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The unsexy IoT

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Re: The unsexy IoT

#11

Post by ocdtrekkie »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #2

My view with IoT is that is true value lies in the monitoring and data collection aspect, and the analysis and prediction that it enables. Consumer IoT doesn't value from this - consumer IoT is all about having Bluetooth and smartphone apps for your foobar gadget. Industrial IoT is where the value is - and it's been around for years. Airlines and manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus have streams of data from planes a…

Well, the aggregate benefits are there... just not for the consumer. The company producing the product, who collects all that data on their customers, gets to pick trends, predict failures, and take preemptive action. ...Often whether their customers like it or not.

Re: The unsexy IoT

#12

Post by massysett »

tmuir wrote: post #4
NeutronBoy wrote: post #2

My view with IoT is that is true value lies in the monitoring and data collection aspect, and the analysis and prediction that it enables. Consumer IoT doesn't value from this - consumer IoT is all about having Bluetooth and smartphone apps for your foobar gadget. Industrial IoT is where the value is - and it's been around for years. Airlines and manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus have streams of data from planes a…

I don't think there are any valid use cases for a widely distributed network of any kind of personal item that make sense for consumers. Consumers don't continuously manage large repetitive processes. They don't own items that remain distributed, or are being redistributed on any regular basis. They simply don't have the minimum threshold of Things that would benefit from the Internet.

I don't know what qualifies as "large" but procuring food for my family is a tedious and time-consuming task so for me at least it is large and repetitive. I'm not sure how much that can be automated though.

The parent post mentioned tracking of airplanes. I wouldn't mind if a company monitored my home heating system or refrigerator and notified me if they were about to fail, as these failures can be expensive and a huge hassle if not anticipated. Also consumers already benefit from alarm systems and cameras they can monitor remotely. Heck, alarm systems have been centrally monitored for decades, just over proprietary networks rather than the Internet.

Re: The unsexy IoT

#13

Post by sdhsdh »

We see a lot of both sides of this at BR (http://buildingrobotics.com/) -- we are actually BACnet experts, but also provide a really novel user experience on top of this legacy protocol. One thing I'd add is that many of the "legacy" industries have evolved in a way that's very different from what the Internet crowd expects and so you can't always make the same assumptions.

Also, it might be "unsexy" but buildings consume 70-ish percent of US electricity, a lot of which is controlled by BACnet and friends... and it turns out there's a ton of low-hanging fruit that's only a (carefully crafted, ASN.1-ish) UDP packet away..

Re: The unsexy IoT

#14

Post by vdnkh »

I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in some form or another for the last 25 years, supplying remote telemetry units (RTUs) to the industrial assets industry. Helium, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, on boats, trucks, and static sites. We also provide a monitoring platform which is where I come in. We're a very uncool Apple - vertically integrated, we design, build, manufacture, ship, and program all of our RTUs in-house. IoT has been around for a long long time now - a lot of our work comes from clients who can't maintain their old systems anymore.

The entire hype wave of IoT has more or less passed right over us. Nobody has heard our name, save for the gas industry itself. But that industry is about to (not literally) explode. Helium is an extremely lucrative industry and is growing by the minute, and there's really nobody in this space but us. Remote monitoring - IoT - has never been more critical to helium than it has now. Without going into too much detail, knowing the pressure levels of your tank 24/7 can save you a lot of money.

So where do I come in? Our platform is written in C#, with the front-end done in Silverlight. I'm the dude getting us off it with some really hip JS work in React. Before that I wrote a lot of microservices to handle various aspects of our system. We were in a pretty bad state when I got there so I spent a lot of time improving our development team. We didn't have PRs for a long time. For a first job out of college, it's not bad. I get to do a lot of cool work, and on my current project I've made every technical decision. But sometimes I wish that we could attract better talent. Oh well, I'm (hopefully) leaving soon.

