Tag Archives: IoT

Review of my 2019 predictions

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Time to look back on the 2019 predictions from 12 months ago…. how many of the predictions came true?

1. Foldable/ rollable and other-able screens

Galaxy Fold
The Samsung Galaxy Fold. The only commercial folding screen currently available.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold was released in the first half of 2019 and is currently (at the end of December) available for sale. For the SIM-free (unlocked) version, it’s only £2,110 including VAT.

For context, the iPhone 11 (64Gb) is currently available for £729 on the same website.

Despite its name, the Motorola Razr 2019 is due for release in Q1 2020.

As for rollable, LG have shown prototypes, but there’s nothing for consumer sale quite yet.

Verdict – 5/10. We only have one folding screen available for sale at the end of 2019, and it costs much more than my Microsoft Surface Pro.

2. Citizen Data Science

I predicted that we’ll find data applications that won’t require a degree in data science to make sense of all their data. Nothing obvious is available yet, although I find Google Maps is becoming ever more personalised with its routing and recommendations. Continue reading Review of my 2019 predictions →

Five trends from The Future of General Insurance event

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Describing key insurance trends at The Future of General Insurance event
Describing key insurance trends at The Future of General Insurance event

This week I spoke at The Future of General Insurance event about our latest Insurance Industry Technology Trends report at Endava. Here’s a brief summary of the presentation.

Endava works in many industries, and we can see what companies outside of insurance do really well, that insurers can learn from. We have found 20 ‘trends’, of which we covered five most relevant ones to general insurers at the conference:

  • IoT (Internet of Things) are slowly redefining how consumers perceive ‘insurance’
  • Moving to mobile first interfaces
  • Using social media
  • The use of digital marketing in the insurance industry
  • Building self-service into systems

Continue reading Five trends from The Future of General Insurance event →

Points to consider when designing your next mobile app

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Percentage of people who have disagreements with their partner due to their mobile phone usage, by age from Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report
Percentage of people who have disagreements with their partner due to their mobile phone usage, by age

According to Deloitte’s Mobile Consumer Survey 2016 report, mobile hasn’t just reached saturating point (over 80% of the UK now owns a smartphone – and still annually growing at 7%), it’s become embedded in our day to day (and night to night) lives. We don’t just own a smartphone, we let it take over our lives – foregoing sleep or partner and friends asking us to put the thing away.

Here are the highlights and takeaways (all are UK statistics, from 3,251 respondents) from the Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report:

  • 10% of smartphone owners check their device immediately on waking up, with over two thirds of us checking our phone within 30 minutes of rising.
  • 43% of us check our phones within 30 minutes of going to bed.
Suggestion: next time you want to spend time with your family or friends, forget your phone from Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2016 report
Suggestion: next time you want to spend time with your family or friends, forget your phone
  • Half of smartphone owners aged 18-24 check their phone in the middle of the night (most of whom check the time, instant messages, social media notifications or email). If you’re not in that age bracket, it’s still 48% for 25-34 year olds, 37% of 35-44 year olds and 27% aged 45-54.
  • Next time you’re out with friends in a restaurant checking your email, or supposed to be out with the family, or just crossing the road, remember the two graphs above.

Continue reading Points to consider when designing your next mobile app →

Smart IoT 2016 Day Two

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Today was the second and last day of Smart IoT London. Read here for Day One’s report.

The presenterless presentation... a very odd presentation at Smart IoT
The presenterless presentation… a very odd presentation at Smart IoT

I went to a few of the presentations, but only two of them are worthy of any mention (one, which I won’t name, didn’t have a presenter… the technical support guys simply played a video in the theatre – it was one of the oddest ‘presentations’ I’ve seen).

I recommend the organisers arrange fewer presentations next year, aiming for quality over this year’s huge quantity.

And please, supply more power sockets for visitors to recharge their phones and laptops (especially to help visitors cover Smart IoT on social networks). Continue reading Smart IoT 2016 Day Two →

Smart IoT 2016 Day One

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Smart IoT 2016 exhibition panoramicI went to the Smart IoT (Internet of Things) event today in London’s Excel centre. The programme of presentations over the two days looked great, so I signed up a while ago. This post is to share with my colleagues and for anyone else who couldn’t make it today.

I’ll start with a summary and then go into detail, because I made lots of notes during the presentations.

Summary of Smart IoT 2016 Day One

On the content:

  • There were some thought provoking content (which I’ve covered below) mixed in with some below-par presentations.
  • I didn’t see any presentations where payments were discussed. I.e how IoT devices will transact with one another/ a service/ a person.

