Roundtable: How can we put the consumer at the heart of the IoT?

To mark the announcement that next year’s Smart Home World event is moving to The Crystal in London, IP&TV News’ roving reporter Thomas Noszczak sought out seven leading tech vendors in the IoT space and asked them -  “How can we put the consumer at the heart of the IoT?”

Here’s what they had to say….

Gus Desbarats

Gus Desbarats (Chairman, Alloy): IoT is more about services than things. The propositions are totally artificial experiences that won’t become compelling by accident. Every detail of every interaction needs to be specified.  Just like in movie production, the heart of innovation process is ‘experience mapping’ a creative ideation process that visualises events and associated issues along a timeline. Mapping starts at a quite broad ‘customer journey’ level but drills down in stages into every interaction step.

IoT’s compelling experiences are tried and tested ones where ‘interaction mock-ups’ have been created early, and tested often, using a broad range of very fast techniques, like quick ‘scenario hacks’ of connected sensors stuck on cardboard mock-ups. It’s the smartest way to manage the inherent unknowns of how people will react to new propositions, before making big commitments to specific delivery strategies.

Jonathan Lishawa

Jonathan Lishawa (CEO, Presciense): I believe that to be successful in the long term the design experience must enhance our lives, presenting a convenient and time saving way in which to interact and manage our environment and personal well-being. This will in itself not be achieved by managing single devices but rather by learning our lifestyle; routine, preferences, habits and even physiology, automatically and proactively managing the environment around us in advance and under our control, registering and notifying us of changes outside of the norm.

If you like it will extended and enhance our peripheral nervous system meaning that we need only actively manage exceptions. This capability and all of the technology must be simply presented through one interface, efficient, demonstrably secure and the machine learning capability reliable if it is to stand any chance of being adopted and trusted by us. 

Jim Hunter

Jim Hunter (Chief Scientist and Technology Evangelist, Greenwave Systems): The key to mass consumer adoption of IoT is to make sure that interactions between people and things blend into a consumer’s life. To accomplish this, the current trend of one app per device or per company must evolve. Things must be considered as you would think of your friends or employees.

Interactions with things should use the same paradigms and user experiences that people use to communicate, store and share their stories. For example, consumers and things should be able to use social media to share important messages.  Similarly, things should be scheduled using standard calendars used to set appointments with people in our lives, versus proprietary app-based calendars created by the thing maker. Of course this does not happen overnight.  It is accomplished through well-designed data and object models that elevate and translate object communication into a semantic conversation that we can all understand.

Nir Ezer

Nir Ezer (VP Products, Friendly Technologies): Smart Homes probably have the highest number of connected “things,” which are designed to address various aspects of the home such as security, safety, power consumption, climate control and home automation. Just imagine that each of these “things” is monitored and controlled from a different interface; in this scenario, managing them becomes a complex and time-consuming task.

As a homeowner, what I really want is a unified home dashboard—an intuitive and friendly Smart Home portal that enables me to control all the connected devices in my home from one portal, which gives me the peace of mind that comes from knowing I can monitor my Smart Home anytime, anywhere and that I’ll be alerted to issues as they occur.

To create such a unified dashboard, service providers must separate the “things” (sensors, devices) from the cloud platform that monitors them.

Roger Tao

Roger Tao (Product Division, D-Link): Cameras will be at the centre of our future Smart Homes as they evolve. Super sensor, intelligent cameras that are able to handle contextual and behavioural analysis are set to enter our lives in the near future. Today, we already see facial recognition deployed in a business environment such as retail stores. This functionality and more is just around the corner for the consumer smart camera. But it does require very powerful computing power. The end result will not only make our homes more secure, but much more comfortable too. Imagine a camera recognising when you wake up in the morning. Now imagine it triggers your coffee machine to turn on and brew fresh coffee…

Speed will always be at the core of the user experience around the IoT. Low latency is necessary to achieve fast data exchange between connected devices and the Internet.

Ruth Wilson

Ruth Wilson (DSP Group): They need to be intuitive, secure, cost-effective, reliable, to work out of the box and not to break anything else already installed in the home and with a simple user interface. Now with the combination of data and voice integral in a single solution, Ultra Low Energy (ULE) is providing the platform to make this happen.

ULE-based systems are very easy to use and designed to be self-installed,  and due to the inherent range and full home coverage of DECT there’s no need for repeaters – that makes the system cost much more attractive. The allocated DECT spectrum is interference free, whereas other technologies suffer from busy spectrum , making  the ULE system  much more reliable. When adding natural voice to the picture as the way to manage the system, we will see more people picking up IoT services. One more hurdle that prevents mass adoption is multiple standards with no interoperability – ULE is an open standard, fully interoperable for other ULE devices and provides a great transport mechanism to sit underneath  other application layer standards.

Conny Franzen

Conny Franzén (President, Inteno Broadband Technology): In our opinion, the connected home starts with a cloud enabled gateway software. With an open software platform designed for innovation and participation it will become the hub for the connected home. The level of smartness is very flexible; some are interested in convenience, media and comfort, some in monitoring and some in home care.

