We’re really pleased to announce three more great speakers for IoT13 from BT, Neul and GreenPeak Technologies:

Dr John Davies is Head of Semantic Technology at BT and has headed up BT’s involvement in the recent STRIDE project, meaning he combines deep understanding of the technical challenges and the business opportunities for the IoT in transportation and infrastructure.

Stan Boland is CEO of Neul and one of the UK’s most respected entrepreneurs. Having built and exited two highly successful semiconductor companies – Element14 and Icera – he is extremely well placed to understand the opportunities for IoT across many sectors.

Cees Link is the CEO of GreenPeak Technologies and one of the pioneers of the wireless data industry, developing the first wireless LANs for household use. He is now running GreenPeak Technologies, a leader in ZigBee based chip solutions for Smart Homes.

If you would like to participate in IoT13, please get in touch. Or sign up for the event here (EarlyBird tickets are still available, saving you £100 on full price).

This seems a bit strange – in December 2012 the government published its plan to roll out Smart Meters across the UK. Less than 6 months later, the Department of Energy and Climate Change announce that:

“As part of the procurement process, DECC has tested with bidders for DCC service provider contracts, and with the energy industry, the time needed for the design, build and test phases of their programmes. The consistent message was that more time was needed if the mass rollout was to get off to the best possible start.

“We therefore expect suppliers to be ready to start their full scale roll-out by autumn 2015. Reflecting the extended period to build and test the systems required by industry, the end of mass roll-out will be moved from end 2019 to end 2020.”

Full statement here:

Wouldn’t it have been better if they had spent a bit more time talking to industry before they made the plans or was it only in 2013 that industry decided it wasn’t going to be ready?

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Time for an update: The Internet of Things Forum (IoT13) is gathering steam, with exciting new speakers coming on board, including IBM, Unilever, ARM, Schneider Electric, Evrythng, AlertMe, Onzo and EE. We’re now seven weeks from a forum that will educate, inspire and connect the people – investors and leadership teams – and companies turning connected devices into profitable businesses. There are still plenty of opportunities to get involved (see below), but if you just want to grab the Early Bird Rate, go here to register.

Practical lessons from the IoT

Some of the most useful IoT analysis we’ve seen (like this HBR feature from Stefan Ferber at Bosch) helps you understand how the IoT will create value in your business. Our speakers and delegates have told us that they want to dig deeper on that theme: looking at real life examples of applications, use cases

and business models based on IoT. So, we’ve built a conference schedule for the day with lots of time for audience Q&A and real life case studies. More details here. More importantly, there is lots of networking time – we know you want to meet the people who could be your future customers, investors and partners.

Company Presentations, Speaking & Networking Exhibition

• Alongside the discussions, we’ll feature some of the best IoT businesses out there as exhibitors and presenters – if you’re brilliant, you can apply for a presentation place on the main stage.

• We have a limited number of table top style spaces available if you want to raise your profile with well-qualified IoT people. More information about the exhibition space is available here.

• There are still some openings for speakers in the conference schedule so if you have insight into the key challenges of making IoT businesses real then please get in touch to discuss speaking options.

You can find out more about IoT13 on the website here, and register for the event here.

Introducing Rackspace,

our gold sponsors. We’re delighted to welcome Rackspace Hosting on board as gold sponsors of IoT13. They share our interest in building an event that will help accelerate the IoT market and grow the ecosystem. Some very exciting news from them for attendees coming soon too. More supporters to be announced imminently and if you want to get involved, get in touch now.

The Harvard Business Review have posted one of the best short analyses I’ve seen of what the Internet of Things means to traditional manufacturing businesses, written by a man who should know: Stefan Ferber, Bosch’s Director of Communities.

He makes the point that, beyond the simple efficiency gains that the IoT enables (and let’s not underestimate those), the opportunities for using manufactured items to act as gateways for web based services look huge. And so do the challenges:

‘For “Old Economy” companies, the mere prospect of remaking traditional products into smart and connected ones is daunting. (My own company, for example, the Bosch Group, produces over half a million things each day across more than 1,500 product categories.) But embedding them into a services-based business model is much more fundamentally challenging. The new models have major impacts on processes at the corporate center such as product management and production and sales planning.’

