October 11, 2012
Services Enablement is the magic that turns generic communication into specific M2M applications and as such absolutely key to a positive development of M2M. In order to educate the market about the importance of Services Enablement and to promote Swedish Services Enablers I initiated Swedish M2M Services Enablers – SMSE – in March 2012. With the most recent additions we are now eight companies in the alliance.
The Mobile Future conference followed by Mobilgalan award dinner is the key mobile industry event in Sweden since many years and includes the most prestigious mobile awards ceremony. Yesterday the organizers of the event, Mobil and Mobil Business, announced nominations to the
Guldmobilen (Golden Mobile) awards 2012. M2M was introduced as a new category for 2012 which underlines the importance of M2M to the mobile industry and progress in market penetration. Four of the five nominated companies in the M2M category are members of the SMSE alliance which clearly communicate the importance of Services Enablement for the M2M market to develop well. This is all very good news and a concrete evidence of progress. Please join me congratulating
Maingate, Kombridge, Info24 and Springworks for their nominations!
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M2M, M2M Service Enablers | Tagged: Awards, B3CC, B3IT, Guldmobilen, Info24, Internet of Things, IoT, Kombridge, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, Maingate, Mediaprovider, Mobil, Mobil Business, Mobil Future, Mobilgalan, Services Enablers, SMSE, Springworks | 
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Posted by magnusmelander
October 8, 2012
We connected businesses and people to the Internet to get mail and web. That was an easy sell! We got it and we discovered a lot of more important things to use the Internet for, increasing productivity and efficiency in organizations across the globe tremendously. Then, clever people started to utilize the data created to invent new applications and business models. Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook are just a couple of well-known examples. Since nobody had a clue about what the Internet would bring, ignorance was often an acceptable reason for failure at the time.
Now we are connecting also things to the Internet. Once again we focus on connectivity and operational values. Efficiency, Security, Sustainability and Convenience are the key values that M2M and the Internet of Things offer. Soon we will start to see clever people utilize the data created to invent new applications and business models. Well, some have already started. We have seen the movie before and the early warning systems works perfectly well this time why ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse.
It’s about time for decision makers to get on top of the M2M development and what it can do to their organization and industry. There are many ways to find information including articles, blogs, conferences and reports (I obviously recommend M2M Business Strategy & Planning which I am the proud author of) but the important thing is to get going, now.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, M2M | Tagged: Amazon, B3CC, B3IT, Business model, business models, convenience, decision maker, early warning systems, eBay, efficiency, Facebook, Google, increasing productivity, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, security, sustainability | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
September 27, 2012
The oneM2M Partnership was established this summer to drive creation of international standards for M2M Services. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has now joined oneM2M as its first Type 2 partner. The seven founding partners are the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB), the Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC) of Japan, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) of the USA, the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) of Korea.
Every single initiative to establish interoperability between M2M services and devices across networks helps speeding up development and deployment of M2M solutions. Since the M2M market is tremendously fragmented the standardization efforts are quite difficult. But every step taken will make the M2M service layer more robust.
Leave a Comment » | M2M | Tagged: ARIB, ATIS, B3IT, CCSA, ETSI, Internet of Things, interoperability, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, OMA, oneM2M, Open Mobile Association, TIA, TTA, TTC | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
August 17, 2012
A lot of people and animals are killed and injured in road traffic, road vehicles impact our environment significantly and road traffic is an important part of efficient transportation of people and goods. With the key promises of M2M being safety, sustainability and efficiency there is a perfect match between road traffic and M2M. A lot of research projects are on-going and part of the overall efforts towards the ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) vision.
The air traffic system has for many years been developed aiming towards zero accidents. This process has made air traffic very safe and I am told that most of the remaining accidents are caused by human beings. The use of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) is increasing mainly to avoid dull, dirty or dangerous flying missions. We have for example all heard about drone attacks (military planes without pilots) in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan.
If we can fly helicopters and aircrafts without pilots we must be able to modernize the road traffic to make it safer, more friendly to nature and more efficient. And even if humans cause many or maybe most of the problems on the road we still don’t feel comfortable putting ourselves in the hands of technology on the roads or in the air. But this will change. The technical solutions are ahead of what we are willing to accept but carefully managed real life trials together with clear and big benefits will slowly make us humans agree to start using new solutions.
