Your Financial Future and IoT

The Financial Services industry will not be immune to the transformative changes of IoT. In the past, we have briefly mentioned that the Insurance industry will be affected by IoT and the use of Telematics. Telematics refers to the wireless devices and technologies that transmit data in real time back to the company, usually in the context of automobiles.

As my colleague Mike mentioned in his previous post "Talking Cars, Talking About You", cars will soon enough start transmitting back your driving pattern and behaviors back to external parties - including your insurance company. For example, Toyota has recently released a range of safety technologies that allows the car to transmit data back to sensors and other cars on the road that could alert drivers when there is an accident or traffic jam. By reducing accidents and having more information available, insurance companies will presumably pass on the savings to the better drivers and thus put more money in their wallet.

Banking is one area that coupled with IoT will excite the majority of us. Imagine a world where as soon you step up to your Bank's ATM, the sensors installed on the ATM starts to recognize your identity by communicating with your phone. The ATM will then take a picture of you and runs a biometric scan to confirm your true identity. After this is completed, the ATM will greet you by your first name and ask what would you like to do today. No more plastic cards to take in your wallet. Now that is what I call convenient.

The commercial real estate industry will also be affected in a positive way. With multiple sensors installed in a commercial building, a landlord or management company is able to better manage energy usage and security. We have already starting to see buildings with motion sensors that detect when a person walks in the room, adjusts lighting, and regulates the temperature. This data is also helpful because it detects the flow of people within the building and allows the company to improve productivity by moving teams that work together more closely to certain areas on the floor.

Shopping mall operators have also been experimenting with IoT devices - sensors that detect smartphone activity through WiFi - that allows them to track and analyze foot flow traffic within the stores and shed more light on spending habits. By analyzing the foot flow traffic on its properties, the operators can recommend ways to increase the attractiveness of stores and thus receive higher rental income. Now there is always the question of whether stores are invading their customer's privacy, but that is a topic for another day.

Make sure to leave your comments if you found this post interesting. Thank you!

Beacon technology – improving airport customer experience

The customer service experience went through a fundamental change thanks to Beacon technology. The beacon devices are an indoor proximity system which transmit a signal using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). When a BLE-enabled device, for example a smartphone, moves in the range of the beacon’s signal it can trigger an action, such as displaying a relevant message on the phone (promotional coupons when one enters a specific zone like stores or airport lounges), directing people to an area of interest in a city or musem, or even providing more information on specific items (a painting in a museum).

While the beacons bring benefits in many areas, we will focus now on the improvements in airport customer experience, an area where a lot of progress has been done, but a lot of further investment is needed to discover and take full advantage of this technology.

Some airline companies and airports, like KLM in Schiphol, United in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Denver etc, Virgin in Heathrow etc are already using beacons and see the benefits and the future potential of the technology, such as:

1) Passenger location – if a passenger is late for a flight, he can be tracked in the airport by getting the information from the nearest beacon.

2) Triggering mobile boarding passes – beacons can be placed at check-in, baggage drop off, passport control or boarding gates and can be used to pull mobile boarding passes on the display on a passenger’s smartphone

3) Getting around the airport – when it comes to big airports, it is very difficult to find your way in them. Moreover, if a passenger is late for a flight or has a very short connecting flight, the situation becomes even more critical. Beacons could provide a more precise and lower cost way for airport apps to guide passengers around the terminal and find the correct gate

4) Baggage reclaim – a beacon could give the passengers all the information regarding their baggage, like what belt they will arrive and how much they need to wait for it.

5) Promotions at airport stores – beacon can send messages telling passengers to redeem coupons, earn points or pick-up duty free items before going to the gate

If there was any doubt about whether beacons have a long-term future, the launch of Google’s Eddystone and the widespread support for the technology, plus excitement about the potential it offers, is evidence enough that beacons are here to stay.

The full potential of beacons, and the impact they can have on day-to-day operations and the passenger experience, is yet to be realised, but one thing seems certain: airlines and airports should be building beacons into their strategies now to ensure they are well placed to exploit a multitude of benefits.

The Evolution of Sport

Even the best fail - continuous failure and learning from that failure is the path to success. Perhaps one of the greatest basketball players of all time, has also "missed" shots. Well at that time there wasn't enough technology to help him, now there is... 

Introducing 94Fifty - The only Smart Basketball for iOS and Android to improve shooting and ball handing skills - fast. It tracks the makes and misses, learns and adapts to any player's skill level. 

This technology is now being used to test the real skill of professional basketball players such as Skylar Diggins 

It is also being used to improve the skills of everyday players so that they too have a chance to become a professional

The evolution in sport is here - applications of the Internet of Things go far and wide. With millions of people participating and viewing sports around the world; the future of sport as we know it is on the edge of a revolution.

