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!