Category Archives: Smart Technologies

Technology in Africa: Extracting insights from Big Data

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The big data opportunity for Africa came into sharp focus this week when IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and key members of her executive team visited Africa to meet with clients and government leaders. “Going forward, data is going to be THE source of competitive advantage,” Rometty told a South African audience.

Already, African companies are harnessing big data to transform their businesses. Take Santam Ltd., the leading short-term insurance company in South Africa. The company is using predictive analysts to streamline the processing of claims and to spot potentially fraudulent claims. When Anesh Govender reported for duty as Santam’s head of operations for finance, his boss told him that he wanted to do more with less. Govender quickly spotted data as his leverage point. “I was amazed how much data was available but how little of it was being used” he said. Govender was one of the presenters at IBM’s South African gathering.

He decided to completely overhaul the claims processing system. In the past, every claim went through the same steps of being reviewed manually by staff members. Today, they’re all fed into a predictive analytics software program that channels routine claims into a queue for quick action. The others go through deeper analysis that takes into account not just the current claim but a lot more information about the customer and their past claim activities. Computer algorithms search for patterns that suggests the claims might be fraudulent. One example: Fraudsters typically start with small false claims and, if they’re successful, submit larger ones. Govender’s staff has tuned the algorithms so they identify the maximum amount of false claims without producing too many false positives—which require extra work by the claims processing staff. Today, they kick out only 1% of claims for deep fraud analysis, and about 30% of them are fraudulent.

 

The Internet of Things and The Good Night Lamp

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The Good Night Lamp is a family of Internet-connected lamps. Turn the big lamp on and the little lamps turn on wherever they are. It is the brainchild of ‘The Good Night Lamp Team’, a UK-based team made up of founder Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Head of Products John Nussey and CTO Adrian McEwen. Collaborators include Konstantinos Chalaris and Tom Cecil.

goodnightlamp.com

The Good Night Lamp is for people who are away from home and would like to keep in touch with their loved ones. But this is not like anything that you have seen before. The project combines the simplicity of minimalist design with the high end capabilities of WIFI technology. It is a superb demonstration of the potential of the Internet of Things. Imagine your kids going to university for the first time, or an elderly relative living alone? By simply turning on a light, the message that they are home is relayed to loved ones. No need for long telephone conversations or texts.

The project is currently raising funds on the Kickstarter website – a funding platform for creative projects. Kickstarter is full of ambitious, innovative, and imaginative projects that are brought to life through the direct support of others.You can even support the project yourself.

Here is the link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/designswarm/good-night-lamp

The Good Night Lamp transforms the IOT from a concept to a very viable, tangible and practical product. It comprises of a “family of lights”, made up of a larger light (primary) and two smaller ones (secondary). All the lights are made in the shape of a home. The idea in a nutshell is that it is possible to communicate one’s homecoming remotely to other holders in the “family”. The smaller lamps (secondary lights) are synchronised to the larger lamp (primary light) so once the primary lamp is lit, the secondary ones also light up.This is ideal in circumstances when a family member is away, even on the other side of the globe.

 

4G access will not cost more for Three customers

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Mobile phone provider Three says it will not charge customers extra to upgrade to the 4G data service.

Three is due to get access to the fast data network later this year. Provider EE was the first company in the UK to be able to offer customers access to 4G and received complaints about its pricing structures. Existing customers were asked to pay an extra £5 for the same amount of data they were entitled to with their 3G contracts.

Last month the firm cut its entry price from £36 to £31 but the reduced cost was only available for new customers. Three says any customer with an “ultrafast-ready” smartphone, which includes Apple’s iPhone 5, Nokia’s Lumia 920 and the Sony Xperia Z, will qualify.

“As we add the next wave of technology to our ultrafast network, we’ve listened to our customers and thought long and hard about the right way to do it,” said Three chief executive Dave Dyson.

“We don’t want to limit ultrafast services to a select few based on a premium price and we’ve decided our customers will get this service as standard.”

Ernest Doku, from price comparison website uSwitch.com, said the move “flew in the face” of the current pricing strategy for 4G in the UK. “Three’s move could really force the other networks to reconsider how they price their own forthcoming 4G deals,” he said.

“That being said, there’s nothing stopping Three from putting tariff prices up across the board ahead of a 4G rollout, so it’s still a waiting game before we find out the true cost of super-fast mobile data in the UK.”

 

Internet of things blurs the line between bits and atoms

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Imagine googling your home to find your child’s lost toy, or remotely turning on the tumble dryer for yet another cycle – after it has text you that the clothes were still damp, or your plant tweeting you to be watered.

