Don’t forget the IoE entrepreneurs!

July 1, 2014

bulbEntrepreneurs 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

Let’s face the M2M security challenges

April 13, 2013

hackersInitially technical innovators focus all they have on making it do whatever they want their innovation to do. Shortly after the breaking news about their brand new product, solution or service we use to receive the follow-on news about problems with things like security, health impact, integrity or fair trade. The scope of the problems obviously relates to what the new thing actually is.

Lets face it, it has always been like this. Telephone systems, microwave ovens, TV set-top boxes, ATM:s, door locks, PCs and Wi-Fi networks are all examples of things that quite easily were possible to manipulate, at least initially. But when we connected people and businesses to the Internet the magnitude of the problem increased many times. Having almost everything using the same communication protocols and even the same network gained us a lot of efficiency but also raised the security bets drastically. Most attacks are not reported publicly but the ones we hear about are serious enough. Fire Eye claims one security attack to enterprises every third second, based on analysis of information on more than 89 million security related attacks reported. Some specific examples since last summer, picked up from Network World: 450.000 stolen passwords from Yahoo, 5,8 million passwords from LinkedIn, 1,5 million from eHarmony, 8 million online credentials from Gamigo and about 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers from South Carolina. And we all remember the series of password thefts at Sony some two years ago. We’re already at the point where this belongs to the daily news feed and is business as usual.

Now we are connecting also things to the Internet and we will inevitably enter a new era of security and integrity issues, yet on another scale. Imagine hackers manipulating traffic lights, road signs, railroad control systems, power grids, nuclear plants, TV broadcasts, elections, pacemakers, airplanes, stock exchanges or hospitals. Media is quite frequently presenting examples along those lines and even if it is hard to differ between urban legends and real life cases it is safe to say that security will be a very important part of the M2M industry.

Recent examples from media include the Techspot.com story about a security consultant and pilot who claims he can hijack a commercial airplane remotely with his Android app, a story about a hacked pacemaker in the US where almost five million pacemakers and implantable defibrillators have been sold the last five years and several stories about hacked cars including the most recent research from Rutger University and University of South Carolina where they manipulated cars in motion via the TPMS system. At the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam the other day electrical vehicle charging stations were identified as potential targets for hackers to cripple parts of the electricity grid.

If the issues of security, safety and integrity aren’t taken seriously by the industry they will slow down or even prevent deployment of M2M solutions. Since perception is reality we need to go beyond just fixing the issue – we also have to make people believe it is taken care of seriously.

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Posted by magnusmelander

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