Internet of Things - Innovations & Business Models

How many times have you’ll fought with your loved ones for – Leaving the water tap open, forgotten to switch off the lights, not buying the groceries on time,  leaving the plants un-watered etc. Well, to solve such many more problems & to make our lives easier here comes “Internet of Things”.

I happened to attend ThoughtWorks Converge Conference last Saturday, in this post I will share some of my learning on “Internet of Things”(IoT).

-          IoT term was first used in the year 1999

-          7 things a device must have to be IoT (Connectivity, Sensors, Processor, Security, Quality, Cost efficiency, Energy Efficiency)

Some of the disruptive Innovations in the space of Internet of Things:

Builders constructing Smart houses:

A house where your room temperature is auto set depending on the current climate temperature, will timely water your plants, lightings change as per your moods. All this is done without human interference with the help of IoT.

Connected Refrigerator:

Imagine your fridge scanning through your grocery items inside & preparing the grocery order list & sending a purchase order to Big Basket & when you come home all the materials are waiting at your doorsteps. Fridge sending out emails suggesting you based on the items present the Dinner menu to be cooked.

Google Car:

 Well google car needn’t be explained. That’s what I need as I am hopeless in driving. So practically eliminating driver’s cost you have a car which will follow google’s map & take you to your destination without any effort.

Healthcare enabled Smart watches:

 Today your Smartphone’s will warn you before your chances of heart attack, when your glucose level is going high & how much your BP is in control. Makes you feel your doctor is in your hand.

IoT Business Models:

Internet Business Models are revolving around Likes, Shares, Eyeballs, Views etc. With IoT there is an evolution of new business model:

-  Build a solution which will solve problems of people & they would be ready to pay for that solution

-    Solve the customer real time problem “now”

-    You may not have consumers directly paying for the solution, but have to identify a third party who would be ready to pay for it

-   Design BM around partnership & alliance for a bigger WIN

Some successful IoT Business Models:

  http://www.patientslikeme.com/

A community where-in people discuss about their health issues & all this discussed business intelligence is shared across clinics & hospitals so that can generate leads.

http://www.getchui.com/

"The world's most intelligent doorbell." Chui's facial recognition technology replaces keys, passwords or codes, allowing you to disarm a security system with facial recognition

Top10 Internet of Things Startup 

Way to approach a problem via IoT:

1.       Identify the problem

2.       Come out with 10 diff IoT solutions

3.       Design feasibility study for each of the solutions & finalize one which is more doable

4.        Develop Business Model

5.       If you know your idea is profitable & scalable go ahead with it

Few Tips for business in IoT:

-          Never startup because you have a great idea, startup because you have a problem to solve

-          Find the most easiest technical solution

-          Don’t design solution just for one market – plan it as a global solution

Today Refrigerators can send Malicious Emails, so my question to you is - Are You Yet there ?

UnMetro – The Markets driving India

It was my absolute please to attend Dainik Bhaskar UnMetro Conference on 13^th Dec. A platform where I got to hear some inspiring UnMetro Case Studies from Marketers, incredible panel discussing the future of India being the UnMetros. 

Some take away & quotes from the event:

People nowadays are migrating from smaller towns to cities like Pune, Lucknow and Ahmedabad to earn their livelihood, whereas the rate of people migrating to the so-called metros has fallen sharply.

The non-metro customer today, demands the same luxury packages such as spas, five stars & international vacations that any of his affluent metro counterparts demand.

Trust is the key to success in the unMetros markets and people are open to talk and learn about new things.

The trend of e-commerce players partnering with retail brands is yet to evolve in unMetros

Consumer in future will reject a user inappropriate product. Affordability is no longer an issue for unMetros

5 reasons for the change in nonMetros – increasing awareness for education, health & wellness, growing need for personal grooming, improving hygiene & increasingly eating out & experimenting with food.

60% of my brands revenue comes from non-metro India

Women & Children in UnMetros India have become powerful as far as purchase decisions go.

The advantage in a small town is that the news spreads very fast, brands need to spend money in cultivating loyalty

Products must be hackable & customizable. Customers are getting smarter. They will not buy products just because their favorite celebrity is endorsing it.

Puma – “We have closed 7 stores due to unprofitably, all from Metros”

DHFL – “We target lower middle income group. We have differentiated Business Model to cater to different segments in Market”

CCD- “We are not in the coffee business; we are in the Time pass business. CCD is a place where people want to spend time with their loved ones, beverages accidentally surround them”

Toyota – “By the year 2015, non-metros will account for more than 60% of our sales!”

Puma – “e-Commerce allows us to reach 800 towns that we would have never had reached. It serves a long tail of towns”

Titan – “In the coming 5 years, e-Commerce will be big, Localization will be critical & technology will help us identifying customers with their name & purchase history”.

We at Huawei have always believed that making a common man a brand ambassador & word of mouth is the best marketing strategy. Thus Huawei Club where we are building an eco-system, engaging with Students, Developers, Designers to enrich our customers experiences.  

A brand essence doesn't and will not change, from market the way the message is communicated at times need to be tweaked accordingly to be effective. After the end of the conference, for it’s really difficult to distinguish metros & unMetros into separate categories.

In fact India outside the metros seems to be the emerging India.

