The internet of stupid things is a more charitable phrase for what many consumers call the Internet of Shit. Yes lots of products can be internet enabled, but should they be? There is a mix of challenges that result in products which fall into the following two categories:
Products that are internet enabled but shouldn’t be – the Happy Fork or the Griffin Smart Toaster being classic examples. I found the Griffin Smart Toaster particularly disappointing as the company’s products such as the PowerMate are generally really good. It doesn’t take the greatest imagination to see how a smart toaster could even be hacked; causing a fire – hence the internet of stupid things. Why do household appliances really need to be attached to technology. Teasmades woke you up and made a mug of tea for you to have first thing. This was a product that reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s – well before cloud services.
Products that would be benefit from tech, but shouldn’t rely on the the cloud. I’d argue that Nest would fit in this category where cloud outages could have serious impacts on the consumer. American Nest customers have had some hard winter nights when their Nest control system went down due to cloud outages. There was no off-cloud or manual control mode that the Nest devices could take advantage of.
It is interesting to see that Li & Fung (who are famous for global supply chain management provided to western brands and retailers) are involved in this video. It is also interesting that they are taking such a proactive view on experience design education.
The qualitative design research Li & Fung did on skiing wearables for a client – made me wonder what value do Li & Fung’s clients bring to the table. More on design here.
The key themes for me from the 2017 internet trends report were:
Continued slowing in internet growth showing that the previous years decline in growth wasn’t a one off. In the 2017 internet trends report we also saw a decline in smartphone growth as well
All of these trends don’t apply with India where the market is still growing for internet access and smartphone growth. In India the 2017 internet trends isn’t ‘2017’ but 2010
Lean forward media is beloved of internet entrepreneurs. Interactive gaming is becoming mainstream around the world, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the largest market for gaming.
In the US at least wearables are becoming mainstreamed. 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Back when I was in Hong Kong, Chinese manufacturers were cranking out low cost health monitors to monitor your exercise activity
The Reflex remixes Gil Scott Heron. Nicolas was one of the few remixers who can make a production that’s better than the original.
Ultraman theme tune
Scatman Ultraman – Ultraman is a famous suited super hero. It is part of the Japanese TV and movie ‘special filming or tokusatsu genre. It is the grandfather of the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. One of Ultraman’s powers was the ability to grow really large, which spawned other giant hero or Kyodai Hero characters.
I started to think about the internet of heavier things after I spent a bit of time with my Dad. We talked about work, engineering stuff in general and technology in general.
My Dad has a pragmatic approach to technology, it’s ok so long as it fills three distinct criteria:
It’s useful
It’s efficient in what it does and how you use it
It doesn’t get in the way of product serviceability
The last point is probably something that we tend to think about least, but my Dad considers it as he is a time served mechanical fitter. Just prior to Christmas one of the gears went in my parents Singer sowing machine. The machine has been in the family for about 50 years. I managed to buy the relevant cog from a website for just under a tenner.
Contrast this with most electronic goods where you tend not to be able to replace products at a component level. Even if you did, trying to find 50 year old standard catalogue processors, let alone a custom ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) would be a thankless task.
We got to talking about a concept I read in EE Times earlier that month; the internet of heavier things (IoHT). IoHT basically means wiring up or making smart fixed infrastructure and machinery. Venture capital firm KPCB think that the IoHT will generate $14.2 trillion of global output by 2030.
The boosters for it like KCPB think that this opportunity revolves around a number of use cases:
Being able to flag up when preventative servicing is required. (For a lot of manufacturing machinery, companies like Foxboro Instruments – (Now Foxboro by Schneider Electric and Invensys Foxboro respectively) – had been doing this prior to the widespread implementation of TCP-IP network protocols). It is the bread and butter of SCADA systems. But it could be bridges and viaducts indicating that they need work done
MRI machines and other medical equipment that are financed on a per scan unit rather than as a capital cost. Basically extending the enterprise photocopier model into capital equipment expenditure
Machinery that is continuously re-designed based on user feedback
Kicking it around with my Dad got some interesting answers:
Flagging up items for servicing was seen to be a positive thing, however, how would this work with the reality of life in a manufacturing plant. Take a continuous process, say something like an oil refinery or food production line where the whole line needs to be shut down to enact changes, which is the reason why maintenance is scheduled in well in advance, on an annual or semi-annual basis. The process needs to take into account the whole supply chain beyond the factory and both shutdown and start-up are likely to be a complex undertaking. When I worked in the petrochemical industry before going to college; the planning process for a shutdown took six to nine months. Secondly, there was redundancy built into some of the plant so certain things that might need to be taken off line on a regular basis could be. A second consideration is that plants are often not off-the-peg but require a good deal of tailoring to the site. Plants generally aren’t new, there is a thriving market in pre-owned equipment. In the places I worked this included equipment such as such as pressure vessels, electric motors and valves – all of this would have implications for interoperability.
