Tag: wearables

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Technology The Industry

The Next Big Thing

I’ve always been somewhat amused to read about the colossally important technology trends that are right around the corner. These trends are mostly driven by the wishful thinking of vendors, and they have rarely come true, at least to the extent that is predicted. Even when the next big thing comes to pass, it’s almost never at the predicted magnitude. There has been at least one of these big trends announced every year, and here are a few of the more interesting ones.

I can remember when it was announced that we would be living in an Internet of Things world. Not only would our houses be stuffed full of labor-savings IOT devices, but our fields, forests, and even the air around us would be full of small sensors that would give us feedback on the world around us. The reality was not the revolution predicted by the industry press, but over a decade, most of us now have smart devices in our homes. But the fields, forests, and surrounding environment – not so much.

The IOT trend was followed by big pronouncements that we’d all be adopting wearables. This was not only devices like Google Glass, but we’d all have wearables built into our everyday clothes so that we could effortlessly carry a computer and sensors with us everywhere. This prediction was about as big of a flop as imaginable. Google Glass crashed and burned when the public made it clear that nobody wanted everyday events to be live streamed. Other than gimmicks at CES, there was no real attempt at smart clothes.

But wearables weren’t the biggest flop of all – that is reserved in my mind for 5G. The hype for 5G swamps the hype for all of the other big trends combined. 5G was going to transform the world. We’d have near gigabit speeds everywhere, and wireless was going to negate the need for investing in fiber broadband networks. 5G was going to enable fleets of driverless cars. 5G would drive latency so low that it was going to be the preferred method for connection by gamers and stock traders. There was going to be 5G small cell sites on every corner, and fast wireless broadband would be everywhere. Instead of 5G, we got a watered-down version of 4G LTE labeled as 5G. Admittedly, cellular broadband speeds are way faster, but none of the predicted revolution came to pass.

A few predictions came to pass largely as touted – although at a much slower pace. Five years ago, we were told that everything was going to migrate to the cloud. Big corporations were going to quickly ditch internal computing, and within a short time, the cloud would transform computing. It didn’t happen as quickly as predicted, but we have moved a huge amount of our computing lives into the cloud. Tasks like gaming, banking, and most of the apps we’ve come to rely on are in the cloud today. The average person doesn’t realize the extent that they rely on the cloud until they lose broadband and realize how little of the things they do are stored in the computers at their homes and offices.

This blog was prompted by the latest big trend. The press is full of stories about how computing is moving back to the edge. In case the irony of that escapes you, this largely means undoing a lot of the big benefits of going to the cloud. There are some good reasons for this shift. For example, the daily news about hacking has corporations wondering if data will be safer locally than in the cloud. But the most important reason cited for the movement to edge computing is that the world is looking for extremely low latency – and this can only come when computer processing is done locally. The trouble with this prediction is that it’s hard to find applications that absolutely must have a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. I’m sure there are some, but not enough to make this into the next big trend. I could be wrong, but history would predict that this will happen to a much smaller degree than being touted by vendors.

All big technology trends have one big weakness in common – the fact that the world naturally resists change. Even when the next big thing has clear advantages, there must be an overwhelming reason for companies and people to drop everything to immediately adopt something new, and that usually is untested in the market. Most businesses have learned that being an early adapter is risky – a new technology can bring a market edge, but it can also result in having egg on one’s face.

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Current News

They’re Back

Facebook recently announced it will be introducing smart glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban. This will be the second major attempt at introducing the technology since the failed attempt by Google in 2011 when it introduced Google Glass. For those who might not remember, Google Glass was shunned by the general public and people who wore the glasses in public were quickly deemed to be glassholes. People were generally uncomfortable talking to somebody who could be recording the conversation.

It will be interesting to see if the public is any more forgiving now. Pictured with this blog is Glass 2.0 that is being used in factories, but the first-generation public version was equally obvious as a piece of technology.

In terms of technology, 2011 is far behind us, and since then it’s common for anything done in public to end up being recorded by somebody’s smartphone. But that still doesn’t mean that people like the idea of being secretly recorded, particularly if the new glasses aren’t so obvious as Google Glass.

We still don’t know what the technology will look like, but Facebook will try to brand the new glasses as cool. Consider this video ad that accompanied the announcement of the new glasses – who doesn’t want to wear smart glasses like glasses worn in the past by James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Muhammed Ali? Facebook says the new glasses will function by being paired with a smartphone, so perhaps they’ll be a lot less obvious than were the Google Glass.