There are many advanced research projects in road traffic continuously pushing the frontier forward. Earlier this summer Volvo successfully led a road train consisting of a Volvo XC60, a Volvo V60 and a Volvo S60 behind a truck on a 200 km journey through Spain as part of SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for Environment). The cars outfitted with cameras, radars and laser sensors were six meters apart and drove safely 85 km/h without any driver interference. The vehicles in the test have covered some 10.000 km on test circuits before the trial. Beyond improved safety and sustainability road trains would allow us drivers to put a professional driver in command for a while, take a bite, check our mail and take a nap before taking control of the car again. Sounds great!Another interesting project is Google Driverless Cars. In May 2012 the first license for a self-driven car was issued in Nevada: a Toyota Prius modified with Google’s experimental driver-less technology. The team just announced that they have completed over 300,000 autonomous-driving miles accident-free, typically have about a dozen cars on the road at any given time, and are starting to test them with single drivers instead of in pairs.
ITS World Congress 2012 in Vienna October 22-26 is an interesting event for anyone interested in where road traffic is going. I’ll be there!
Leave a Comment » | ITS, M2M, Safety and Security, Transportation | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, driverless, droner, Google, Internet of Things, IoT, ITS World Congress, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, road train, SARTRE, Toyota, Traffic, Transportation, UAV, UCAV, Volvo | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
August 4, 2012
Single purpose M2M solutions have started to appear in the market. They are typically addressing one specific problem with a combination of hardware, software and communication. If the problem addressed is clear and considered big enough by many people and the solution works well then the willingness to pay should be possible to build a business around. Provided the solution uses the cloud to deliver the service from, then expanding the solution to include generic devices like smartphones, pads and PCs is an interesting next step at least to access the data but maybe to run the entire application on as well.
A good example is Coyote from France who claims over 1.7 million users of their speed camera alert system in Europe. The service is also available as an app for iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry and for Parrot. A Coyote device cost about 250€ including one year of service. A solution like this is also interesting for mobile operators since one agreement can sell hundreds of thousands subscriptions of the same type and each deal like this provides opportunities to add service enablement services on top of the connectivity.
The two key success factors of products like these are a high quality solution to a reasonable big problem and ease-of-use out of the box. Then people are willing to pay reasonably well for the service and word of mouth will work for marketing. Easy to buy and use solutions are also interesting in sales channels. It is quite likely that we will see many more single purpose M2M solutions onwards.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, M2M Service Enablers, User Interaction | Tagged: apps, B3CC, B3IT, Business model, Coyote, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, speed camera, Traffic, Transportation, usability | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
June 18, 2012
There are many reasons why M2M solutions will hit society, businesses and people with enormous power. Most of them relate to what happens when we connect things and put computing on top but one specific force is democratization of development tools – a similar brutal force that Basic and Hypercard gave to the PC industry, and that Apple provided the mobile industry with the App-concept. When thousands or millions of developers get going, innovation, specialization and competition happens big way.
Arduino is an open well documented physical platform developed 2005 in the Olivetti town Ivrea, Italy. It is a platform which collect, compute and communicate data which makes it the perfect prototyping tool for students, hobbyists and professional developers to realize their device ideas. Today the affordable and easy to use development kits can be bought at the Radioshacks of the world. Nobody knows how many Arduino developers there are but over 300.000 boards have been sold, the ratio of cloning is currently estimated to one per original board and Arduino skills are more and more often requested in CVs.
Arduino supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and there are a number of boards available. They are really affordable and pre-assembled Arduino modules cost less than $50. The community is rapidly growing and it’s easy to join by for example following the Arduino blog.
Among the companies using Arduino for their tools and services are Google and Telefonica. And the more I dig into the world of M2M the more spectacular examples of Arduino projects I find. Imagine this: a 14 year old boy in Chile developed an Arduino machine which post a Tweet when detecting an earthquake and now this alert is sent to some 30.000 followers on Twitter.
This is only the beginning. The opportunities are massive but some risks are also involved. Many companies will experience difficult competition from unexpected directions and some will leverage these forces to strengthen their position in the market. Governments will see completely new solutions to old and difficult problems. And consumers will be offered new innovative services, many of them replacing products we buy today.