The Future of Sex

A few months back, I was sitting in a bar with some friends from my MBA and the topic of the future of sex was discussed. A few beers later we had come to discover a great business idea: an internet connected device that you and your partner connect to, and gives the participants the exact sensations they are having sex with the person on the other end.

The thought process would be that this idea would be great for long distant couples, and ultimately a business opportunity that would allow consumers to have 'sex' (virtually) with their favourite porn stars. We considered that the primary difficulty with this concept would not be the social stigma attached to using such a device, but the lack of technology to make the concept a reality.


Enter Durex, one the worlds largest condom manufacturers.

Durex appear to have read our minds, as they have developed a concept called "durexlabs", which is an technology division of Durex, that seeks to improve the sex life of its customers through modern technology. I'll let you have a look through the durexlabs site and form your own opinion as to whether this technological advancement is a good thing or a bad thing.

But, what I will draw your attention to is Durex's new concept which is very similar to the idea my friends and I discussed a few months back; "Fundaware"(see explanatory video below). Yes, this is only an experiment, but is it a sign of the future of sex?

For those who really care about their pets

Every owner would like to care after his/her beloved dog or cat all day and every pet likes to be cared as so. Unfortunately, work, school and groceries shopping do exist. Many people think that animals don’t feel bored and actually can entertain themselves when they are alone in the house. 
So, yes, the Internet of Things can greatly improve our and their life. Don’t make them feel alone!

Sadly, as you can see from this video, reality is different:

So, how can IoT help us to take care and improve life of our beloved friends?

And if you are, as you should be, terrified of losing your best friend, now with Whistle you can not only track where it is using GPS, but also check the amount of physical activity enjoyed during the day. Wait, are we forgetting about the most important thing? Maybe for us it’s not, but F-O-O-D is what they think and dream of constantly.

Let’s meet PetCube: it’s a moving camera that lets the owner check what’s happening, speak with the pet and play with it using a laser that pets looooove to chase!

Also, it’s very important to give them the possibility of taking a walk and satisfy some physiological needs without compromising safety and security.

Thanks to SureFlap, your pet can go out in the garden (or terrace) and come back whenever it wants by reading the vet's chip, while at the same time preventing unwanted guests to enter and closing the door at night, as mom does for the kids.

Remember: exercise is very important to keep dogs healthy, as in humans!

With the french-sounding “Bistro” now not only you can feed pets remotely, but thanks to the integrated scale you can prevent them from over-eating!

IOT Talk with Spain's Innovation Expert- Enrique Dans

Last week, we got the chance to talk to Enrique Dans a professor from IE Business School, who has the most viewed technology blog in Spain. Dans is one of the most interesting people to talk about innovation with, and we wanted to get more details about what he thinks about IOT and the future.

According to Dans, IOT is currently at its earlier stages. The majority of people are currently using it mostly as a hobby or for basic conveniences. IOT is all over the place, we are seeing many applications here and there, as Dans called them “all these crazy little devices that you can put all over the place, and then we will start to realize that we can connect everything and manage it in such a strategy that is convenient”.  I agree 100 % with Dans. Right now these devices help to make our life simpler in one way or another. Some examples have been mention previously by some of my colleagues and a great example is this previous post.

In my opinion, IOT is a little scarier as the devices will have too much information about our life, personal data will be recorded, unfortunately easily hack-able or available for someone to take advantage of. A perfect example of this is Dans idea about the future of insurance with IOT which he mentions on this article. The internet knows already how much you sleep, how much exercise you do, and many other personal factors of your life that were unavailable before. To me this is very scary. But Dans is not a person that easily gets scared, and he is intrigued to know what will we do with all the information that is going to be generated through IOT. He definitely believes that IOT is the future and it has huge potential.

As IOT evolves as an industry, it will start to get some heavy weights involved and fighting over whose platform and data aggregator is adapted, or who becomes the most used “hub”. All the main players have started to move in that direction. Amazon with its web service, Google and its new router, and Apple with Homekit. Dans also mentions Facebook as an up and coming new player in IOT. Other possible players are traditional telecom companies. They all have different strategies, and it is going to be interesting to watch which approach will win in the foreseeable future.

To conclude IOT is definitely the future, and we will continue to see many companies trying to come up with more technologies and gadgets to make our life simpler. It will be interesting to see who the main players are going to be, and how IOT becomes more engrained in our lives.

IoT Today: 3 Things You Should Know

Scouring the web for inspiration on my next blog post, I came across 3 different but interesting articles related to the Internet of Things.

These articles remind us that, even though a portion of us might think that our 'internet connected' world is still far away into the future, IoT is here - now. And perhaps most importantly, we should now start to consider how this technology will continue to shape the way we live.

The first article is from FastCompany and discusses how IoT will change our workplace, from optimizing our workspace to gathering/analyzing various amounts of data on the fly. One of the challenges, as the article correctly points out, is how do businesses connect their equipment/facilities to the internet without losing the human interaction. The robots are coming...

