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse this time.
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1 Comment | Business Models, Cloud computing, IoE, IoT, M2M, M2M Service Enablers, Tools and platforms | Tagged: Axeda, Basis, Business model, Dropcam, Google, Intel, Internet of Everything, Internet of Things, M&A, Nest, PTC, ThingWorx, Waze | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
July 21, 2014
One of the most talked about areas for Internet of Things is Smart Cities. Cities themselves invest to become one. Most of the large players in IoT focus on Smart Cities. There are events, predictions, articles and show cases everywhere and each and everyone use their own definition of Smart Cities. A city is a very complex and dynamic location which from an ICT point of view could be described as a system of systems. It is obvious that sub-systems could be more efficient using IoT solutions and that the overall system of systems could be improved if the data collected was shared cleverly between the systems. No wonder Smart Cities is a perfect topic to focus on both for suppliers and municipalities.
But how much smarter has cities become over the last years? Well, there are of course impressive reference cases here and there and a lot of sub-systems in a lot of cities have become better using IoT solutions. But the size and complexity of pulling it all together in a city is difficult to deal with both from practical and technical perspectives.
This is why I am really impressed by Infracontrol, their pragmatic approach to Smart Cities and what they have been able to do. They started about 20 years ago to help cities connecting mainly traffic related things like tunnel alarms, ventilation systems and traffic lights. As they grew bigger in several cities and with new applications they developed Infracontrol Online™ 2003 to connect cities and citizens for better services. Today they have 56 Swedish municipalities using Infracontrol Online™ and their first ones in Portugal in place as well. Their customers report 60% better service quality, 30% savings in maintenance expenses, a lot of energy savings and higher citizen satisfaction. Sounds smart to me! Needless to say Infracontrol is a member of the Swedish SMSE-alliance!
Get inspired by Jenny Gustavsson’s 5 minute pitch on Infracontrol at Internet of Everything For Real™ 2014!
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Posted by magnusmelander
July 4, 2014
Better use of energy is one of the key challenges to our society today and smart metering is the first step towards a smarter electricity system. It makes it possible to understand the overall level of electricity consumption and for example compare it with historical data or similar buildings. But in order to understand which devices consumes what in a house, office or apartment we have had to put a meter on that specific device for a while and track the result.
But
Watty, a small start-up in Stockholm, is taking a completely different and much more elegant and scalable approach – they listen to the electricity and identify patterns they recognize. In a similar way as
Shazam identifies music they can see fridges, heat pumps and washing machines. Their detective mounted on the smart meter send the data to the cloud where Watty use their clever algorithms to analyze and report back in an easy to use app. They can even detect appliances that might go on fire or an open door to a fridge.
I think this is brilliant and the right approach to better energy use. Take a couple of minutes to listen to Eva Andersson at Watty presenting what they do in the Case Marathon at
Internet of Everything For Real™ 2014 in Stockholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyfBrbh840o
Watty is of course a member of
SMSE together with 27 other Swedish start-ups in the IoE space.
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Posted by magnusmelander
July 1, 2014
Entrepreneurs have always made the difference. And will always be the ones pushing the boundaries and finding new innovative solutions to problems. They continuously bet their time, energy, savings, past and future on making their ideas fly. And they are always the ones to create the next big thing. When we look back at how we ended up where we are, it is easy to pin-point the inventions, individuals and companies that made difference. But it is very difficult to figure out which few of all thousands of entrepreneurs that will make the difference onwards.
Internet of Things is now incredibly hot and most people would agree that it will impact states, industries and life of people around the globe. Governments are making big statements and big investments in IoT to put their country in good position. Analysts and other experts claim they have the answers to what will happen, when and how much. And operators, consultants and vendors are fighting for an important role in what to come.