I’m fortunate to work and live in the middle of this period of great change!
Leave a Comment » | M2M | Tagged: Arduino, B3CC, B3IT, democratization of development tools, Google, Internet of Things, IoT, Ivrea, Linux, M2M, Mac OS X, Machine-to-Machine, Olivetti, Telefonica, Windows | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
May 18, 2012
M2M solutions using Mobile operator’s networks are growing quite aggressively. According to Berg Insight we have some 110 Million M2M SIM cards active today. But even if this impressive growth continues we will never reach the connected society within my life time unless generic, cost efficient, easy to install and use alternatives comes to market. It is not primarily a matter of communication technology – it is a matter of connectivity together with services enablement making it cost efficient to develop applications. Such solutions will use fixed or mobile wan connections to connect to the Internet.
At May 16 I stumbled over the first potential solution to the “M2M for the rest of us” solution – Electric Imp. They just left stealth mode introducing a line of Imp cards that can be installed on any electronic device to put it online and control it. The cards connect to the Internet and a cloud based service using Wi-Fi. In their own words: “take the best implementation of hardware, firmware and cloud service, build them into a single mass-produced product, and apply them to any device in the world”. The word Imp is borrowed from Arpanet’s Interface Message Processor. Developer preview Imp cards and developer kits will be available this summer and Imp cards will retail for $25 when available in the market. Electric Imp claim they have invented a solution for configuring Imp devices for Wi-Fi networks in seconds using iOS or Android smartphones.
I find this exciting since it sounds like Electric Imp has what it takes: a generic, cost efficient, easy to install and use solution for connecting things to the Internet. As an evangelist and investor in the early Wi-Fi days I am also exited to see bets on Wi-Fi in the M2M field.
Electric Imp has a great idea, strong founders, capable investors and address a massive market opportunity. Their success will be determined by how fast they will get hardware vendors to adopt their platform and put Imp-slots in their devices.
Leave a Comment » | Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, M2M Service Enablers, Networks | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, Electric Imp, Imp, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, SIM, smartphone, WiFi | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
May 15, 2012
Security, efficiency and sustainability are the three key promises of M2M to businesses. And most applications of M2M address one or several of these straight forward issues in an organization: minimize use of service cars, avoid production stops, save valuable time with accidents, make processes more efficient, automate to avoid expensive labour work, etc. These are straight forward in the sense that we address concrete problems quite easy to put numbers on and investments can be verified using business cases and ROI. But the ultimate value of M2M comes from innovative business models, increased brand value and other less tangible things. And these are much more complicated to identify and dress in numbers. Innovation and creativity is clearly an important part of such efforts and I would suggest companies to look at the M2M consumer market to get ideas and cases to bring home.
There is actually a fourth promise of M2M which I normally don’t talk about to businesses – convenience. But in the consumer market this is a key driver and differentiator. Other reasons to look carefully at the consumer market are the typically limited budgets forcing innovative and cost efficient solutions and the absolute requirement for easy to install and use solutions. In addition consumers are generally more open to cloud services and many of them are early adopters with smartphones, pads and other gadgets. Examples of things and tricks to bring from the consumer space to business could be the use of smartphones to connect devices cheaply to the Internet and the host of innovative cloud services using sensors and gadgets in the growing personal health and fitness market. Imagine how much the home care providers can steal with pride from here! Take also a closer look at how well many consumer services enable their users to use any and all of their devices for the service. A lot to learn there.
And by the way, isn’t the Internet-of-Things a misleading name? There is only one Internet of People and Things.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, User Interaction | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, business case, Business model, Internet of People and Things, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, roi, usability | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
May 8, 2012
Connecting things to the Internet opens up for a new wave of innovation to society, companies and consumers. That fact has been talked about and dressed in numbers for the last couple of years. Still we see quite little action beyond connecting “big phones” and electricity meters. Something is obviously missing and I think I know the answer.
We have good enough technology available and we have been blessed with a new category of smart mobile devices with apps perfect to visualize functionality and value for people. And we are in the beginning of the cloud and Big Data era which constitutes a perfect environment for M2M-applications and the data created. Still little action.
