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.

Have ou ever used your index finger to point at something and asked: What’s that?

Well, this is what has probably motivated a group of MIT researchers to use an (augmented) index finger to get information about the world around us.

As you can see in the photo on the left, they have developed a sort of ring to wear on your index finger. You point your finger at an object and the camera embedded in the ring transmit the image to a smartphone in you pocket where it gets identified. Through an Internet connection you can get information associated to that object, possibly contextualised to your experience.

It is really moving in the direction of the Internet WITH Things, where every object will become part of the Internet and we will be able to interact with each of them.

Clearly, this gadget looks cumbersome, although it was impossible to imagine just 20 years ago that one would be able to have a videocamera and a radio transmitter embedded in a ring, but we know that in a few years it will shrink to become almost invisible. And, besides, we will be wearing Google Goggles in two years time, probably supporting this same feature through a compass and an accelerometer embedded…

Graphic image used in the Technology Review article

This is what a Technology Review article is reporting! After several years of progress in both devices and software, several attempts in marketing applications we are now seeing a number of practical applications targeting the mass  market.

Augmented reality started several years ago, over 15 years ago to be exact, as a way to help professionals in tough situations, be that an airplane engine repair in some remote location with AR providing assistance to the local engineer, or as an help to a surgeon during surgery. In 2009 the first mass market apps (Yelp, Layar…) to float information on the images captured by a smartphone camera. Interesting the one that allowed you to translate road signs on the move just by pointing your phone camera to the sentence (Word Lens).

More recently, thanks to more powerful smart phones and to better wireless connectivity, apps have begun to exploit image recognition capabilities and also to share information with other phones. Crowd Optics, as an example, has shown a way to look with your cell phone at a distant part of a NASCAR racing circuit to get photos taken by people in that part of the circuit, like having a personal cameraman at your fingertips to bring in images of those parts of the circuit you cannot see from your location.

This and other examples are provided in the linked article on Technology Review.

What I like to point out, though, is that all these steps improving augmented reality through a cell phones are but the beginning of the Internet WITH Things!

We will get used to expect that any “thing” around us is loaded with information and services, and that we can get at those just by pointing our smart phones to it. And, of course, this is just the beginning. Other ways to support interaction will be wearing glasses that embeds video display capabilities (Google glasses?) and screens embedded in the Thing itself.

More down the lane we (you) might have a chip embedded in the retina… a bit scaring though.

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.

Let me share with you a contribution I have been asked from COMSOC on IoT and IwT…

It is happening. More and more objects (mostly sensors so far) are connected to Internet. Take a look at Pachube, as an example (https://cosm.com/?pachube_redirect=true). They started just 5 years ago with the idea of providing a place where people can send information generated by their sensors and share information. Now they have hundreds of thousands of feed. I have no connection, nor interest in Pachube, but I take them as an example of what is happening:

1. ever more objects are connected to the Internet
2. it is getting easier to do this
3. there is a growing interest in sharing data
4. start ups are at work to figure out how to leverage from this new phenomenon.

Now, lets go step by step.

STEP 1

Why is this happening? Easy, because it can!

Electronics is cheap, and getting cheaper by the day. Hence you can have embedded electronics in many objects. It is also much less power hungry so that you can power it by scavenging stray energy in the environment. No connection to the mains needed (nor expensive battery to change after a few days or months…).

Electronics and software makes object aware of their environment. They can sense a variety of characteristics around them and convert these into data. Welcome to the growing world of sensors, a world that HP estimate to reach hundreds of billions by the end of this decade (CISCO has a lower forecast but still in the number of many many billions…).

Communications is getting more and more pervasive. You don’t need to look for a gateway to connect to the Internet. The environment is, more and more, the connection gateway. The advent of LTE, or 4G, is a further step in this direction: it has larger capacity (not really needed for most “Things” on Internet, but useful when you have a growing demand from -paying- human beings and you do not want to cut your revenues by letting other stuff to chew into your capacity) and moreover it has the capability to provide a native IP connectivity. Now, this is crucial, since it makes possible to connect a “thing” with a chip costing 50c, rather than, as is the case today with 2 and 3G, with a stripped down cell phone that is still costing 20+ dollars.

COMSOC is active in all these “enabling” technologies, from radio to networks and protocols. It is also active in the sensor area as well as in application areas (including Health, possibly a driving business for IoT).