In order for this to be possible we promote an open system, ready for the innovation and participation, enabling the operator or open access network to partner with industry leading application suppliers. In the end the “system” will be the enabler and the application will put the consumer at the heart of IoT.

Click here to download the preview brochure for this year’s Smart Home World 2016 (21-22 June, 2016, The Crystal, London)

Entering the ‘Internet of Services’

Smart Home roundtable: 

Entering the ‘Internet of Services’

Last month’s IBC saw plenty of speculation about IoT in general and the Smart Home in particular – specifically how they were going to impact home entertainment. IP&TV News’ Thomas Noszczak decided to gather the thoughts of six leading solutions providers in the ecosystem, to sound them out on one of the fundamental shifts in perception that seems to be taking place in this area.

He asked: “If we are moving from the Internet of Things to the Internet of Services, how can we best engage the consumer in this new ecosystem?”

Here’s what they told him…

Ceece Links

Cees Links, Founder & CEO, GreenPeak:
Consumers are not interested in things – they do not want an Internet of Things. Instead they want services – delivered using the latest technologies and connectivity that make their lives safer, smarter, more comfortable and more convenient.

What do consumers want? They want smart security, smart environmental control, smart energy, smart lifestyle monitoring. They want services that they do not have to install and set up – they want services that learn how they and their families live their lives and then automatically configure the house to the needs and schedules of the people living inside.

Currently the tech industry is marketing this new generation of smart solutions as a collection of things to be bought, installed and configured together. Aside from tech early innovators and earnest DIYers, consumers do not want to do it all themselves. They want solutions that work right out of the box.

Benn Bennett

Ben Bennett, SVP Business Development, Irdeto:
As services have evolved, so has cybercrime. Today’s cybercrime environment can almost be described as “Hacking as a Service” with criminal tools such as ransomware available for purchase and botnets for rent by the hour.

Consumers depend on Service Providers to stay ahead of the ever-increasing array of cyber threats to their homes; to be the security gatekeeper and remove privacy or security implications. In order to meet these expectations providers will need to implement systems that provide protection, intelligence and control for IP connected devices in the home environment, while at the same time making sure this additional security is seamlessly integrated so it does not impact the overall consumer experience.

Joep van Eijden

Joep van Eijden, Sigma Designs:
Today’s consumers are accustomed to the idea of a specific app that controls a specific task or device, a paradigm ingrained from this decade of the smartphone’s evolution.

With so many new IoT devices and data points soon to be relevant in and out of the home, consumers will want a new control model; one-to-one is no longer adequate.

Security companies, telecommunications providers, retailers, STB makers and others will compete to provide the “command center” experience in the connected home. The brands that can reliably combine the most interoperable devices and create the most seamless experiences will inevitably gain and maintain the most user affection.

Darrell A. Haber

Darrell A. Haber, VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Skyworth: 
As MSO’s search for ways to increase revenue, they will look to provide new value-added services beyond their traditional businesses.  The IoT brings new opportunities for the MSO to take a more active role with their customers and potentially act as gatekeepers for all IoT services.

The strength in these offerings will hinge on the MSO being able to turn a literal broadband gateway into a figurative “gateway to the world”.  The termination point of the internet in the house has become the most important point in the daily lives of consumers and has largely been ignored beyond delivering traditional triple-play services.  MSO’s must seize the opportunity to expand their offerings through home automation and control, home security and home media management.  

Benoit Joly

Benoit Joly, SVP Smart Home, Technicolor Connected Home: The more developers will be able to create scenarios based on multiple devices talking to each other, the more hype and end-user engagement they will generate.

Technicolor’s ize offers digital concierge services similar to what everyone know in real life: A nurse, a doorman, a caretaker, a guard… We use sensors and analysis to help you manage your everyday life, from anywhere. This is very different from selling isolated connected products with a single function.

With ize the operator TV services are part of the smart home experience. This allows Network Services Providers to market it easily, adding parental control, gaming and other OTT apps to their current offering. For example, parents can receive a notification when a child wants to watch TV. Or you can see who is ringing at your door on the TV screen. It’s a greater integrated consumer experience than having separate solutions that don’t talk to each other.

Roberto Pellegrini

Roberto Pellegrini, VP Strategic Marketing and Business IoT, ADB: 
At ADB we advocate IoT is a tool for business model innovation, able to create new “services” opportunities even for sectors who consider pure “products” as their core business.

IoT creates the opportunity to manage and evolve the interaction between end users and products over time, and can evolve from insight purely on the product’s lifecycle to insight on use cases: this is the premise for the creation of a “service” proposition attached to a traditional “product” proposition.

More importantly, the ability to create collaborations with other industries’ applications, can lead to “loosely” bundled service propositions which are particularly attractive for end users, as they augment the utility of products with respect to their stand-alone usage. This is applicable equally to B2C and to B2B industries.


Click here to download an early preview of next year’s Smart Home World (21 – 22nd June, 2016, The Crystal, London) guide