IoT fragmentation as a business model

Recently, Machina Research brings news that competition in the IoT market leads to waste for those funding IoT development. It's dangerous to frame competition vaguely as waste instead of incentive. IoT companies want that funding and will develop rapidly to gain it. From the article:

The world of IoT is currently characterized by competing technologies and platforms, further complicated by numerous standards development organizations, and this fragmentation is causing a delay in the widespread adoption of IoT.... We can’t hope to realize any smart city ambitions until all stakeholders can agree on a common set of IoT standards.

In terms of IoT security, I definitely agree with standardization. However, when considering IoT adoption and deployment, there are a few problems with trying to standardize now — the field is still too new:

  1. Standardization would hinder development at this point in the field. IoT is still a new and exciting space. Diverting effort away from development and towards standardization would negatively impact the young industry.
  2. Industry standards best come from industry experts. Most people would probably agree the USB connector is a great standard and has made connecting things easier than it was years prior. This is because it was designed by a group of industry experts from seven different companies in a mature space who needed a common solution.
  3. Opportunity and competition to become an expert drives the IoT industry at this point. The incentive and freedom to become an industry leader will have a greater impact on long-term IoT adoption and deployment. At this time, we’re all benefiting from IoT companies having the freedom to develop.

Your favorite technology/product/service was the result of a companies competing for your business. IoT is no different.

IoT, can you hear me now?

Readwrite brings recent news of Sigfox and its plans to provide a low-power, low-bandwidth IoT networking solution built on top of cellar networks. Integrating within an existing infrastructure is a smart move, and funding from some big players definitely helps; from the article:

Sigfox’s network does not require lots of investment to scale.... Samsung, Telefonica, and Intel have invested $150 million into the company...which should give them enough to heavily expand into new countries.

As IoT starts to pick up the pace, Sigfox believes it will see an increase in sales.

Sigfox’s business model appears to target enterprise and industrial users, you won’t use their service to live stream an event, or upload photos. Some stats from their dev page:

  • Up to 12 bytes per message
  • Up to 140 messages per day
  • Six messages per hour

The +/- on this service will likely mirror cellular providers — on the one hand, it’s fantastic to have an option to connect hardware on a world scale; on the other, probably everyone has had at least one negative experience with a cellular provider’s service or contract terms.

This blog tends to focus on developments in data and security, but with the low-bandwidth model of this service, I don’t anticipate a lot of potential to expose personal data. With any smart (exploitable) device on a network, it’s good to proceed after determining 1) the device will benefit from being connected and 2) losing network access to the device for any amount of time won’t be catastrophic.

IoT's affinity for open source software

I've been a fan of open source software (OSS) for some time now. But ask anyone who's worked with older systems in hardware, and they'll probably tell you the interface was written in proprietary software. My main complaint with proprietary software -- and a common one, I'm sure -- is that it often feels uninspired and sometimes sluggish or dated. It's almost as if more effort is spent on marketing and licensing efforts. And that makes sense; if a customer has locked in a license, there's not a lot to incentivize a company to rapidly develop and release new software.

Not so with the case emerging with IoT, which is seeing an increasing number of OSS stacks, writes readwrite. Compared to proprietary software, OSS is more flexible in terms of end user control, and tend to offer more rapid updates, usually improves quality quickly. From the article:

[W]hile open source will remain a big deal to IoT developers even as the space commercializes, we’re likely to see it embraced more for its quality than for its ideology over time.

What's interesting is the analog between IoT hardware and software -- circuits and fixtures are prototyped from individual components the same way the code base is connected together from various OSS projects. In both cases, the result maximizes control and flexibility. Hopefully the OSS trend in IoT continues.

When IoT subscription service turns shady

The Internet of Things! It allows us to connect nearly every device in our lives in a meaningful and useful way, glean new insights from sensors, and utilize hardware as never before. What could go possibly wrong?

Today, Kit Walsh from the EFF provides that answer with a review of a disappointing update from Nest/Google. From the article:

"...[B]ricking the Hub sets a terrible precedent for a company with ambitions to sell self-driving cars, medical devices, and other high-end gadgets that may be essential to a person’s livelihood or physical safety."

This news is frustrating on many levels, but I will stay in my wheel house of hardware, data, and privacy.

  • Hardware: once you purchase a device, it's your's and you own it. End of story. With this decision, Nest/Google effectively went into the homes of every lifetime member and poured water on their laptop. Sure, you could reclaim some parts, but your home isn't a chop shop and customers aren't scavengers.
  • Data: certainly the people who purchased a Hub are interested in their data, but after the shutdown date, the data will be deleted.
  • Privacy: getting back to the laptop analogy -- borrowing from Newton, every possession in your home remains in a state unless acted on by an outside force. Most customers probably wouldn't be happy about Nest/Google entering their homes.

So what recourse to consumers have in the emerging field of IoT? In general, you can count on me to be against compelling an entity to "do the right thing" through regulation or similar means. But  how can we react against behemoths like Alphabet at al when they make decisions against the interests of **paying** customer base? Again from the article:

"But there's another way to push back against untrustworthy devices, and that's refusing to buy electronics and software that prioritize the manufacturer's wishes above your own."

In the Internet of Things, who really owns hardware after purchased? Without a doubt, the customer. However, stripping people of their right to use their property as they choose and denying access to their data shows people in this case don't actually own said hardware and data -- they've subscribed to it! While subscription works fantastically well in some cases (Netflix, Spotify, etc), it's counter-intuitive and wrong for this use case in IoT. Something to keep in mind the next time you're building out your smart-home.