Attendees from Nigeria to Brazil talk IoT, 5G & the Internet of Senses on world #IoTDay

IoT Waikato’s first session for the year was hosted on World IoT Day on 9 April as a virtual meetup in collaboration with Smart Cities Council ANZ, NZ IoT Alliance, and IoT Alliance Australia. We had over 250 people register with around half attending on the day. Not only great numbers but because we were virtual it meant physical location was no longer relevant and so we had people from all around the world tuning in.

IoT Waikato is a Wintec initiative bringing together industry, technology businesses, local government, entrepreneurs and innovators, students and the wider community on a regular basis to hear about and discuss IoT innovation and network with leaders in the IoT, Industry 4.0 and smart cities space.

This time we wanted to inspire a wider conversation around opportunities for greater IoT innovation with speakers talking about IoT and 5G, use cases, approaches and challenges to solution development and deployment, security, connectivity, smart cities, and scaling.

“If you put sensors everywhere, what would you know and what would you do with what you know?” was how Jeremy Foster, Country Manager NZ at Ericcson, started off, including a reference to SimCity and a 14 year old who presented a solution to Barack Obama for providing sustainable storm water and run off in modern urban environments using IoT.

Entrepreneurs, when it comes to real-time data “please don’t get stuck around what real-time means in technical terms, think about what it means to the business decision you are making with the information you have got” he advised.

Jeremy focused on how data should be considered and how it all comes together with his presentation covering IoT and 5G, manufacturing and health sector use cases, and the “Internet of Senses” - consumers predictions around digital sound and vision, touch, taste, and smell enabling multi-sensory experiences that are inseparable from physical reality.

Interestingly when consumers were asked about changes we might expect in how we use the Internet and communicate in 2014 and beyond, they had this crazy idea that streaming services would enable us to view content on the move. Who would have thought that would come true ??

April’s IoT Waikato event was co-hosted by Adam Beck, Executive Director at Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand. Adam hosted the Q&A and also had the audience engage through Mentimeter around some general questions.

“What is the best way to avoid privacy concerns being eroded since innovation tends to move first with privacy not always built in?” asked a member of the audience with Jeremy firstly responding with “Who is asking the question? A digital native or a digital migrant?” and going on to talk about the importance of trust and considering what privacy means and what it is useful for.

The first question on Mentimeter – What one word describes IoT innovation to you?

Then – Could 5G supercharge the IoT sector?

Jeremy advised that “on any technology decision or innovation I would always be having non-technical people assess the value of what we are doing in real terms” and our next speaker, Matt Hector-Taylor, Co-Founder at IoT Ventures, then proudly introduced himself as “the non-technical person Jeremy was referring to” and took us through lessons learnt in designing and delivering end to end IoT solutions.

IoT Ventures works with entrepreneurs and businesses to deliver Lora based IoT solutions in New Zealand and Australia with a focus on Lora Wan and Lora technology, long range and low power IoT, looking at the problem that needs to be solved and generating business value.

“We have a few scars as far as delivering solutions … and so if there is one lesson we can callout it is that you are not necessarily going to get a return from your investment, whether you are a customer, entrepreneur or business” said Matt, given the risks, constraints and moving parts that need to be brought together in delivering a solution.

In this regard Matt went on to talk about how IoT projects are susceptible to the same things that could go askew other large software or IoT projects in terms of not knowing the scope, not knowing what the outcome is, not getting everyone on-board with the value you are trying to drive, and managing multiple stakeholders, for example, and how there are a lot of parallels between building large buildings and delivering IoT at scale.

“Spending time and money understanding the business value you are wanting to deliver and considering risk is fundamental” advised Matt, “before you get to designing what your solution is going to be.”

“You can have as many great ideas as you like in the initial engagement but to get to a full production solution that is fully scaled and is delivering benefits is going to take a lot of time and money … understand that it is a journey and don’t forget change management ” says Matt.

During Q&A Adam asked – How are you feeling about IoT innovation?

Nam Nguyen then presented IoT Alliance Australia’s IoT reference framework, developed to be applicable to most IoT solutions, looking at IoT as an end to end solution, and that is designed to be vendor neutral to enable, in a common language, better articulation of solution requirements.

The IoT reference framework can be used to understand: the solution; security; privacy; safety; resilience; reliability; the ecosystem; and more, from an end to end perspective across the entire IoT solution.

Nam talked about examples of the frameworks application to the planning process within the water utility and energy sectors in Australia, considering various lenses – business, architecture, operation planning, security, data, and technology services.

“Security is important at every layer not just in terms of considering the technology but the process of handling security incidents and users” emphasised Nam.

We were running a little over time, so we skipped Q&A and went straight on to hearing from Jiveen MacGillivray, Challenge Manager at CivTech – part of the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, who was up at 4.20am in Scotland along with Stuart Colville, Technical Director at M2M Cloud.

CivTech, soon to be in its 5th iteration, has a role that is both within government and outside government with a challenge-based approach to solving problems as a collaboration between the public and private sector.

“CivTech is trying to address how you procure what you don’t know exists” says Jiveen, with the challenges to date resulting in over 140 jobs, primarily in the SME space with over 11 million pounds worth of contracts plus other flow on investments and grants of just over 6 million pounds.

One of the problems that came through CivTech was a local government needing to manage over 800 million pounds of physical assets including knowing the exact location of these assets, how they are used, and how the operations are planned inside or outside of a building. M2M Cloud was asked to initially focus on ICT assets to reduce the time it takes to find those assets off the network in a compliant way and meeting relevant digital security considerations.

“The technical and commercial requirements really pushed our team to explore innovative and daring technical approaches to solve this challenge” said Stuart, which resulted in the creation of Artemis, named after the Greek goddess of hunting in the wilderness, a solution providing organisations with location intelligence.

“Artemis gives assets a voice” explained Stuart, leveraging a small radio beacon that sends and receives short- and long-range radio singles, using Lora, Wifi and Bluetooth technology, with a small replaceable battery that lasts up to 3 years.

The global asset tracking market is estimated to be $32 billion by 2024 and “there is a really exciting opportunity for public sector organisations to mutually share their Artemis networks to create a network effect … it is our ambition to create a national low cost public sector asset tracking network all done through existing connected devices and infrastructure” says Stuart, who is seeking customers for pilots in Australia and New Zealand.

The final quick poll on Mentimeter asked participants for their thoughts on what contributes to greater IoT action/investment.

From the audience we had a question around pricing and Stuart said they were aiming for $70 NZD as a start and also confirmed they were interested in pilots across both the public and private sector.

On all accounts the first time ever that we have run IoT Waikato as a virtual event was a success, as one of 25 events held worldwide for #IoTDay. We will most likely also be hosting the June IoT Waikato Meetup online.

For information on IoT Waikato visit www.meetup.com/IoTWaikato