The glasses are the first step towards virtual presence. Facebook Mark Zuckerberg says his vision is being able to virtually invite friends into your home to play cards virtually. However, this first set of glasses isn’t going to include an integrated display that would be capable of generating or viewing holograms. That means the new glasses will likely include the same sort of features like Google Glass such as being able to record what’s in front of you, using the web to browse for facts, or dipping into the web to call-up information about people you meet. With the advances we’ve made in facial recognition since 2011, that last item is a lot scarier today than it was a decade ago.

I recall the tech industry excitement about Google Glass and other proposed wearables back in 2010. The vision was to seamlessly be able to carry tech with you to create a constant human-computer interface. Google was stunned when the public universally and loudly rejected the idea, because to most people the technology meant an invasion of privacy. Nobody wanted to have a casual conversation with a stranger and then later find it posted on social media.

It’s hard to think that is still not going to be the reaction again today. Of course, as a baby boomer, I am a lot leerier of technology than are the younger generations. It seems that Generation Z is a lot less concerned about privacy and it will be interesting to see if young people take to the new technology. We may have one of the biggest generational rifts ever between the first generation that finally embraces wearables and everybody older.

Google Glass never died and morphed into a pair of glasses to use in factories. It allows workers to pull up schematics in real-time to compare to work-in-progress in front of them. The technology is said to have greatly improved complex tasks like wiring a new jetliner – something we all want to be 100% correct.

I will likely remain leery of the technology. What might eventually bring me around is Zuckerberg’s vision of being able to play poker with distant friends. I’ve been predicting telepresence as the technology that will finally take advantage of gigabit fiber connections. I’m not sure that we need glasses that secretly hide the technology capability to make this work – but I guess this is an early step towards that vision.

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Technology The Industry

Machine Generated Broadband

One of the more interesting predictions in the latest Cisco annual internet forecast is that there will be more machine-to-machine (M2M) connections on the Internet by 2021 than there are people using smartphones, desktops, laptops and tablets.

Today there are a little over 11 billion human-used machines connected to the Internet. That number is growing steadily and Cisco predicts that by 2021 there will be over 13 billion such devices using the Internet. That prediction also assumes that total users on the internet will grow from a worldwide 44% broadband penetration in 2016 to a 58% worldwide penetration of people that have connectivity to the Internet by 2021.

But the use of M2M devices is expected to grow a lot faster. There are fewer than 6 billion such devices in use today and Cisco is projecting that will grow to nearly 14 billion by 2021.

So what is machine-to-machine communication? Broadly speaking it is any technology that allows networked devices to exchange information and perform actions without assistance from humans. This encompasses a huge range of different devices including:

  • Cloud data center. When something is stored in the cloud, most cloud services create duplicate copies of data at multiple data centers to protect against a failure at any given data center. While this does not represent a huge number of devices when measured on the scale of billions, the volume of traffic between data centers is gigantic.
  • Telemetry. Telemetry has been around since before the Internet. Telemetry includes devices that monitor and transmit operational data from field locations of businesses, with the most common examples being devices that monitor the performance of electric networks and water systems. But the devices used for telemetry will grow rapidly as our existing utility grids are upgraded to become smart grids and when telemetry is used by farmers to monitor crops and animals, used to monitor wind and solar farms, and used to monitor wildlife and many other things in the environment.
  • Home Internet of Things. Much of the growth of devices will come from an explosion of devices used for the Internet of Things. In the consumer market that will include all of the smart devices we put into homes such as burglar alarms, cameras, smart door locks and smart appliances of many kinds.
  • Business IoT. There is expected to be an even greater proliferation of IoT devices for businesses. For example, modern factories that include robots are expected to have numerous devices that monitor and direct the performance of machines. Hospitals are expected to replace wires with wireless networked devices used to monitor patients. Retail stores are all investigating devices that track customers through the store to assist in shopping and to offer inducements to purchase.
  • Smart Cars and Trucks. By 2021 it’s expected that most new cars and trucks will routinely communicate with the Internet. This does not necessarily imply self-driving vehicles, but rather that all new vehicles will have M2M capabilities.
  • Smart Cities. A number of large cities are looking to improve living conditions using smart city technologies. This is going to require the deployment of huge numbers of sensors that will be used to improve things like traffic flow, monitoring for crimes and improvement everyday things like garbage collection and snow removal.
  • Wearables. Today there are huge numbers of fitness monitors, but it’s expected that it will become routine for people to wear health monitors of various types that keep track of vital statistics and monitor to catch problems at an early stage.
  • Gray Areas. There are also a lot of machine-to-machine communications that come from computers, laptops and smartphones. I see that my phone uses data even at those times when I’m not using it. Our devices now query the cloud to look for updates, to make back-ups of our data or to take care of other tasks that our apps do in the background without our knowledge or active participation.