STEP 2

Is it business as usual? NO, it is not!

Our telecommunications network were designed for symmetric traffic at 64kbps with individual transaction lasting about 3 minutes. A nice gaussian shape. Internet has changed that. No more symmetric but asymmetric flows (the A in ADSL…) and no more 3 minutes average transaction but longer and bigger capacity eater (video is now the dominant traffic on Internet).

From the gaussian of POTS to the S shape of Internet today to the inverted gaussian of tomorrow...

Our (telecommunications) network has evolved to managed this, we have developed CDN (Content Delivery Networks), the architecture has changed to manage head ends and to shadow/mirror content around the network in a distributed fashion (by the way transforming our hierarchical network into a massively distributed and interconnected data bases).

And now, its change all over again. That gaussian curve that changed its shape to become an S curve with the Internet of Video, now changes its shape again to become an inverted gaussian with its lowest point representing voice-human- communications. On the right the curve grows pushed up by video consumption (and generation – more symmetry than before…) and on the left grows pushed by the billions of tiny transactions generated by the IoT. As the curve changes, new architectures are required and, most important, new biz models are needed and they in turns are being “invented” by new players.

And COMSOC, again, is on target, looking at the future of internet, at future network architectures.

STEP 3

Is IoT the next Big Thing? NO, but is is an enabler!

IoT is using a limited traffic capacity and it is not going to generate tremendous revenues to Operators in terms of traffic sale. Actually, the growing computation power in objects has already shifted most services outside of the network (owned by the classic Operators), so in a way it is decreasing their revenues. New biz models to leverage the value of sensors have not proved successful, so far at least from the point of view of the Operators.

However, the IoT are a piece in a puzzle of the connected world and mashed bits and atoms. This is what I call the Internet WITH Things (IwT).

Imagine a world where everything you see and touch is wrapped in bits and services, through a seamless connectivity and personalization of the interaction. If you pick up a bottle of wine or look at a monument you will be involved in a multimedia perception customized to you and your context. Who can provide this customization? Surely an Operator. It is a world that have to be seamless and simple, and it is going to be a very complex world in terms of interacting technologies. Because of this gap between the complex reality and the need for seamless, simple perception there is a need for management and that is an area where Operators can have their say. It is not going to be easy, there will be many, qualified, competitors for what is to become the new communication market and fabric, but it is a market where Operators can play.

COMSOC is now at the edges of this new marketplace. It probably needs to partner with the Computer Society and with the Consumer Electronics area,…. and with several others. And it is a game where COMSOC can be a big player.

By 2050 the Digital World will be as real and as important as the physical world.

Manufacturers will create for any of their product a mirror image of it that will be present in the digital space. This digital copy will be instantiated and associated to the actual buyer of the product (and to the user). This will create a market space for third parties to generate services and adds on to the product.

The digital instance will keep growing and transforming as time goes by, reflecting its use, its transformations and the interaction with the ambient. Along with that a web of relations is formed connecting whoever and what ever use or has exposure with the product.

In this digital space there will be basically no difference between objects, information, services and people. Each of this is a digital set that keeps transforming reflecting the transformation in the physical world. Each object (person, service, information…) will therefore have an associated digital shadow that in many cases can be used to “patch” the physical object.

Additionally, the digital existence can be mashed on the physical existence so that a physical object can be perceived as a single whole composed by its atoms and the overlaid bits. The key to the success is twofold:

- it should provide a seamless experience where actually bits and atoms are smoothly intertwined

- there is the possibility to select (again seamlessly) the amount of overlay (if any) desired.

Clearly,  today objects communicate one another if they have been designed to do so. In 50 years time you won’t find an object that has not been designed with embedded communications (and we will have machine that will be autonomously designing objects and embedded communications will be a standard building block).

Communications will mostly be local, it will provide awareness to each object and collectively it will provide awareness to the ambient. This changes the rule of the game. What if the car stops or refuse to speed up because it is aware of road condition? Am I going to be sidelined by objects? Or, on the contrary, will my dominance on the world block these evolutions because they would dim my pride?