The next article on Furtune is about a new start-up called Helium who boldly claims it wants to be the Android of the Internet of Things. The company has launched a smart sensor platform for IoT targeting the healthcare, food, and beverage industries. The platform will allow companies to monitor sensors for industrial applications, use the cloud to store the data generated by the sensors, and ultimately make sense of all the data.

Finally, I found this story on Nextgov, which is probably the most fascinating out of the three (at least to me!) as it talks about what the U.S. government is doing to protect the various Internet of Things of being exploited by criminals and hackers. The Wired article referenced in the Nextgov article is just one of the reasons why this is an important topic and why you should be especially concerned if you own a Jeep as seen in the video below.

Be sure to leave your comments if you find these articles interesting. Until next time!

Use your heart to simplify your life

The last IoT device from this series, after Kapture and Inteliscope, is the Nymi Band, a wristband that uses your unique cardiac rhythm to authenticate your identity, allowing you to wirelessly take control of computers or smartphones, open doors (car, house, hotel etc), check into flights, pay and so much more. No more credit cards, no more keys, no more remembering long passwords or going through all the trouble of checking in-  Nymi and your heart will do that for you! 100% secure!

Be a real shooter

We continue the presentation of cool IoT devices started yesterday with Kapture with Inteliscope, the device which  transforms every amateur shooter into a professional one. Used for hunting, in the army or for paintball or airsoft, Inteliscope uses your smartphone to zoom in up to 5X on the target, record a shooting and share it with your friends. See the presentation video below for more information and stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on another must have IoT device.

Get back the last 60 seconds of your life!

Check out  Kapture, the device which will save the last 60 seconds of your life just by a simple tap, after the conversation actually passed. You can then listen to the recording on your smartphone and trim it, name it, share it and tag it.  And if you are a fashion lover, like the ones described in our previous posts, there’s no need to worry: it comes in different colors so you will never be in the radar of fashion police.

Your Experience - Enhanced

The Internet of Things has effected and will continue to effect many facets of life. My colleagues have mentioned several including sleep, food, and fashion to name a few - yet it is this holistic experience of the Internet of Things in it's entirety that has the power to transform our experience of the world altogether.

The applications can be found in several industries, but the one's I find most interesting are the applications within the entertainment industry. For example, attendees at a concert might be able to pre-order pictures of the show, or of themselves in their seats, from cameras in the arena. Live video of fashion runways from the model's point of view could be streamed to smartphones. Mixing customer data with information available to event organizers could also be applied in highly practical ways, such as alerting concert goers to the nearest fast food stand or the bathroom with the shortest ques. The applications are endless, and done so that no one ever attending a concert feels like this anymore...

One example of this type of technology is in boxing. Many people saw the Floyd "Money" Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao fight. Until the last minute it was unclear who won. Debates raged on after the match as well. How many punches did Mayweather actually land? How hard were they? Was the matched fixed from the beginning? Imagine the entertainment experience uptick if the data below were available for viewers and boxers... No more uncertainty, one clear decisive outcome, may the best man win..

So we know that there is great potential for the Internet of Things to be better embedded into the entertainment experience. Which area of entertainment would you like to see the Internet of Things having the biggest impact? Give us your thoughts by clicking here.

Internet Connected Hangover

Who amongst us has not gone a little hard at a party, had a few too many drinks and passed out?

Even if your friends aren't as creative as the guy's above (or you've been partying alone), and, after passing out, you don't wake up covered in marker, or missing eyebrows, the hangover alone will ruin your day.

What are we going to do about it? Stop drinking all together? NO!!!!!

Thankfully, MIT Media Lab have come to our rescue. An MIT student, Dhairya Dand - having gone WAY too hard on a night out and woken up in hospital - has developed internet connected ice cubes that flash red when you've had too much to drink. This invention is surely going to save lives.

This blog has previously discussed on how we are now connected to the internet in the fields of fashion, sleep, driving, food and sex. They all make rational sense. But now edible internet?

Go home internet connected things, you're drunk.

The kitchen of the future. Available today.

Nowadays everything is getting connected. Even ice cubes, condoms and diapers.

But what about the kitchen? We all know that old grandma recipes are the best and everybody claims to be good at executing them. But I’m sure that a little geeky help to improve the outcomes and save time would be welcome, right?
Let’s cook a special dinner the IoT way.

Ingredients first.
How beautiful it is when you have bought everything for preparing lasagne except the most important one: lasagne.
With the Neo Smart Jar this will be just a nightmare of the past. Not only it keeps track of which and how much you have at home of each ingredient, but it also takes care a placing an order on Amazon Fresh for you.

