I've been attending Thing Monk off and on for a few days. It's a really great conference, organised with a lot of care and attention to detail. I highly recommend attending and technology companies like my employer ThoughtWorks should even consider sponsoring if they want to get on the radar of the IoT community in London. On the basis of what I saw, everyone and anyone in the IoT space was in attendance.
The opening keynote, the moment seizes (you), was from Sam Phippen from Digital Ocean. He gave an interesting talk about the obsession with shipping things and how this results in short term thinking in software, a big problem if you are putting software products into people's home that need to be designed to last for a long period of time.
Haiyan Zhang, ex-Ideo, now Innovation Director at Microsoft Research talked about Expressive Interfaces for the Internet of Things. She head up a team focused on Connected Play developing products that surface information and become active in human-like ways, like smart jewellery that responds to colour in the wearer's environment. She talked about the ways in which small changes in interfaces are non-linear unlike small changes in computer science. For example, the best speech recognition services have 95% accuracy but once that accuracy reaches 99%, it will be a game changer for human computer interaction.
Martin Gale gave an interesting talk about Living Life on the Edge. Martin has the amazing job title of Master Inventor and CTO for the Industrial Sector at IBM. He talked about the way in which sensor networks are being deployed to transform heavy industry in a fourth industrial revolution AKA Industry 4.0 as companies move towards cyber-physical systems. Once upon a time, you would wait for something to fail then go mend it. That progressed into scheduled maintenance with rules and process around preventing failures. The trend now is towards measuring and predicting failure before it happens, automating preventative maintenance and rerouting workflows. One of the challenges around low-powered, mission-critical sensors on the edge of networks is the latency between sensing and responding. A roundtrip to the cloud and back can be both inefficient and insecure so there is a further trend towards software-defined environments with tighter controlled communication and feedback loops. This reminded me of a recent book I read called Code/Space that refers to environments like airports that would be rendered meaningless if the software were removed.
The comedy award went to Terence Eden who gave a terrifically funny presentation called The Connected House of Horrors detailing his geeky attempts at automating all the things in his house and beyond. Rather than describe his talk I'll give you some quotes I captured from him:
"if you live with other people, don't do this"
"why does my lightswitch need to make premium rate phonecalls?"
"I am driving around in an unpatched Linux box"
"Twitter is better than almost any other IoT platform"
"The Samsung EULA says 'everything you do in front of this TV will be sent to Samsung'"
"Most domestic tech is designed by bro's in Silicon Valley living by themselves"
"none of this is making my life any better"
He built his own dashboard for his house as there was nothing out there to integrates all his stuff into a single view.
The talk that followed immediately had a similar title, The Little Things of Horror. I didn't catch all of this but what I did hear was very interesting. Alasdair Allan was talking about privacy/security issues in the context of IoT. He talked about how Mark Zuckerberg's pronouncements about an age of no privacy cannot survive the coming of IoT and the "data exhaust" that things will be emitting.
Data as infrastructure, like any other infrastructure, must be resilient
He also played down the hype around Blockchain ("just an immutable log") and reiterated the point made my Martin Gale about edge devices talking amongst themselves in preference to putting everything in the cloud.
Day 2 kicked off with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino talking about the things she had learned from her 5 years of IoT London. Alex runs the IoT London meetup, the seconds biggest IoT meetup in the world behind Bangalore. They run 11 meetups a years and 2 showcases. The next showcase will be on 26th October at City Hall with special guests from government departments in attendance. She also talked about the need to get more young people (under 30) involved in IoT. In addition to running events, Alex has also curated an amazing list of resources at iot.london including an IoT reading list and she is currently compiling a yellowpages of all UK and European companies involved in IoT.
Amongst the every events resources she mentioned were:
The Good Home project exploring ideas for 21st century urban living
Startup bootcamp who will be having their demo day on 26th January
Thingscon conference coming to the UK on June 17th
One of the other things she mentioned was a new studio that is being set up by R/GA Ventures in London to help early-stage and growth-stage startups creating connected products and services. I got chatting to Matt Webb ex-BERG and now one of the mentors on this new program. He is looking for companies to get involved in supporting this. I definitely think ThoughtWorks should jump on this as it would be a great chance to expand our network in London.
Ling Tan from citizen technology consultancy Umbrellium gave a talk about building an immersive interactive architectural interface. They created a virtual cat called Cinder that roams the network of a state of the art sensor-equipped school in Cambridge and "dreams of data" from the school management system, helping to educate and engage students. We can't we do the same for our office?
A change of pace and scale then as Thomas Grassl from SAP talked about the use of IoT in moving containers at scale around the Port of Hamburg. The numbers in this were pretty staggering. The port currently moves around 9million containers a year, 24,600 per day, enough to stretch from Hamburg to Berlin. They want to increase that number to 25million per year, 68,000 pre day, enough to stretch from Hamburg to Munich. Combining the data from telemetry systems of trucks with parking sensors, public traffic information and cargo logistics to automate the workflow of huge container was pretty impressive and gave real scale to the idea of connected things.
Ports have their own hackathons too! The Port of Antwerp is hosting a Logistics of the Future hackathon event on 9th December. If you like playing with big toys aswell as big data, maybe you should go?
The final talk I saw was perhaps the most impressive of all. Johan Stokking is tech lead of The Things Network, an amazingly ambitious project to create a global network for low powered, long range devices using the LoRa specification. "The inconvenient truth about constrained devices" he said is that they are stupid not smart. They have to be stupid in order to consume less power. Messaging size, frequency and timings are all incredibly constrained when using small devices over long distance. He compared long range radio networks with short range IP networks by describing them as "slow and loud" versus "fast and quiet". They are community-powered, open-source and all around the world, evenin in China. Looking at the lack of London gateways, I couldn't help but think, ThoughtWorks should be a part of this.
I saw a few other talks that were also good but I didn't take notes for. If any of this interests you, head over to the Thing Monk website or follow them on twitter. I'm sure some of the slides and/or recording will be available soon. If you are interested in IoT, I would say don't miss this conference next year. It's an absolute goldmine of information.