Continue reading Smart IoT 2016 Day One →

Cloud thinking for IoT

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Who would have thought that the legal side of IoT could be so interesting?
Who would have thought that the legal side of IoT could be so interesting?

TechUK held an event called “Can the IoT (Internet of Things) become a reality without the Cloud?” and whilst the event didn’t really answer the headline question, it was interesting in other unexpected ways.

The last couple of events I’ve attended at TechUK have been a little dry, lacking anything interesting to report here. As I left the office for the IoT event I remarked to a colleague that if this event was also dry, I might reduce the number of TechUK events I attend.

There were four speakers supported by the chair Stephen Pattison, VP, ARM Holdings:

  • Paul D’Cruz, Chief Technical Officer, Cisco UK Public Sector
  • Barry Jennings, Associate, Bird & Bird
  • Nick Hyner, Director Cloud Services EMEA, Dell
  • Gabriel Vizzard, Internet of Things Lab Services Foundry, IoT Solution Architect, IBM

Stephen, Paul, Nick and Gabriel naturally promoted their employer’s latest product offerings, with varying degrees of humour.

Surprise surprise Cisco said the current network (Internet) doesn’t have the bandwidth for billions of devices (I wonder who sells network equipment….) and Dell talked about more Cloud computing which ultimately translates into more [Dell] servers. Every time thw word “security” was mentioned, we were served a reminder of how much ARM are investing in IoT security protocols.

The surprise session was from Barry Jennings who spoke about the liability and funding models for IoT. Continue reading Cloud thinking for IoT →

Reading list for 12 October 2015

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Kids playing cards
Yes you can play cards on an iPad, but kids don’t enjoy it as much as the real game

In between all these links I’m currently reading LEAN Enterprise – I’ll provide a full review if/ when I manage to finish it.

In the meantime, here are some of the more interesting links I’ve visited over the last week:

Mobile leads first half digital ad surge| warc.com – Ad spend on mobiles increased 51% to £1.08bn during the first half of 2015. Is it a bubble or a natural trend? Continue reading Reading list for 12 October 2015 →

IoT article: Why Insurers are Threatened by Everyone Except Other Insurers

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Craig Polley discussing Insurance and IoT at TechUK
Craig Polley from Digital Risk Services discussing Insurance and IoT at TechUK

This morning I attended a TechUK seminar “Insurance and the Internet of Things”.

There were some good speakers who raised quite a few points which I hadn’t heard or thought of until today. Clearly there are some leaders in the space, who are not insurers and are gearing up for a battle for new types of insurance products.

My notes are below. As usual, apologies for brevity, spelling and grammatical errors – all of which are mine not the speakers. It was a fact packed 90 minutes and I struggled to keep up with all the presenters. Continue reading IoT article: Why Insurers are Threatened by Everyone Except Other Insurers →

The Insurance Industry and the Need for Innovation

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On stage at ITC 2015, and I look like I'm performing some sort of card trick
On stage at ITC 2015, and I look like I’m performing some sort of card trick

Earlier this week I was on a panel at the ITC (Insurance Technology Congress) 2015 event. My panel was dealing specifically with Internet of Things in the insurance industry.

The event was aimed at CIOs of large, mainly commercial insurance companies. The CTO and CIOs in the room spend their time and budget keeping the lights on – i.e. keeping their systems in tip-top shape.

These CIOs and CTOs are rightly proud of their systems’ stability and availability, and until now innovation is a distant second priority. However, new technologies and technology companies are entering the market, and this conference was a joining of minds to create a plan for the future.

Note: Endava were sponsors of the event, and I was only able to attend the first day of the event. Continue reading The Insurance Industry and the Need for Innovation →

Challenges ahead for the Internet of Things

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Connecting IoT devices is now simple (except for toasters)
Connecting IoT devices is now simple (except for toasters)

One of the most popular blog posts I’ve written recently was about the Internet of Things and Insurance, in readiness for a panel at the Insurance Technology Congress 2015 event in September.

Since the blog post I’ve received some feedback asking about other aspects of IoT which I’ll cover here. Specifically they fall into two buckets – security, and more clarity around the definition.

Defining IoT

Like many areas of IT, one could argue that the IoT has already been around for decades, but now it’s receiving more market awareness.

At the 1989 Interop conference, Dan Lynch and others created the first Internet Toaster which was connected to the Internet (via TCP/IP) and could be controlled (well, the power was controlled) remotely. It was a proof of concept that really anything could be on the Internet. Continue reading Challenges ahead for the Internet of Things →