It might have been sci-fi just a decade ago, but with the Internet forcing its way into every aspect of our lives, cyberspace is leaking out into the real world. In the past few months, companies ranging from giants such as Google to small start-ups have been touting the possibility of interconnecting people and objects – lightbulbs, fridges, cars, buildings – to create an internet of things.

Many say this is a trend bound to hit us all in the near future. “Some of the things that are possible are truly unbelievable,” says Constantine Valhouli from the Hammersmith Group, a strategy consulting firm.

“We’ve moved from a desktop internet to mobile phones and mobile internet – the next step is buildings and objects, enabling us to communicate with them directly or enabling them to even bypass people entirely and communicate directly with each other.” Imagine a production line where machines alert one another about production problems or bottlenecks, or cars that warn each other about driving conditions or a crash on the road ahead.

The internet’s next big frontier

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In its early days the internet was seen simply as a way of transferring data across large distances but it is now playing an ever increasing part in our lives.

David Reid reports on what is seen as the next big frontier for the web – called the internet of things – allowing you to use your smartphone to control your home heating, pay for parking and even monitor your own fitness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9782395.stm

 

Andreessen Horowitz Funds IFTTT; Puts Wood Behind The Internet Of Things Arrow

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IFTTT, a San Francisco-based Internet of Things startup with a passionate following among webheads, announced Thursday that it has raised $7 million in a Series-A fund led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Launched in December 2010, IFTTT puts the power of the Internet in the hands of ordinary people, making it possible for them to easily link web services together. This year, IFTTT expanded its scope to include physical objects like Belkin’s WeMo devices and the Winthings body scale and blood pressure monitor.

John O’Farrell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explained that the firm had selected IFTTT from a growing number of Internet of Things startups because of the promise it holds for freeing personal data that is trapped in applications like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Foursquare. “For example, when I post on App.net, my post instantly appears on Twitter too, thanks to IFTTT,” he writes. “Every time I post a photo (or am tagged in one) on Facebook, IFTTT downloads it to my Dropbox without my even having to think about it.

The two things that could doom the ‘Internet of things’ revolution.

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M2M is huge, and power everything from point-of-sale machines and ER devices to much of the Big Data revolution. But all that is in danger, says John Horn of RACO Wireless, if we don’t patch two major holes.

Complexity is a profit killer

M2M solutions must be made to be easier to deploy. We’re talking days or weeks here – even hours. Not years. Solution providers need the ability to get thousands of M2M devices up and running at once, crucially, using existing, standardized technology. They need the ability to customize rate plans and to see in real-time how their customers are actually using their applications. This is possible. More to the point, enterprises that get their M2M applications up and running quickly are seeing amazing returns. No longer do enterprises have to sit on the sidelines and wait as the process unrolls while they continue running their business with the same deficiencies that their solution is intended to improve. Typically, there is up to a 40 percent return on their investment in the first year alone.

But every time there’s a problem with that M2M application or the enterprise IT department has to focus on something like making the wireless connection work, that ROI is reduced. And at some point, if deploying a M2M application distracts from a company’s core business rather than enhancing it, then the ROI is no longer worth the effort.

Sunsetting 2G could slow some M2M applications

Unfortunately, simplicity isn’t the only thing holding back the growth of M2M right now. In fact, the very future of some M2M applications is being challenged, thanks to the mobile industry’s migration to 3G and 4G networks. In the process many are simply shutting down their existing 2G networks, stranding customers who have M2M applications that rely on them. There is one story of a small boutique in the Midwest that relied on a 2G network to process credit-card payments. Without notice, its 2G cellular service was shut off and suddenly the shop’s point of sale device was non-functional, leaving a vulnerable small business scrambling to find options.

Complicating matters is that many M2M applications simply don’t use enough data to justify updating or transitioning them to wider pipes and the more costly devices associated with 3G and 4G networks. So, while in many cases it may be an option to upgrade to a significantly more expensive 3G or 4G compatible device, the low levels of data consumption required by these applications would not come close to justifying it, and so unnecessarily put a hit on a businesses ROI.

These shifts force customers to be very strategic in how they plan their M2M strategy. As some carriers are forced to move away from 2G networks because of spectrum constraints or other long-term strategies, there are other carriers that remain committed to supporting their 2G networks. The bottom line is that for M2M to reach its full potential, application providers need easy-to-implement M2M solutions. And they also need some assurance that their M2M solutions will still be supported in the future as networks continue to evolve. If you give enterprises and potential M2M application developers these two things, M2M will reach its full potential.

