RF Tracking and Fencing.

Have blogged before on RF tracking
http://albertputnam.blogspot.com/2013/11/wifi-tracking-any-rf-tracking.html.

NFC and BLE and Beacons... interesting things from Nordic Semiconductor and their allies (like Estimote).

Apart from straightforward inventory... engenders ideas about geo-fencing as an augmentation of other systems like access control.

MassTLC IoT at PTC - Smart Connected Products Transforming Competition - HBR.

IoT has had much discussion lately. Went to a great MassTLC sponsored seminar at PTC on November 4. How Smart, Connected Products are Transforming Competition. Went hand in hand with article in Harvard Business Review. Lay of land for Smart Connected Products. Ten questions businesses should ask themselves. Very appropriate.  Looking at steps

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Control.
3. 3. Optimization.
4. 4. Autonomy.

Could not help but think about the roots of IoT in tracking/viewing things. The order should perhaps still be

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Optimization (based purely on what is monitored and outside of any actual IoT programme).
3. 3. Autonomy.
4. 4. Control - Control is last because one should understand the situation before taking action.

And in many cases there are limits (safety, regulatory, privacy, moral, etc.) on what can be controlled. Most of the value is in monitoring and optimization. Some situations never get to control.

 

There were questions during discussions about..

When will industries standardize? What are we waiting for?

1. Leadership from Apple, Amazon, Google and so forth were cited for consumer.
2. Leadership by the main players are often cited in commercial industry. But there is a commercial incentive for non-standard approaches (differentiators) in many situations.
3. Cooperation and collaborative openness. There are examples of collaborative standardization. There are ecosystems which makes it easy to exchange, normalize, coordinate, aggregate and analyze data.

Examples of collaborative standardization:

• BACnet in buildings.
• Sunspec in renewables.
• MTConnect in factory systems.
• OPC (XML DA) in automation.

And the following too - if an ONLY if the mapping/schema is well known... the universally accepted schema is the heart of the matter

• Modbus in industrial. The depth and of Modbus (all the way to sensors), and the breadth of its install base, should not be ignored.
• SNMP in IT.
• RESTful exchange in commerce.
• Any XML in any domain.
• MQ (message queuing) in any domain.

SQL is often hauled out as an exchange method. There is no universal public schema for any database system. Such a schema would be orthogonal to the performance needs of a database.
 
And as a final word. Smart connected things without goals and analytics are fruitless. And goals need not be set in stone, as they are generally informed by analytics. Tactical drives the strategic and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin. Planning is essential but plans are useless.

 

Machines, Capital.

Two books have come up consistently in discussions lately:

The Second Machine Age - Brynjolfsson and McAfee - Washington Post Review.

Capital - Piketty - Bloomberg Article.

Probably not to be ignored by any serious amateur in economics and business looking at where we have been and where we are headed.

Analysis Defined.

Dictionary definition: Examination of structure as a basis for interpretation.

As an action: Data -> Results.
Or more richly: Inputs and Ideas -> Decisions and Deliverables.

Methodologies: 7C's:

Traditional: Three "Chi"s:

• 1. Chance - guess.
• 2. Cheat - know the answer before one starts.
• 3. Chestnuts - rules of thumb with unknown basis, gut.

Systematic: Four "K"s:

• 4. Coordination - statistics and regression for projection - functions of independent variables against well understood dependent varaiables like time and position.
• 5. Correlation - aka coincidence - any available variable against any other variable... including methods used in Big Data.
• 6. Crowd - wisdom of the masses (large numbers) - human and others - emergence.
• 7. Core - models based on reality - physical and observed.

The first six are all about getting to the seventh - building a model of reality. The key is a platform and framework for getting to the core.