The implications are profound for all aspects of corporate processes, and sets companies up for a collision of two galaxies – between their existing product-centric businesses and the new structures and processes that will allow for future, service based offering. But this collision looks like fertile ground:

A study undertaken by researchers from the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland (Service Business Development: Strategies for Value Creation in Manufacturing Firms) concludes that these services are most definitely lucrative for traditional manufacturers. Considering the example of a papermaking machine, they note that the sale of the machine itself generates a margin of around one to three percent, while selling a related service yields five to ten times as much. The ratio is much the same for the sale of rail cars versus related mobility and maintenance services.

The good news is that no business has to do it all on its own, as a whole ecosystem of IoT suppliers and platforms is rapidly forming to work with companies making this transition. And as more companies go through this transition fresh light will be shed on what works, and what doesn’t, on the bold road to IoT based services.

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We’re thrilled to announce our next batch of speakers joining us on the 27th June to discuss the commercial opportunities and challenges in building IoT businesses. Two more entrepreneurs, two respected investors, and a distinguished academic will lend us their experience:

Andy Hobsbawm, Evrythng

The founder and CMO of Evrythng, Andy is a lifelong evangelist for digital services and communities. He will give us his point of view in the discussion on winning business models for IoT.

Pilgrim Beart, AlertMe

Pilgrim is an innovator and entrepreneur who founded one of the UK’s most successful Smart Home platforms in AlertMe. With a string of startups under his belt, he is very well placed to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing IoT across multiple sectors.

Bill Janeway, Warburg Pincus Technology Fund 

Bill Janeway has been an active venture capital investor for forty years, building the team at Warburg Pincus that funded many internet success stories. He is also a respected academic with many publications on modern finance and will join the panel looking at the investor perspective on the IoT

Alex van Someren, Amadeus Capital

Alex is a poacher turned gamekeeper (or maybe other way around?) a very successful entrepreneur who is now Managing Director in the Seed Fund at Amadeus Capital. He will join Bill on the panel considering where the smart money is going in IoT.

Prof. Gerd Kortuem, The Open University

Gerd is Professor of Ubiquitous Computing at the Open University. His research areas include the intersection between the physical, social and digital worlds and he is involved in test bed projects in a number of hot areas including smart cities and transportation. He will take part in the panel looking at the potential of IoT in multipartner, infrastructure projects.

A more detailed schedule for the day has now also been published, including the opportunity for exciting IoT businesses to showcase their potential to the audience for the day. If your IoT business is tackling a big opportunity and you would like to make a short presentation on the topic, then apply here for a chance to pitch on the 27th June.

If you would like to receive updates on the IoT13 conference by email, please update your profile below:

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Interesting article by JP Rangaswami in CIO magazine about the trust revolution that is required for the Internet of Things to have context and therefore value for consumers.

As the Internet of Things evolves, trust, becomes more important and valuable, not less.

“[Of the alerts we already get from our phones etc] Many of these alerts and messages are meaningful only when they are presented with context. The metadata of time, location, source, identity of person, identity of device all become important, and we can use that metadata to filter further. Additionally, the status messages themselves contain valuable information, which can be compared against predetermined thresholds.

“…We are going to see much more of this, as notification exchanges and clearinghouses emerge around platforms. People will build services that use platform APIs to test levels and contexts via the data, metadata and thresholds. The ecosystems that emerge around the platforms will also form part of the filtering process.

“The social networks we belong to, the communities represented, the devices used, the platforms and ecosystems they form part of, each of these is a revolution in its own right. And all these are necessary but not sufficient to deal with yet another revolution, the explosion of Big Data.” The Internet of Everything and tweeting tweets. Even with the Internet of Everything, relationships between people and the trusts that bind us together will still be relevant. CIO Magazine

In other words, there’s as much work to be done, (and opportunities for entrepreneurs), in building the platforms that provide context for the data produced by the IoT as there is in the devices themselves.

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We loved some of these ideas though we don’t expect all of them to be struggling with the challenges of large scale manufacturing.

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