How the Internet of Things will change almost everything.

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In a guest post for Forbes, John Humphreys, VP-marketing for cloud management software provider Egenera equates the Internet of Things to a central nervous system of the Planet.

If you think the digital world is crowded now, wait until you see what the next few years will bring. Today, there are roughly two Internet-connected devices for every man, woman and child on the planet. By 2025, analysts are forecasting that this ratio will rise past six. This means we can expect to grow to nearly 50 billion Internet-connected devices in the next decade.

Over the next decade, most of the connected device growth will come from very small sensors that are primarily doing machine-to-machine communications and acting as the digital nerve endings for highly dynamic global sense-and-respond systems.

Driven by a revolution in cheap sensor technology, we have, for the first time, the ability to impart a central nervous system on our planet. This fabric of technology will allow us to measure systems on a global scale and at the same time offer a never before seen resolution.

The Role of the Cloud

If all of these sensors act as the central nervous system for the planet, then the cloud is the brain. It’s the place where all the data flooding in will be collected, collated, analyzed and turned into information and that information turned into knowledge.

In a world containing vast arrays of constantly changing sensors, the challenges for the cloud include scale of operations and rate of change. Whether it’s for a social network, a scientific study or for resource optimisations, a key characteristic of the Internet of things (IoT) is its massive scale and self-organising nature.

The challenge is the temporary nature of the network. As such the next generation of the cloud will need to malleable enough to scale autonomously, adaptive enough to handle constantly changing connections and resilient enough to stand up to the huge ebbs and flows in data that will occur. To meet this challenge, cloud computing will need to accelerate its evolution and rapidly move past its current form.

Internet of Things: Dealing with data

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It’s important to consider where data is coming from when thinking about the Internet of Things. A lot of the useful data we might use personally naturally comes from us. So, it’s not so much an internet of things as an internet of people – with things that gather data.

DJ Patil, a data scientist with Graylock Partners recently gave a talk at Le Web about how we could be using data to improve ourselves.

“It should be the Internet of nouns,” he told The Next Web. “A noun being a person, place or thing. When we think about ourselves, we create data – things like our temperature, perspiration, our heart rate, can all be measured. So the way we instrument ourselves can help us to understand more about ourselves.”

One of Patil’s clear examples is the data we use in medicine: “We can build jet engines that tell us when they’re sick. Why don’t we have a world where the doctor looks at your data, calls you and says “you’re not looking that well, maybe you should come in now”?

One of the technologies at Le Web that really seemed to be on the fringes of consumer technology was the Muse headband from InteraXon. Simply put, it’s a headband that reads brainwaves so that users can collect data about themselves and even work on exercises to improve focus and attention.

It’s another example of how collecting data can help us make better choices, but InteraXon co-founder Ariel Garten sees a future where our brain waves may be the trigger which can change the physical world around us.

“Way, way down the road, this is a technology that is going to be used to turn on and off the lighting in your own home,” she told The Next Web. “It will be able to let your computer know when you’re frustrated so you can change the size of the monitor so you can interact more effectively. It’s something that’s going to allow technology to support you more readily and effectively.”

Garten’s sensational demonstration on stage at Le Web saw the event’s host Loic Le Meur type out an email. Doesn’t sound so shocking initially, but as he typed, his emotional state dynamically changed the font his words appeared in. It looked a lot like magic.

To paraphrase William Gibson, the Internet of Things is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The Muse headband will go on sale in 2013, Lockitron is also shipping next year, Fitbits are spreading and the data keeps growing.

It looks as though 2013 will be a real breakthrough year when it comes to bringing the Internet of Things to a wider market. If platforms do become more accessible and standards are set, then if you can think of a ‘thing’ and find the data to connect to, it seems as though almost anything could be possible.

Japan radiation monitoring goes crowd, open source

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A new open and crowd-sourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be happening. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal kick-starter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country.

The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors. Safecast is one of the larger crowd-sourced monitoring efforts, not unlike a similar effort in the United States that predated the Japanese disaster. Safecast plans to deploy hundreds of geiger counters in Japan.

For the last month, the Safecast crew and volunteers have been collaborating with universities in Japan and driving their geiger counters around the country and taking measurements. Safecast’s early monitoring trips north of Tokyo returned some disturbing findings, including elevated radiation levels in a kindergarten classroom.

Safecast link: http://blog.safecast.org/