I stumbled on a forecast released by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute on 12 technologies that will (might?) transform the world in the next decade in terms of impact on life and economics and I would like to share it with you with some comments from my side.

The 12 technology areas identified by McKinsey’s Advanced Institute

- Mobile Internet is already a reality. What is happening is that in the developing world where no fixed lines are available in the mass market (and most likely will not be widespread and pervasive also in the next decade) the access to Internet will be wireless, hence mobile. What I see, however, is the growth of a “mobile culture” in the sense that everybody will get used to be part of the Internet, will consider Internet (its information, services, links) as an integral part of their life. We will likely forget that we used to have manuals, and we will probably forget that we used to learn dates, how to do, and so on. Quite seamlessly we will just get what we need when we need it. Planning will be a thing of the past, in many areas of the everyday life.

- Automation of knowledge work is something that has been taking place in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution. The point is that we are shifting the meaning of “knowledge” (and intelligence). Centuries ago knowledge was about how to do things and it seemed at that time that a machine could not learn how to do thing, could only be a prosthetic augmenting the “mechanical” capability of a person, nothing more. Well it turned out that machines learned to do things and would increase their capabilities over time to the point of doing certain things better than an artisan, and for sure in larger volume at lower cost. We felt that playing chess was a matter of intelligence and that a machine would not be able to stand against a good player. We were proven wrong and we decided that actually playing chess is not based on “real” intelligence…. We have psychological problem in comparing ourself with machines because we are NOT machines.  Well, in the next decade the major shift in my mind will be the cultural acknowledgment that we ARE machines developed through eons of evolution. The outcome of the Human Brain project will be disruptive in this cultural sense, even more than in a technical sense (enabling new computational structures…). Hence the automation of knowledge work will just be another step in the increased sophistication of machines. What the futurist Thomas Frey  says “One common fallacy is that people are being replaced by machines. The reality is that machines don’t work without humans. A more accurate description is that a large number of people are being replaced by a smaller number of people using machines” does not resonate completely with me. My opinion is that this was true in the past, for the future I would say that the increased intelligence in machines will on the one hand replace people’s intelligence and on the other hand will challenge people to increase their intelligence, thus enabling new opportunities.

- Internet of Things is again already happening under our noses, although under the thresholds of our perception. More and more things are directly or indirectly connected to the Internet and the data generated are being used to create a larger map of connected objects that is virtualised on the Internet. This process will clearly continue in this and in the next decade and indeed I share the feeling that in the next decade we will have a mirroring of most of the objects made of atoms into objects made of bits and residing on the Internet. This mirroring is opening up a new dimension, the one of the Internet WITH things, IwT. We will be able to interact with both the objects made of atoms and the ones made of bits and the boundary of one vs the other will tend to fade away in our perception. Actually, most services will leverage the object made of bits because it is easier, and cheaper, to work on bits.

- Cloud technology is commoditising a good portion of IT and it will likely continue to do so in the rest of this decade. In the next decade what I see is that the pervasiveness of IT will create a global fabric where a significant portion of services and information will be spread out, thinly, at the edges, in objects and devices, in what is starting to be known as “the fog”.

I’ll continue to examine the remaining technology areas in the next posts.

The tiny KL02 microcontroller, made by Freescale, was created to enable swallowable wireless computers, and contains an energy efficient processor, memory, and RAM.
Credits: Technology Review

Freescale has announced the availability of a micro chip, basically a computer with integrated radio part for transmission that can be considered a midget cell phone. It is less than 2mm*2mm, as you can see in the photo on the left if you look close at the tiny bit on the top of a keyboard key.

It contains a processor, a storage and a wifi communication port plus a tiny battery that can be charged in different ways depending on the application.

You can get the details in an article on Technology Review.

Notice that Freescale is targeting this chip to the pharmaceutical market with the idea of inserting it in every pill that you swallow. So the header of this post is not just to catch your eye…

Indeed, in the near future we can expect to see more and more pervasive electronics embedded or pigging back on any object. The low power requirement of these micro chips (indeed it is correct to call them micro!) makes it possible to use scavenging as source of power.