Now, let’s add the tomato sauce. Wait, was it 100 or 200 grams? And that’s to me looks as too much oil…
Sounds familiar, right? Well, now you can forget about this hassle. Get yourself a Get Drop Scale.
Not only it will guide you step-by-step through the recipe, but will also detect errors.

Ok. I know. Real cooks don’t weight ingredients. But they do care a lot about pan temperature to get that nutty flavour. Should I remind you of that lousy, pale, steak you had at home yesterday?
Meet SmartyPan:

And if you prefer to have your T-bone BBQ style, iGrill will manage to get it to the point.

Perfect. We are now ready to eat our special meal. Take a fork, please. But not the century old piece of cutlery. The Hapi one. Not only it checks your calories intake, but also the way you eat, to help you stay fit.

Lastly, your old cookbook may also need a refresh. Let’s call IBM’s Watson for that.
Seriously. Never thought about a “Vietnamese apple kebab”? It did. And it has just published its first recipes collection.

Please, hurry up to try it. Because in the near future your fridge will probably decide that butter isn't welcome in this house.

Why does IoT matter to me?

We live in a incredibly connected world already so how does the Internet of Things continue to revolutionize the way humans interact with technology? The answer is very simple: it changes everything. Humans have fantasized for years about home automation and now the future is finally becoming a reality.

Big tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM to name a few, have invested truckloads of money to be able to deploy IoT technology to the consumer. For example, as my colleague Francesco mentioned in his post, Amazon's Dash service allows a user to re-order more detergent, soap, paper, etc with a press of a button which, sends the information directly to Amazon and the product will be delivered straight to your home. How many times have you had to run out of the house just to get essential supplies that you forgot to buy? Exactly. Well just imagine a world where you never run out of toilet paper or run out of milk for your favorite cereal.

 

So what's exciting to me about IoT? Only the best thing in the world: Sleep. Did you know that humans spend about a third of their life sleeping, that's almost 25 years under the sheets! Fact.

Unfortunately, at this time, there aren't many companies competing in this important segment. The most promising product out there is Luna which wants to turn any bed into a smart bed. Imagine a bed that you can control the temperature with your smartphone and can communicate with your smart thermostat - Nest - what temperature to set when you're sleeping to ensure maximum sleep time. I'm already excited!

So what does the future hold for a comfortable sleep? In the not too distant future, there will be a single bedding ecosystem that records your sleep patterns, monitors heart rate, sets the thermostat ideal for sleep, locks your door, and wakes you up automatically to your favorite song. Then you have the pillows and sheets. These are not smart at all although there was a company who promised to have sheets that snap together with the duvet cover which would at least eliminate the need to make your bed everyday. 

And if you are badly missing your significant other for bedtime, there is even a product for that! It's called Pillow Talk and it was designed so you can feel (through a heartbeat sound or soft glow) that your long distance partner is sleeping next to you. However, there is one slight disadvantage to this product - you might creep out your friends..

Here's to a good sleep!

What Should I Wear Today?

For women “What to wear” can be the toughest question of the day, or the night before…. And lets be honest… sometimes you just want to repeat the same outfit that you wore before because nobody saw you. It was 20 years ago that the movie Clueless showed us this amazing software that helped you decided what clothes you should wear today.

Today, you can find apps that can help you with the process (but still not as cool as the one for clueless)

ClosetSpace

One of the cool features of this app is that it provides you with outfits according to the weather

It also links with your Google Calendar, so that you can know what you wore on a specific day. One of the selling points of this app is the discounts offered by ClosetSpace’s partners which include: Glam Squad and Rachel Zoe’s mobile Covet Fashion.

My Dressing

At the beginning it might take time to capture a picture of all your clothes, but once you do, this app allows you to combine and organize your own clothes into collections.

There are more similar apps out there that can guide you and make this process simpler, can help you to stay on style, and more importantly let you share your outfits because now days its all about sharing in social media.

But I can stop thinking about Cher’s Closet…..

 I was looking to see if maybe there were projects related to the internet of things because we now value our time more and finding what to wear can be a time consuming decision, and I will just love to have a program that could recommend me what to wear today according to today’s weather, event type, and more

Connected Closet

This closet is connected to the weather, and as soon as you open it the hangers that contain clothes that you can wear according to the weather will light up. Then you will make your first selection, and only the items that can match your outfit will stay light up. This takes in consideration that your hanger knows exactly what article of clothes are in it. So now we are talking… This is definitely closer it to the Cher’s Closet that I have been wanting for 20 years.

PHILIPS IntelligentWardrobe

Even though it is just a patent, this patent will make our everyday life choices easier. This intelligent wardrobe management system will show the user the options that they have for that day. Another feature of this closet is that you can record the meeting or occasion that you will be wearing this outfit to, and record who has attended the event, and this intelligent wardrobe management system will make sure that you do not repeat the same outfit.

Hopefully... We don't have to wait more years to be able to get Cher's Closet