As often when powerful technology comes to market it is too abstract for most people to see how they and their organizations will benefit from it. What it will do to their life, business and society. Our industry needs to educate people and help them see the value and opportunities of M2M solutions. It is definitely not about technology – it is about business and should be discussed with business developers, product owners and management teams.
I believe a combination of meetings and a lot of relevant examples is what it takes to create understanding and feed a creative and rewarding thought process. The examples are most often not that your competitor did this, but rather someone in an adjacent industry did something and that was the result. Meetings with theoretical examples don’t work. We have seen some of that already and it sometimes feels like people from the M2M industry tell other people from the same industry how it works. And it is still too early to provide relevant ideas “stand alone”, without face to face meetings, since the context and overall education often is missing.
The method I am using with clients starts with an overview of the market (education) and continues with discussions about problems and challenges in their business relevant for M2M solutions. This normally becomes discussions about cost savings and efficiency which is great. Further down the road we look at business cases and ROI calculations. But the true power of the M2M concept comes to play when we start discuss potential new innovative ways of doing business enabled by M2M solutions. Collecting, cultivating and leveraging the data generated. Selling services or functions instead of products. Going from product life cycles to continuous R&D. Offering customers an unexpected service or feature. Effects to the brand and new weapons in recruiting employees or customers. This is what I believe is the real power of M2M solutions and the Internet of people and things.
This is what I call “M2M for real” and I will do my best to promote this approach beyond our company. A good acid test will be an “M2M For Real” event in Stockholm which the media company Mobil Business is organizing June 20, TeliaSonera is main sponsor and where we will provide a solid introduction and status update on M2M solutions followed by a “smörgåsbord” of examples from all kinds of industries and opportunities to discuss.
Leave a Comment » | Business Models, M2M | Tagged: B3CC, B3IT, Business model, innovation, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
April 24, 2012
Services like Skype and Spotify utilizing the Internet just as a connection are often referred to as over the top services or OTT. Consumers normally love them but operators typically have a more complex view of them: great since they create demand for their IP services but not that great if they replace services the operators charge for. Most M2M applications are really tiny in terms of traffic generation which explains why over 95% of the mobile ones still use 2G. For mobile operators M2M is more of a subscription business than a data business today. It is hard to estimate how M2M solutions will impact data volumes since it’s a combination of actual applications and volumes of connected devices.
I always claim that the M2M consumer market is a great place to look for innovation and interesting examples to bring to the business market. One example is what could be referred to as M2M OTT, where vendors of connectable devices use people’s ordinary mobile devices to connect to the Internet and an application in the cloud or elsewhere. This can make the device cheaper and smaller to manufacture and use. By using for example Bluetooth to connect to the phone and leverage the existing subscription and data plan. Data from the device can be made available to an application somewhere typically adding no cost to the user. And no new revenues but more traffic to the operator. There are many examples of this in the consumer market today and the personal health and fitness segment is one worth looking at. A mix of books, trends, research, services and products has created a rapidly growing movement and industry. Dr David B. Agus’ bestseller “the end of Illness” and the sleep monitor Zeo are good examples. The Zeo is a complete system taking sleep analysis out from the labs. By connecting a Zeo headband to an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth, the sleep data collected is made available to an app for reporting. But the sleep history data is also made available to the user’s account at mysleep.myzeo.com where analysis, backup and other services are available.
Using the mobile devices for local collection and presentation of data and access, over the top, to an application and services in the cloud is a model we can use in other situations. There are obviously downsides having to deal with Bluetooth, phones running out of power or stolen etc. But for some applications this is a great model maybe also in the business environment. There is simply not one or two models for M2M but many, and it is important to carefully look at all possible approaches available when implementing an M2M project.
Leave a Comment » | Cloud computing, Consumer market, M2M, Networks | Tagged: 2G, Agus, Android, apps, B3CC, B3IT, Bluetooth, Internet of Things, IoT, iPhone, M2M, Machine-to-Machine, OTT, over the top, SIM, smartphone, zeo | Permalink
Posted by magnusmelander
Services Enablement is the magic that turns generic communication into specific M2M applications and as such absolutely key to a positive development of M2M. In order to educate the market about the importance of Services Enablement and to promote Swedish Services Enablers I initiated Swedish M2M Services Enablers – SMSE – in March 2012. With the most recent additions we are now eight companies in the alliance.
connectcompute 