There are a number of promising ways to scavenge ambient power, from using the HCl in our stomach for swallowed pills, to harvesting glucose energy for chips embedded under the skin to systems converting vibration or temperature differential for chips disseminated in the ambient.

Once the issue of powering is solved we will see plenty of electronics pervading our ambient, our body and becoming a seamless presence in our life…

The size of the bar is proportional to the processing capacity (Credit: http://www.thegenesisblock.com)

It used to be easy to compare processing capacity some 20 years ago. You took a chip and you looked at the clock. The fastest it was the more crunching capacity available. Then it came new flavour of chips, those processing at 16, 64 bits and of course even if the clock speed was the same a 16 bit would perform twice as much as an 8 bit but just one fourth of a 64 bit with an equivalent clock speed.

Then we had to consider the multi-core architecture. Microchips started to have several cores, and again two chips running at the same clock speed would have their processing capacity depending on the number of cores.
Chips got specialised too: RISC and ASIC could perform much better than normal chip, running a t the same clock speed, because they where using a special or reduced instruction set.

Parallelism percolated not just in the chip (multicore) but also in supercomputer leading to massive parallel architectures so that you needed to take into account the speed of the single chip (core) the number of chips and also the speed of the interconnecting matrix.

More specialised chips came to the fore, like the GPU, Graphic Processing Units, that were even faster, ant then bitcoin networks specialised in mining operation (not ore but data…).

Got the picture? No?  Well I am not surprised. It is complex and when you see comparison of processing performance today you are likely to see comparison of apples and oranges.

In the graphic on the left you see a comparison of different kinds of apples: the evolution of processing taking as a gauging stick the fastest supercomputer according to the Top 500 ranking, and you can notice a sort of Moore’s law at work there, since each faster computer performed at twice the speed of the previous one, if they were separated by 18 months time.

The Genesis Block now reports that the latest bitcoin network has achieved a speed of 1 EFLOPS, that is a speed that is 20 times faster than the combined speed of the Top 500 computers all together (the fastest one today, Titan, has a speed of 17.59 PFLOPS, over fifty times “slower” than the bicoin network). Be careful: we are comparing apples with oranges but nevertheless this points out that there can be “apples” and then there can be “oranges”, that is different ways of approaching processing leading to amazing speed.

Today a top of the line smart phone can do as much as 200 MFLOPS, that is 50 million times less than the fastest supercomputer (Titan). On the other hand, there are 5 billions cell phones and all together they have a bigger processing capacity than that supercomputer. Were they all smart phones they would also exceed the bitcoin capacity.

Clearly the 5 billion cell phones are spread everywhere but if you are considering the hundreds of thousands within a city boundary you can appreciate the kind of processing power potentially available. Notice that of these hundreds of thousands probably over 90% are sitting idle, hence they have a processing power just waiting to be harvested!

In the future, this is my bet, they will create a processing fabric that will be used by a variety of applications. Actually they will be much more! They will have a tremendous amount of storage capacity, PB of redundant data and, most important, they will create an amazing sensors network able to harvest a variety of ambient data with many more inferred from them. As a matter of fact they will become an aware fog whose “state” will change as result of a multitude of stimuli.

And, of course, cell phones in ten years time will be just a fraction of the overall processing power, since the IoT will outnumber them at least 100 to 1.

I had a talk with a journalist some days ago on the Internet of Things and then she followed up with a list of questions I just replied to few minutes ago. I’d like to share them with you and see if you would beg differently.

The BMW keys and cars communicate one another

The IoT is already here, just look at Cosm (https://cosm.com), or think about the car keys talking to the car systems (BMW cars use the car keys to store info on the car systems for maintenance purposes…). There are hundreds of other examples…

Sometimes it is not about technology, rather about how to use it.

RFIDs are, relatively speaking, a old hat in this rapidly changing technology world. We have see them being used in a variety of contexts and places, also in different shapes and with different hues of technology, although they are all microchips that can (usually) be powered by the same radio frequency of a reader in the vicinity that is demanding the data they contain.

