Mar 26, 2020

Regulation and Competitive Advantage

A couple of years ago, I was in conversation with a group of technologists and investors at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. This gathering takes place every January in Washington DC. Think of it as the transportation industry's equivalent of Mobile World Congress. 

Our group was discussing the then emerging market for connected cars. I threw in a question about the impact of regulation on their business strategies. Regulation matters in relation to safety, liability and insurance solutions, and data management. Factors such as these matter more to commercial viability than technical innovations. The need to factor regulation into technology choices and business models was evident even then. The universal response I got from the group was that innovators needed to be given the leeway to develop the technology and novel services. Putting it explicitly, regulators needed to stay well out of the way.

The same issues are apparent as new markets develop on top of the foundations of mobile communications. One example is the sharing of consumer data derived from mobile phones [1]. Another is Facebook's difficulties in launching its Libra currency and payments initiative, ahead of regulatory buy-in.

Jan 10, 2020

2019 in Review: A changed IoT landscape

The turn of the year has triggered many people to reflect on what they were doing 10 years ago. With that in mind, I looked through my tracker of M2M and IoT corporate initiatives to see what has changed and what we might learn about the future. The main categories of initiative include the following: technology innovation, market entry/expansion, partnering, acquisitions/investments, distributor agreements, product/service innovation, business reorganization and outsourcing.

A more tightly knit IoT value-chain 

A snapshot of the 2009 industry covers a relatively well defined mobile-industry ecosystem. This largely centered on mobile operator initiatives, driven by leading operators and supported by GSMA efforts to develop a new market for the mobile ecosystem.

Dec 30, 2019

Privacy payoffs in smart cities


A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Connected Cities Privacy Summit (CCPS) in Washington DC. This was a 'first of a kind' event focusing on data privacy issues. Other smart city events tend to feature pilot-projects and technology demonstrators.CCPS drew speakers from Google’s Sidewalk Labs and public-sector officials from Canada. US presenters came from a range of academic, consultancy, legal and technology organizations [1].

Many of the CCPS presentations took a cautious approach to privacy protections. To some extent, this reflected the nature of the audience. Roughly half of the attendees hailed from legal, compliance and policy professions. I took a somewhat different approach. My presentation covered the opportunities arising from data sharing. This drew on some of the lessons learned from oneTRANSPORT.io, one of my consulting projects over the past few years [2].

Sep 23, 2019

Telcos and Smart Cities

Earlier this month, the publications team from Mobile Europe hosted their Smart IoT Connect event in London [1]. This is one in a regular series that examines the role of the telecoms ecosystem against
a backdrop of opportunities across the Internet of Things (IoT) industry. I was fortunate to attend and here are a few highlights from this year’s event which focused on the smart cities sector.

In broad terms, the supply-side of the industry is maturing. Businesses are focusing on the practicalities of closing commercial deals in contrast to launching exploratory pilot projects. There is a realization that the smart city proposition and sales process spans a wider set of parameters than telco connectivity. Telcos are talking about new commercial models and service solutions, such as data management, that map to higher levels of the IoT solutions stack and above the connectivity layer. However, based on what was presented it is going to take time to translate strategy into execution, at scale, and commercial success. The number of local government representatives attending the event reflected positively on the demand side of the equation. It validates a key theme throughout the event about the need to bridge the public-sector-to-telco knowledge gap.

Aug 13, 2019

MNOs’ IoT Platform Predicament

IoT Analytics, the German market research firm, recently published a customer satisfaction assessment of IoT platforms [1]. It covers 50 vendors and applies a broad definition for IoT platforms. At one end of the spectrum, there are multi-purpose cloud infrastructure and platforms, such as those offered by Amazon and Microsoft. At the other end are platforms for niche users, with machine builders as one example.

IoT Analytics used feedback from senior executives in organizations that procured and are deploying IoT solutions to rate the top-25 platforms. There is a slight bias to North America, which accounted for 40% of the mix. Europe (25%), APAC (25%) and MEA (10%) make up the rest of the survey.

For this post, I propose to focus on a summary chart. This maps leaders, challengers and follower IoT platforms across technology and customer-centricity dimensions. The chart highlights a predicament for mobile network operators and especially the large European operators.