Lastly, what would be the implications when when the ethereal nature of technology underpinning the internet of heavier things met infrastructure that has a realistic life of a hundred plus years in the case of bridges or buildings?
Looking at the defence industry, we can see how maintenance costs and upgrading technology drives much of the spending on weapons systems – a bridge will generally last longer than a B52 bomber or a Hercules transport plane (both are 60 years old systems).
Financing on a per-use unit cost. This was discussed less, the general consensus was that this could dampen innovation as the likes of GE Medical would become finance houses rather than health technology companies, in the similar direction to what happened with Xerox or an early 21st century Sony.
Machinery that is continually redesigned on user feedback sparked a mix of concern and derision from my Dad. It seemed to be based on a premise that products aren’t evolved already – they are changed. The pace of change is a compromise between user feedback, component supply issues and backward serviceability. Moving to an ‘always beta’ model like consumer software development could have a negative impact on product quality, safety and product life due to issues with serviceability of equipment.
HSBC’s Zing shuts down. It didn’t manage to compete effectively against Revolut and Wise. Zing provided cheap foreign exchange. On the face of it HSBC had a number of use cases in its main retail banking markets that would have made sense.
Hong Kong:
7+ percent of the population are expats. This has been pretty constant over previous decades, though people are constantly coming and departing. A big group of these communities are domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. All of whom would benefit from cheap foreign money transfers.
Like other developed Asian countries, many young Hong Kongers study abroad. Having a way to cheaply transfer money to and from Hong Kong would be useful for this second group.
Finally Hong Kong has a diaspora, with families being spread across the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
UK:
30+ percent of Londoners were born outside the UK. Overall, the UK had ethnic minorities which make up 8 – 10 percent of the population. Many of them have multi-generational links with their homelands.
The NHS in particular has a large proportion of skilled foreigners working for them from Filipino intensive care nurses to Greek X-ray technicians.
Zing decided to launch only in the UK. Despite HSBC’s footprint, it didn’t grab the visibility or market share achieved by Revolut or Wise. It also failed to make money and HSBC seems to have taken a shorter term view to succeed or quit compared to its startup competitors. One could charitably view Zing as a correct view of the ‘fast failure’ model, if learnings from it are taken from it by HSBC and applied effectively.
Zing is emblematic of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma where established companies lose market share as they fail to disrupt themselves to compete against new upstart businesses.
Financial innovation is hard. Barclays closed down their mobile payment system Pingit, NatWest stepped back from its digital bank offering and Vodafone has struggled to expand M-Pesa.
US TikTok ‘refugees’ make surprise move to China’s ‘RedNote’ | FT – Xiaohongshu’s technical team were not ready for the complexity of a western audience. What’s interesting is that the move was a political statement to US politicians and a tacit rejection of Meta’s competitor platforms very soon after their ‘pivot to free speech’.
Vintage | Hi-Fi News – modern reviews on classic hi-fi models that give you a realistic understanding about how they compare to the current state-of-the-art. A number of the pieces come off much more favourably than I was expecting.
Obsolete Sony are doing a great job at documenting Sony’s history:
Kameron Hurley: There Have Always Been Times Like These – Locus Online – Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. –Ursula K. Le Guin
Luxury
ISSUE #1 — ARTSUMERISM – Power Dynamics by COPE – massification of luxury goods might have taken the artisan out of luxe. But has enabled it to develop an art collaboration somewhere between patron and influencer relationship.
Shoemaking experts Rose Anvil interview Fitasy on the advantages and challenges of using additive manufacturing for shoes. Fitasy provide a more realistic perspective on the circular economy benefits of filament printing at the end of the interview.
Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? | Vulture – I find it a bit odd as an idea, but then I do listen to a lot of talking heads YouTube channels without looking at the participants such as TLDR, Chip Stock Investor et al and much of the CNBC content I listen to is an audio track from their TV feed.
UK’s elite hardware talent is being wasted. | Josef – this reminds me a lot of working in the chemical and petrochemical industry at the start of my career. When enough people opt out the capability collapses in on itself.
Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.
Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.
A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.
For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.
On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.
By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.
A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.
When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.
I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.
I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.
The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.
Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.
That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.
Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:
They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.
What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Business – street style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.
Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.
Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe – “In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.