Re: The unsexy IoT

#15

Post by notgood »

IoT has many other problems... as pointed out by the popular twitter account against it: https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en

Some of the most amusing posts:

- Nest not being able to function while there is service outage (e.g. can't change temperature if server is down) https://twitter.com/Jenthulhu/status/688918036791840768

- Tried to install an Spotify update for the car, ended disabling brakes. https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/687693238103224320

- Extortion by your own appliances (in-app-purchases + IoT, parody?): https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/633278514284920833...

- Samsumg smart fridge exposes your Google credentials: https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/636102318585475072...

- Can't change thermostat while updating: https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/684831858463387648...

- Mall smart screens get blue screen of death: https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/652403071859970048

Re: The unsexy IoT

#16

Post by ktamura »

I totally echo the OP (Disclaimer: I work at a big data analytics SaaS with IoT customers called Treasure Data).

The "unsexy" IoT can be really unsexy. One customer wanted to get their data out of SCADA (www.scada.com), and as it turns out, the only way to get telemetry data out of their SCADA boxes was through emails as CSV attachments.

We ended up working with a third party dev shop to build a simple mail server that parses the incoming CSVs and send them to our backend so that the vendor could analyze the data coming from SCADA (which in turn came from heavy industry devices) using SQL, Salesforce, etc.

I never thought that MIME attachments would be a critical part in a "big data", "IoT" analytics pipeline...

Re: The unsexy IoT

#17

Post by nicolsc »

Fully agree: most of the IoT solutions are "unsexy" stuff.

It's often painfully hard to explain that the kickstarter-sexy projects are only the tip of the iceberg.

A BLE "smart" waffle machine would surely be fun, and good material for @internetofshit. But while we're looking at useless/gadgets stuff, there are a LOT of useful (or at least midly interesting) things happening in the IoT.

Unsexy doesn't mean old. And IoT doesn't mean "smart device". A dumb sensor sending raw data can bring in a lot of valuable data.

Metering is still a thing, and i see new projects every week in various fields : agriculture, public equipments, healthcare, safety, ... Lot of independent things that don't need to be used by a user, and that you don't especially know they are "connected"

Re: The unsexy IoT

#18

Post by pjmlp »

Also regarding unsexy IoT, despite having been replaced by Android Java fork in the mobiles space, J2ME and Embedded Java are being used by quite a few companies in the unsexy IoT space.

Re: The unsexy IoT

#19

Post by pjmlp »

vdnkh wrote: post #14

I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in some form or another for the last 25 years, supplying remote telemetry units (RTUs) to the industrial assets industry. Helium, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, on boats, trucks, and static sites. We also provide a monitoring platform which is where I come in. We're…

C#? Quite interesting.

Anything that you can share about it?

The language geek in me loves the use of C#, Java and similar safe stacks in the IoT domain. :)

Re: The unsexy IoT

#20

Post by pjc50 »

massysett wrote: post #12
tmuir wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are any valid use cases for a widely distributed network of any kind of personal item that make sense for consumers. Consumers don't continuously manage large repetitive processes. They don't own items that remain distributed, or are being redistributed on any regular basis. They simply don't have the minimum threshold of Things that would benefit from the Internet.

I don't know what qualifies as "large" but procuring food for my family is a tedious and time-consuming task so for me at least it is large and repetitive. I'm not sure how much that can be automated though. The parent post mentioned tracking of airplanes. I wouldn't mind if a company monitored my home heating system or refrigerator and notified me if they were about to fail, as these failures can be expensive and a…

I wouldn't mind if a company monitored my home heating system or refrigerator and notified me if they were about to fail, as these failures can be expensive

I'd be worried that the pre-emptive maintenance would be far more expensive. You can already get heating system insurance, but I wouldn't trust the IoT system to not over-order maintenance in order to maintain the company's profits.

I saw an advert for HP's printer ink subscription service: http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/ads/instant-ink/overview.html and recoiled in horror. It's already the most expensive liquid most people will buy, and you want to let the printer order it for you?

We're back to the door in Ubik that asked the user for a nickel before it would open every time.

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