Tiny RFID in shape of stickers that can be easily glued on any object

Now I run into this press release by the University of Adelaide, reporting on a project aiming at using RFID within a home to tag, basically, every single objects. A reader (a cell phone,as an example) is carried through the day by the elderly living in the home. As he moves around the reader picks up the identity of the various objects and this information is relayed to a computer that can monitor the whereabout of the person through the day. After a while, using artificial intelligence algorithms (and this is where the research is delivering its value), the computer learns the habits of the person and is ready to detect any variations in behaviour that may signal some problem. At this point the computer can send an alarm to whoever can be of assistance.

This very simple systems (RFID are very cheap and easy to deploy) together with the sophisticated AI algorithms can therefore become a smart watch dog providing the elderly with a trusty surveillance.

And here it is where the Intranet with Things emerges. It looks like an Internet of Things (IoT) since things are connected one another but as a matter of fact the information never gets out of the home, thus ensuring complete privacy. Only when a potentially anomalous situation is detected a signal is transmitted over the network.

Simple approach, indeed, with possibly sophisticated orchestration delivering a good service and stimulating new ideas …

First it was the Internet of Things, IoT, where Things can connect one another to exchange information, also known as Machine to Machine, M2M. Then Things are seen to become part of the internet on the same footing as Information and Services and People use Internet to dialogue with them, the Internet with Things, IwT, of whom I am a great supporter, since I feel that from a biz and social point of view the IwT are a game changer.

Now, Cisco is talking about the IoE, Internet of Everything, that to a good extent is pretty similar to the IwT but makes a step forward by taking an holistic vision where Internet is the ubiquitous fabric for our life and our world.

As objects become smarter, thanks to embedded electronics, communications capabilities and sensors, they become aware and change their behaviour according to the perceived context. Since we can be part of their context, our presence can change their behaviour.

The figure on the left, taken from the Cisco Blog where they are introducing the concept of the Internet of Everything, shows the links among people, things and data, all regulated, de facto, by processes (that is the way interaction happens).

Actually, in perspective, I would say that there will be little difference between “data” and “things”. At least, this is my vision.

What I see is a fuzzy boundary between atoms and bits. Sensors enable the transposition of atoms into a mirror image made of bits. Operations carried out at bit level are so much cheaper than the ones taking place at the atoms level, hence most services will take place at the bits level. Then, the services will have effect on the atoms, so the circle is completed.

In this view, data are representations, and they can represent atoms or “themselves”. The way of interaction is the same, and the computation that can tae place is the same. Besides, the now old concept of data encapsulation in a way transform a data (set) into an object that can have an independent existence and can be manipulated, aggregated with other objects but still maintains its own identity.

Connected things not necessarily need a Telco network…

Looks like there is quite a difference between the two numbers, to get a better idea would you like 20 euros or 1,000? Hence, it is difficult to understand how a company like Ericsson is forecasting 50 billion “things” connected to the Internet by 20120 whilst a company like HP puts the number in the trillions.

I was yesterday at the ETIS annual gathering where I gave a talk on IoT and before me there was a guy from Ericsson who made the 50 billion forecast. Nothing new, actually. It seems to be the magic number Ericsson is pushing on all tables.

Both Ericsson and HP are well known and respected companies, so why such a big discrepancy?

I think I spotted the problem, and it is an old one, going back at least to the 80s. It is rooted in the different perspectives of telecom vs computer industry.

On the one end the world seen by the telecom companies is the one at the termination points of their network, a network that is fully controlled by them and that can be shaped to their liking.

On the other hand the computer industry sees as its world whatever embeds a microchip, be it connected or not. And of course, these days those chips are more and ore connected, even though they may be connected through networks that are not telecommunications network. Well, these latter simply are invisible to telco’s guy, they do not exist. The problem is, of course, that by taking this approach you, as a Telco, are limiting the scope of your market and in a world where volume makes a difference you are undercutting yourself.

So let’s go back to numbers: is it 50 billion or 1 trillion?