If we read the books of recent history we will find that the Internet started off as a research project but entrepreneurs made it what it is today. ISP:s connected people and businesses to the Internet, companies like US Robotics provided fast affordable modems and remote access solutions, Netscape and others created browsers and Alta Vista powerful search engines. Then thousands of web designers started to make good-looking web sites followed by CMS systems for more organized creation and maintenance of webs. While organizations started to benefit from the efficiency and improved service possibilities using the Internet, entrepreneurs exploited new innovative ways of doing things and completely new ideas. And ever since we have seen new innovative companies growing from nothing to big or huge: Amazon, Google, Twitter, SalesForce.com, LinkedIn, Spotify, Skype, Klarna, iZettle and TrueCaller just to mention a few – yes I am Swedish… Nobody figured out before hand how the Internet value chains would look like, which business models would be successful, the impact it would make or which companies would become the new giants.
Internet of Things is a misleading name. It’s the same Internet and we are just adding things to it. That’s why I prefer Internet of Everything. It is safe to argue that the development of Internet of Everything will follow a similar path as the Internet of People and Businesses. The main differences are that it will happen faster and ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse this time. It will be entrepreneurs once again who form the future and there are many of them around already! I have 28 of them in my
Swedish M2M Service Enabler alliance alone but there are thousands of them around the world. And they are fighting hard every day to prove to customers, partners and investors that their idea, solution or approach will be a great success.
I would welcome more appreciation and support for the entrepreneurs! They don’t need a lot and it is paying customers who should fund most of their development. But a little help to go abroad to meet potential customers and partners and, most importantly, commercial pilot projects at home would be a very good start. There are initiatives already including startup and incubation programs, competitions like EIT ICT Labs Idea Challenge, Cisco’s IoT challenge and IPSO Alliance IoT Competition as well as investors looking into this field. But let’s give the entrepreneurs what they need to make this happen for us!
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Posted by magnusmelander
June 24, 2014
Mergers and acquisitions indicate rapidly growing markets ahead. Google made a 3.2B$ acquisition of Nest in January. Now they just followed on with an acquisition of the Wi-Fi surveillance camera maker Dropcam for 555M$. Thermostats, smoke alarms and cameras – what is Googles plan? I think it is the homes and maybe offices they are after. There are many thermostats, smoke alarms and smart cameras available but Nest and Dropcam definitely comes with a cool design which should at least bring home healthier margins. People love nice products! Google has always been interested in Wi-Fi and it’s not a wild bet that there will be Wi-Fi in homes and offices. But this can’t be enough, they must be going after a service model with recurring revenues and collecting data from these devices to store, manage, analyze and sell. I have always claimed that “data is the gold of M2M” and I am confident that Google shares that view.
Provided I’m right, I still questions that idea. Even if Google spend another couple of B$ to buy companies with cool things (Sonos could be a good target) they will never get market share over maybe 5-10% and scattered around. I understand that they could sell the information back to the users of these devices but that seems to be a difficult path to get the money back. And if they try to sell the data elsewhere I would believe the owners of the devices and policymakers would have a view on that. But Google knows all that. The recurring revenues are obviously attractive but it feels questionable to pay this much to get there.
On top of all I believe their will have to be at least three separate wireless networks in homes: an unmanaged Wi-Fi with good performance but only best effort services, a really secure fully managed network for security related applications like door locks, surveillance and medical monitoring, and maybe even a third managed low bandwidth network for connecting things like fridges, coffee machines, etc. And even worse, we will see a mix of WAN and LAN technologies being used as well. I simply don’t see how one can deliver sensible services like surveillance or smoke detection over an unmanaged best effort Wi-Fi network. Successful companies with such services like Verisure today typically manage their own network.
So I am probably wrong. Goggle sees something I don’t. And they also understand the down-side of connected hardware since Nest just had to recall 440.000 smoke alarms due to a potential risk that they didn’t alarm immediately. But I am happy for their acquisitions since it stimulates entrepreneurs, customers and other companies who consider playing a sincere role in building the Internet of Everything.
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Posted by magnusmelander
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