In the drawing we can see two examples. The cars talking one another to make driving safer (but actually you won’t need to drive anymore, since cars will be a personal-public transportation system as they already are in Masdar, UAE) and also wiser in terms of energy. The other example is a pair of slippers/shoes equipped with sensors, able to talk to monitoring systems to provide information on the gait. This, in turns, allows detection of incipient forms of stroke and leads to prompt intervention even before the person feels something might be wrong. It would be yet another way of being “controlled”. Are we going to accept it just to play it safe or the invasion of privacy would oppose its adoption? What about health insurance companies? Will they decline to pay medication cost unless you are connected to health monitoring systems able to decrease the probability of costly intervention?

Object to object communications will open up a Pandora of new life paradigms and will create a host of new issues for politician and social science players to consider. As shown in the two examples there are potential big benefits but at the same time we might feel ever more controlled. As in the previous post the forecast of becoming a symbioses with machine is scaring the wits of many of us. Even though I am talking now of objects to objects communications there is always us living along with objects. So far the ambient has been inert but what will happen once it becomes active with a “mind” of its own?

I don’t know about you but I wasn’t particularly good. Being able to “do it” was plenty of satisfaction and I never tried to beat the clock. I remember there were championship were the goal was beating the clock, solving it was a given. And I remember being impressed by watching these guys solving the puzzle in less than a minute.

But now I saw this:

Cubestormer II is the name of the robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in less than 6 seconds. And what is amazing as well is that it is not a rocket science robot. Its “brain” is a Samsung Galaxy cell phone, its bones and muscles are Lego Mindstorm. You can get both at your department store for a few hundred bucks.

The robot uses the cell phone both to inspect the cube faces through the cell phone camera and to compute the moves required to fix it. Then it sends the commands to the Mindstorm for execution. Looking at the faces, calculating the strategy and implementing it requires slightly more than 5 seconds. The best human can do that in half a second more, but that does not include the time he needs to look at the faces and work out a strategy, it is just the pure rotational activity.

This news picked my interest at two levels.

First, it is just amazing to see what a combination of a cell phone with a toy can do. Just 5 years ago the cost for doing this kind of thing would have required some hundred thousands of dollars.

Second, we can easily imagine what this kind of evolution will bring: through a cell phone we will be able to connect the physical world with the Web and rely on sophisticated services to interpret atoms and provide services to act on them. Welcome to the Internet With Things!

Platforms like Layar are paving the way to the Internet with Things

We have been using Internet to grab information and use services. As we said yesterday, a multitude of “things” are going to be connected to Internet talking one another and with service centres. Part of these things, however, will be interacting with us and conversely when we will look at one “thing” we will be able to interact with it or rather with its “bit” image, a mirror of that thing that lays somewhere seamlessly connoted to the actual thing via the network.

We will see in this decade a progressive construction of a sort of parallel world, a world made of bits, mirroring the real world and we will be able to move from one to the other in such a seamless way that this distinction will made very little sense since it will not be perceived.

Seeing a thing and looking at it through our cell phone, as an example, will enable the association of information that is both connected to the thing, to the context and to ourselves. And since the world of bits is a world where transaction cost are very low, in this world we will see a continuous development of services that will be seamlessly applied to the real world.

This is the Internet WITH Things, and it will change our perception of the world.

By 2020 we can expect to:

❏    Be possible to reach a wide variety of physical things via Internet and to use Internet to get services and information about physical things.

❏    Have many products design to offer APIs that will make it possible to connect information and services to them, through the network (interpreted in the broad sense defined in 4.3.3).

Whilst the Internet of Things (IoT) foresee billion of things potentially communicating with one another, the Internet with Things (IwT) foresee a growing number (in the hundreds of millions initially, to become hundreds of billion) of object that will become accessible to human beings through the Internet. The IwT shares several technologies and architectures  with the IoT although the “communications interface” should be adapted to meet human needs and the form factor of the object matters since the object is “visible” and its physical characteristics are a selling point, as important as its functionality. In the IoT the functionalities exposed are the ones designed by the producer of the “T”; in the IwT a significant number of functionalities will be mashed up by third parties.

In addition, the IoT will be produced by enterprises having a specific know how in telecommunications whilst the IwT will be produced by a variety (eventually all) of enterprises with very little specific telecommunications knowledge.

• With the IwT COMSOC expands significantly its potential audience, since it can involve engineers (and designers, marketers…) working in a variety of industries.