Rational Software Conference 09 - Day 2

Martin Nally addressed the audience about how to improve Software Economy & achieve agility at scale:

Introduced 2 framework to achieve the above

> RCA (Report Collaborate Automate) to complete the project 1 month early.

It is very much needed that the requirements are well defined

> MCIF (Measured Capability Improvement Framework) best practice for SDLC which tells us how to isolate the activities.

He adds that Software economy is balancing risk & opportunity

Neeraj Chandra:- Smart Product for Smart Planet

He started off his presentation with a saying “You can’t cut the way to success”

Innovation is more about solving a problem on ground reality and reducing complexity. Recession is a curse & this IT down turn will end and then we need to take up this opportunity. Future will see Smarter products like

Mobile Computing, Smart Transport, health care, energy & aero-scope. A products major failure is most of the time the embedded software. Concludes by saying that “Rational Software’s are Smart product existing in this yet to be - Smart Planet”

Session on Mashups: Defined as :-Lightweight web application created by combined contents from different app with some new insight. Eg being igoogle and Google Map. Helps in building Enterprise. WebTop is the first mashup application.

Best Practice in Mashup Application is to know what to combine & how to combine

WebSphere feature pack & RAD for Web 2.0 Application Development: This feature has SOA for web 2.0 + Ajax Messaging & Ajax Development feature, DOJO toolkit 1.0 to avoid browser behave differently.

• Support 3 tire architecture,
• JavaScript developer Editor
• JavaScript debugging – Firebug
• Eclipse integration in RAD
• DOJO project setup
• GWT integration not possible
• Exploring EJB as a REST is easy by just configuring it in RAD
• WebSphere feature can be used in Eclipse

John Burroughs on Web Security tool AppScan:

Security is recession proof. When market was down security went up. We see 75% Application attacks & 25% network attack. The latest version of Appscan can scan across SOA, DOJO & Flash application. We see only 20% of OS attacks and Web App attacks are 55%. SQL Injection is the No1 vulnerability. AppScan is

the tool which can detect vulnerability at production, build, development phase.

Ø AppScan coding test is integrated at IDE and supports all IDE’s

Ø AppScan for development level editing is a plug-in

Ø They acquired Ounce Labs so that they could do white box testing after which the next version of AppScan released in Oct 08 had code analysis tool.

2009 RoadMap

* Join ISS initiative

* AppScan ISS site Protector

* Solving Enterprise Security Challenge

* Jazz security Software delivery platform

Phase of Security Vulnerability: Coding, Build, QA Testing & Product

Stealing data & gaining popularity amongst pears are the major reason for cyber crime.

Growth in Complexity & Web 2.0 has made security more needed the solution to fight against would be to train the developers in security and more investment in security.

After those 2 days of lab & session packed knowledge bag made me feel proud of being an IBMer and believe that Rational tools need to be more in-use to get agility in place from real world to SDLC.

Rational Software Conference 09 - Day 1

Tools can make SDLC agile and economic, IBM Rational Software are the major players. Rational software Conference 09 witnessed 5000 registration for 2 days held at Leela palace on 13^th – 14^th Aug 09.

Steve Robinson - Real Insights, Real Results: Introduced the contribution of JAZZ an open source forum. He says if all project follow CAR (Collaborate – Automate – Report) framework they will be agile & scaleable

Heyden Lindsey – Driving innovation today: Rational innovation is Smart planet & smarter products. Success with innovation in any project can be achieved by understanding business goals then looking for collection of frameworks & available tools, knowing how to deploy them and lastly selecting meaningful matrix to measuring the performance.

We see lots of software innovations in the area of Electronics, Automation & Aerospace. Cloud computing has 2 sides - on cloud service and service for cloud

On cloud service is where software’s are installed in the cloud and many can access it.

Service for cloud is when a operation is exposed as a service.

Grady Booch – S/W a key to Smart Planet : UML author started with an example, A software which could before hand predict Cyclone or Katrina which will occur. We need technology to change, want it to be a bit smarter which could store huge data, share data and have competency in market.

Lab on Rhapsody 7.5: A tool which will translate UML model language to code.

Lab1: Hello world program by drawing a Class diagrams and writing only 1 line of code.

Lab 2: Build a stop watch

It’s a Model – Driven & UML development

Enables design level debugging having benefit of product & quality

Rational software Architecture is used to build Java based web application from a UML

Lab on AppScan 7.1: A tool to test Web Application Security.

OWASP reports SQL & XSS Injection the highest level of attacks

Lab 1: Hacking cookies information

Lab 2: SQL Injection

Lab 3: XSS Injection

It exposes the security vulnerabilities on URL basis, gives recommendations to resolve.

Session on JCAP: Java code Analyze Program

Developers can automatically inspect their Java source code and improve their Java programming skills as they write their programs via JCAP. It provides descriptive Java patterns explaining error prone code constructs and providing solutions for it.

It checks:

• conformance to coding standards,
• misuse of the Java language,
• best practice conformance
• code structure and
• potential bugs at the earliest stages of development.

Session on Ration Clear Case Remote Client 7.1: A software configuration management tool. Has atomic commit, scheduler for build and an option to pick the version of the file. Can share a branch, has bulk checking & checkout option, view update, find merge, new project changes, cross project changes,

Build type: - triggered, scheduled, nightly and build-forge

Give us work from home option, disconnected, can be used in LAN environment, supports web view, notification when the view is updated.

Day 2: Upcoming post....