Internet of Things and Twine

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I’ve been asked by a number of people what is this “Internet of Things?” So, here’s a draft. Where do you disagree?

What if everything could share information?

Internet of things is making sharing information simple by bringing the network capabilities of computers to anything and everything.

Who knows what will happen in uses? Maybe it’s essential that Netflix pauses when the dryer finishes it’s cycle so you know to fold laundry before it wrinkles. But, big opportunities in “quantified self, ” home automation, retail supply chain (hey, I’m expired!), medical treatment, etc.

Basically, if intercommunication is so cheap that you can collect information from everything and take action on anything, what could you do with it?

Many technical revolutions fall into two categories: look what we can do that could never be done before, and look now it’s so cheap that everything can use it. (it’s really a continuum, but that’s “crossing the chasm,” etc).

Twine is smart because they make it simple to add basic functionality in this direction to existing stuff, so lowers the barriers to get started. Since it’s a new idea, we have no idea what all of the possibilities are, they make it simple for consumers to experiment.

Medication examples :

I want my pill bottle to tell my phone to have an alarm to remind me to take the drugs when my phone recognizes I’ve walked into the cafeteria.

I want my pill bottle to keep track of how many pills I have left. I want my phone to track this and remind me to refill early because it has my calendar and sees I have a trip coming up.

I always put stuff down, and can’t find it. I want my phone to ask my home alarm system where my pill bottle is.

I remember taking a pill, but can’t remember if that was today or yesterday. My pill bottle knows.

Drugs expire, send an email.

Drugs see what other drugs are in your medicine cabinet, that are yours (not the spouses) and checks for interactions you forgot to tell your pharmacist about.

Drugs reaching limits of storage temp (power failure?), send a notification.

How do you turn your phone into a tool?

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I picked up a Galaxy S III over the summer, and a few minutes every week making the phone do more work for me.  What are your Android tips?

  • Change application view to alphabetical list or grid
    • Apps – menu – view type – select
  • Make sure you set up a password on your phone.
  • Put contact info on your lock screen
  • Create one touch icons for most common calls. I have one that I hit and it calls my wife’s personal phone. You can find it under widgets.
  • Alternatively, you can use the ‘favorites’ list, and have that as a widget on one of your pages.
  • Change the keyboard: Purchase SwiftKey from Google Play
  • Arrange icons so that most used are on the bottom row that stays with every page.
    • Mine are: phone, contacts, Google search, apps, and a folder containing work mail, Gmail, and texts.
  • Put regularly used apps, or apps you need in a hurry, on the front page.
    • Mine include a lot of reading, but also TripIt, RSA token, maps, remember the milk (lists), camera, etc.
  • Epistle to edit and sync text files with my laptop (uses dropbox)
  • For Web stuff I want to read (news articles etc) on the go, I use instapaper (website) and sync with instafetch (app). So, I always have plenty to read on planes.
  • Find news with Zite or Flipboard apps.
  • Create a calendar widget so you can see the next few days without having to open the app
  • I have 2 Remember The Milk widgets: what I have to get done for the day, and what I am waiting on others to do.

Daring Fireball: Open and Shut

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John Graber of Daring Fireball has a great (albeit occasionally snarky) post challenging the value of “open” for shareholder value in technology companies.

The key point he starts to discuss, and then backs away from, is the value of externalities contributing to create better products faster.

Tim Wu also hints at this in his piece in the Newyorker, which kicked off Graber’s conversation. I’d like to hear more from both on this.

With an increasing demand for technology solutions to increasingly complex and evolving business problems, there’s a lot of money for whomever solves them. Share the wealth, and I bet we’ll provide our customers value faster now, and as the problems continue to change.

Life in a Networked Age

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John Robb, who brought us the term “open source warfare,” wallops the concerns of governance of our increasingly global network:

A global network is too large and complex for a bureaucracy to manage.  It would be too slow, expensive, and inefficient to be of value.  Further, even if one could be built, it would be impossible to apply market dyanmics [sic] (via democratic elections) to selecting the leaders of that bureaucracy.  The diversity in the views of the 7 billion of us on this planet are too vast.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2013/02/life-in-a-networked-age-.html

Transnational Corporation Networks Affect the Market and Stability

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The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025995

3 Recommendations on Process Scale Reading

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There’s a difference between engineers in most IT shops and in manufacturing.  In IT, there’s a heavier emphasis on design (servers, apps, architectures, etc) than “figuring out how to make things in the greatest numbers and the fastest possible time” [Freedom’s Forge].  With economics what they are today, and the potential operational impact of the industry wide push to cloud, this experience sounds critical.

Let’s build it.

Here’s what I’m starting with.  What are you reading?

Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman, recommended by Gunnar – history of the industrialization of the US leading through WWII.  I’m looking for similarities in manufacturing and industry mobilization with hopes of applications to cloud technologies and IT operating models.

The Goal by Eli Goldratt; rereading one of the worst novels ever written.  Genius however, for walking through tools, ideas, and philosophy for improving manufacturing effectiveness.

Pharmaceutical Process Scale-Up by Michael Levin; from the preface: “the procedures of transferring the results of R&D obtained on laboratory scale to the pilot plant and finally to production scale.”

Anything But Random: 1,500,000 Blogs

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7,100,000 Relationships Across 1,500,000 blogs

Before Google’s Social Graph API closed last month, I was able to gain access to a reasonable subset: 7,100,000 relationships across 1,500,000 sites (shown below). To be honest, it wasn’t what I was expecting.

The attach rate $latex \left(P\left(k\right) \sim{} k^{-\gamma}\right)$ is pretty close to what Barabasi, Albert, and Jeong found in Scale-free characteristics of random networks. $latex \gamma \sim{} 2.11$ across all, with $latex R^2 = 0.86$. $latex \gamma \sim{} 2.73$ for nodes with fewer than 101 attachments; $latex R^2 = 0.97$.

all nodes
nodes with 100 or fewer edges

Even though that was not much different, what clearly stood out was the sizable amount of neighborhoods. Continue reading “Anything But Random: 1,500,000 Blogs” →