Let’s do some simple math on the back of a handkerchief. Today there are 7 billion people on the Earth. By 2020 there will be a bit more. Already today each of us have several sensors in his context.The computer I am typing on has an accelerometer, a light detector, a multitouch, a temperature sensor, my cellphone has accelerometer, a compass, a touch screen, a temperature sensor, same goes for my iPod and iPad. All of them have virtual sensors, that is it is possible to know the location they are, how much memory, how much power is used, what type of interactions are taking place and so on.  Just looking at me, then, I count over 20 sensors. Multiply it by 7 billion and you get 140 billion “things”. Clearly other people may have 0 sensors (although there is close to 1 cell phone per person in the world and that alone would qualify for 35 billion sensors!).  Other people, on the contrary, may have a few more.

And of course I have sensors at home (several for the anti-intrusion system, temperature sensors, weight sensors, light sensors, I counted over 50 at home and it is likely I missed several more…). Then I have sensors in the car, over a hundred of them… And there are sensors in the building I live, on the roads, in the city….

50 billion means 7 sensors for each person on the Earth. Just with the quick calculation above it is easy to see that today we are already well over the 50 billion mark.

One trillion would mean less than 140 sensors pro capita. Not that much if you think about it! And I have not mentioned all the other things that can be connected (or just logically connected) to the Internet, like the ones having a tag. Any suits, t-shirt, towel in a shop is likely to have a tag that is intercepted and identified by the shop security system.

What will happen when all bar codes will become electronics? How many trillions of objects will be related to the Internet?

The crucial point is that you can look at IoT has things that have a SIM card (the Telco approach) or as things that have a mirroring element in the Internet (a number of bits attached to them). The latter is the computer world vision and it is in this latter vision that most of the biz opportunities lie.

When a video camera is connected to the Internet via a WiFi link Telcos add 1 to their IoT, but the computer world adds 1,000 since that camera brings in images of thousands of objects captured by its lenses and identified by image recognition applications.

Eventually both Ericsson and HP are wrong in their forecast, but HP has an head start placing it 20 times ahead of Telcos… And so do SAP, Oracle….

The Intel WiFi chip that can be embedded in a normal microprocessor chip

Intel has just unveiled a WiFi sliver of silicon, as reported by Technology Review,  that can be part of a normal microprocessor chip. As of today, WiFi chips were separate from the microprocessor because of specific needs of the radio part.

The radio chips usually are based on silicon containing gallium arsenide (whilst the ones used in photonics contain erbium). This made them different from the silicon being used for microchips and hence the need to have different chips for the different functions. Each has transistors but these transistors operate at different speeds.

In turns, this leads to boards that are not improving at the same pace as the single chip (the Moore’s law applies to the single chip only, not to the board).

Few years ago scientists demonstrated the possibility to create on the same silicon sliver both the radio and the photonics part along with the silicon used for the microprocessor. This, however, is the first time that someone (Intel) has come up with an industrial manufactured chip embedding radio on the microprocessor chip.

The implications are very interesting (and you can read them in the linked article on Technology Review). Basically the single chip will follow the Moore’s law, hence it will become cheaper, will consume less power and will increase its capabilities doubling every 18 months.

The side effect is that we can expect that wherever we find a microprocessor (e.g. in over 70% of toys, to name just one area) we will find embedded connectivity. The Internet of Things has just got a significant booster!

The development of ver very cheap electronics, made possible through a printing technology, is about to change bar codes into electronic tags. This is what Thinfilm has agreed to do signing a contract with Bemis to create intelligent packaging and the related platform. They expect to bring this technology to supermarkets and stores by 2014.

Thinfilm technology creates an electronic circuit, like the one used for RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification), simply printing it on a flexible material that can be sticked on any package, thus replacing a bar code.

The RFID tag can be read at a distance, since it communicate via radio. A cell phone can do that. The data contained in the tag can be as little as a simple code (a url) allowing an application to get more information about that product, or it can be a set of data (a few kBs). What is also interesting is that Thinfilm can produce a tag that has a much more complex circuit than the one used in an RFID tag. As an example it can contain sensor capability, to measure the temperature that package has been exposed to, and can store this information for subsequent control. It can also contain an active radio communications to send an alarm if the temperature approaches a critical level.

The shelves can provide the power support by generating an electromagnetic field that can be used to power the circuit and keep a small battery charged.