Of course, having more machine-to-machine devices doesn’t mean that this traffic will grow to dominate web traffic. Cisco predicts that by 2021 that 83% of the traffic on the web will be video of some sort. While most of that video will be used for entertainment, it will also include huge piles of broadband usage for surveillance cameras and other video sources.

If you are interested in M2M developments I recommend M2M: Machine2Machine Magazine. This magazine contains hundreds of articles on the various fields of M2M communications.

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Technology The Industry

Too Many Gadgets?

It seems that we have reached a point where the typical consumer thinks there are too many gadgets in his (or her) life and the average person is becoming less interested in buying new ones. A poll conducted earlier this year by Accenture showed that consumer demand for personal electronics is greatly reduced compared to recent years.

The drive to have personal electronics was spurred by the smartphone revolution, which has outperformed sales compared to almost any other product in history. But there have also recently been other personal electronics products like the Fitbit and health wearables that have done very.

But it looks like the shine might be coming off of the personal electronics industry. The Accenture survey showed that fewer people are considering buying every category of personal electronics. For example, the poll showed that only 13% of respondents were considering buying a new smartphone in 2016. That is far below the levels seen in recent years where a significant percentage of smartphone users upgraded their phone every 2 or 3 years.

And the survey also showed weak demand for wearables like Fitbit, for virtual reality, for drones and for the Internet of Things. If this poll is true, then all of these industries are going to underperform compared to expectations. We are certainly seeing this in the real world. Apple stock just stumbled due to falling demand for the iPhone. Samsung and the other smartphone makers went through the same thing last year.

The poll didn’t ask why this was so, but just measured consumer demand. I can think of several reasons why demand is down. First is cost. None of these personal electronics are particularly cheap and it’s unrealistic for the market to expect that all of these electronics will sell as wildly as is predicted by industry insiders. If you listen to the hype each year at places like CES you would expect that everyone in America will soon be buying drones and piles of IoT devices for their homes.

I think another primary reason for the decline is performance. My wife has a sports device to track her running. It works great for what she wants from it and there is no particular reason for her to upgrade it. And every runner she knows has one. Once the market for runners and walkers is saturated there is only so much that can be expected in demand for a device with such a specific function. There is just not much difference between the newer sports wearables and ones sold just a few years ago.

And performance is now a bit issue with smartphones. There is not much difference any more between one generation and another. The new smartphones look the same, feel the same and do about the same things and the old ones. And this is more the fault of the slowing of Moore’s law than anything else.

Since the early 70s chip makers like Intel have released a new chip about every two years that crammed about twice as many transistors into the same chip space. This is the primary reason why each new generation of the iPhone has been a noticeable improvement over the previous model. Each new chip has meant a big leap upward in speed, energy-efficiency and performance of the smartphone.

But in the 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of 2015 Intel disclosed that the pace at which it will launch new chips is going to be slower in the future. Intel’s latest mass-production chips for smartphones now have a gap between components of 14 nanometers. Physics is going to limit that ultimate gap to perhaps 4 or 5 nanometers at the smallest due to the size of the molecules of the chip materials. There isn’t very much more room for improvement.

This is not to say that there won’t continue to be improvements in computers – but soon the improvements are not going to come from more compact chips. There are amazing new breakthroughs coming in other areas. IBM has a new chip that works in 3 dimensions that has a lot of promise for supercomputers. There are computers becoming faster by using light instead of electricity. And there is a lot of promise from quantum computing. But all of these improvements, at least for now, are likely to help larger computers and don’t lend themselves to the cheap mass-produced chips that drive personal electronics.

And none of this means that the market for personal electronics is dead. There are still huge numbers of all of these devices being sold. But when you use the performance of Apple over the past decade as the way to measure success in the electronics world it’s likely that nothing is ever going to measure up to that yardstick.

This is a cautionary tale for any carrier that is considering selling home automation, energy management or security. There is a decent living to be made in all of these areas, but don’t get sucked into the hype that every home in America is going to want all of these devices and services within the next few years. Because it appears that is definitely not true.

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