According to their press release:

“Intelligent packaging is an emerging technology with many potential intersections with Bemis’ flexible packaging and pressure sensitive materials business segments,” said Henry Theisen, Bemis Company President and Chief Executive Officer. “Our agreement with Thinfilm represents an investment in a technology that could eventually make printed electronics a component of every package we manufacture.”

Once you have this electronic circuits associated to each package in a supermarket you really start to have a huge amount of common “things” that can connect to the Internet. The strawberry package can embed a sensor to detect the excessive ripening and send an alarm to make sure that the package is moved to the front of the shelf (or thrown away if it is getting rot) and there you have the IoT, Internet of Things.

But that same package, connected to the web via the platform, can be used to deliver services, like recipes or information that can be cross checked with a particular customer to see whether those strawberry can create allergy problems. Welcome to the Internet with Things, IwT.

In the first case the relation is between the package and a system, a thing to thing communications, in the latter we have that the “thing”, the package, has become one of the element of the web and can be searched, polled, mashed up, associated to services to serve a person.

I am here today at the TTM, the Technology Time Machine, organized by the IEEE where I have been chairing a panel on the Future of Service.

We have seen quite a change in telecommunications services in the last 10 years. In the last century (but that is just 12 years ago!) telecommunications services were strongly coupled with the infrastructure. Then the shift of intelligence to the edges (smarter terminals) and the transparency of the infrastructure led to a decoupling of services from the network. All of a sudden services were no longer confined by the network reach but have become global. The decreasing cost of sending bits have made the origination point irrelevant. From Kolkata you can provide a service to Cape Town. The world shrunk and the service providers multiplied to reach hundreds of thousands. The explosion of Apps are an evidence of this, as the services provided by Indian companies like Reliance to manage a network in the US from Mumbai.

There is here a weak win-win situation: Operators have seen an explosion of traffic driven by the increased number of services and service providers have seen an increased demand for services. It is a weak win however. Operators have lost their monopoly on services, actually they lost the service offering; the service providers are so many that only a few make significant money, most of them are barely cutting even and many are offering services without expecting revenues, further depressing the overall market.

The customer is a winner: there are so many cheap/free services to choose from. The reality is that of the 200 apps that might the present on a cell phone just a very few are actually used.

There is also a lose-lose situation: Operators have seen their cost for network upgrading increasing with uncertain revenues and service providers have a hard time to develop a money making service proposition, given the jungle and abundance of services.

Customers, as well, may be losing some of the quality they were used to. On the average, today’s customers have lowered their Quality Expectation and this makes, once again, a difficult selling proposition pricing for quality. Clearly some customers are willing to pay for guaranteed quality but they are just a minority. Besides, such a guarantee is getting more and more difficult to provide, given the spanning of a services over many networks a single Operator cannot control and involving resources that are not part, nor controlled by the network.

What can we expect in this decade and beyond? A crank back is unlikely. We are going to have even more networks in the future, each one controlled by a different party and actually so many of them, and sometimes so fleeting, that the establishment of old time inter-Operator agreements is not an option. We are going to see networks created by terminals, mesh networks, sensors networks, software defined networks, viral networks, bio-networks. You embed a chip, or even program a bacteria (we are in 2050) and you establish a communications through nearby bodies.

So many more networks on the horizon. So many that some radical change in management and communication paradigm is needed. My opinion is that such a change will derive not from planning and deployment, rather it will happen as an emergent property of the whole. Autonomic systems will dominate the landscape. The very concept of network is going to fade away, substituted by the concept of communication fabric.
Services will keep increasing in number but given the hundreds thousands we already have, does any increase make a difference? Am I going to feel it? Unlikely. But if I, and you, are not going to feel it it is even more unlikely that we are going to pay for them.

And still, they will keep growing. Hence, new biz models, new sustainability ways have to be found. As communications, sustainability is likely to become embedded in objects and in environments.

The same, I bet, will happen to services. That is the only way for accessing them. You cannot access a service you don’t know is there and with millions of them you will be unaware of most. But you, and I, will keep accessing objects around us, will keep living in our environment and interact with it. This interaction, more and more, will be service mediated. This is what the Internet of Things and WITH Things are all about. And this, to me, is the future.