Tag: internet of things (page 1 of 1)

Lightning – cryptocurrency and the Internet of Things

lightning

Bitcoin is an experiment. That's granted. The fact that it's trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a ballpark limit of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has 'gone through' – non-recourse transactions – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you're looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that's not for this post.)

While 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week.

State channel – more exciting than it sounds

The crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It's at the heart of the currency's success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It's with a fair degree of excitement then that I've been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013.

The jargon here is state channel – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!) Read more

The Internetome

Internetome conference, David Orban
Just going back through some archives and found the definition I developed for the Internetome conference in 2010. Sponsored by Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, it was, I believe, the UK's first all-day Internet of Things conference. The conference website bit the dust some time during my subsequent server migrations, so for posterity, particularly as everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days ...

The Internetome

The Internet of Things marks the unprecedented intertwining of the Internet with the ‘real world’: the intangible information space with the tangible living space; ubiquitous computing and the informational augmentation of reality.

To date, we have employed ‘real world’ metaphors to aid our naming, definition and understanding of information technology, such as the biologically sourced terms web, bug, virus, worm, memory, backbone and sensor. And with the advent of the Internet of Things, IT now interweaves with the reality that provided the metaphors.

But we’re not interested in the technology per se. We’re interested in the many facets and implications of its application. So, borrowing from the use of the suffixes -ome and -omics to describe the object and study of a biological field (eg, genomics, the study of the genome), we make the following neologistic definitions:

The Internetome: the manifestations (facets and implications) of the Internet of Things.

Internetomics: the study of the Internetome directed at improving transdisciplinary understanding and its transdisciplinary design, governance and execution.

Just rediscovered this article about the conference on ReadWrite, written by David Orban (featured in the photo here).

Future Vistas for SEO

Brighton Dome – the front of the queue for Brighton SEOThe Brighton SEO conference is, I believe, the largest of its kind in the UK. We're expecting over 1,000 delegates today. I'm up immediately after the "Ask the engines" panel featuring representatives from both Google and Bing, and you can peruse my stack above on where I think the third decade of the web's development might take today's SEO practitioners.

What's the hypothesis for future vistas?

Well without web search there would be no search engine optimisation, right? (You can see why I get invited to speak at such august gatherings ... pure insight!) And yet the SEO skillset no longer needs the fuel and constant vagaries of public WWW search to keep practitioners in full employ.

SEO can be considered with ill repute when it's perceived to be about gaming (read "fooling") search engine algorithms in order to serve solely the website owner's perceived needs. However, when you view SEO skills as working in partnership with search engines to help deliver the right information to the web user at the right time in the right format, suddenly the reputation is transformed. How incredibly useful!

Moreover, we are moving beyond WWW search. All sorts of data and information and knowledge repositories are growing fast as the age of Big Data, Big Information and, hopefully, Big Knowledge dawns. Anybody with the facility to help make sense of that data, transforming data into useful information and information into knowledge, has the right skills at just the right time.

Influence: Socializing the Enterprise – my presentation at Dreamforce 2011

Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff is excited that there are 45,000 delegates registed for this week's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It sure is one helluva a show (and I particularly appreciated the Metallica and Will.i.am gig last night!)

The theme for this year's conference is the socialization of the enterprise and the reason for my invitation to present to the Executive Summit yesterday and delegates at large today. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com is paying me to be here.]

There can be no doubt that Salesforce.com is on a mission to help its customers make the social transition with as much emphasis placed on increasing the social exchange with employees and partners as customers and prospects, and this mission entailed the acquisition of Radian6 earlier this year.

When I spoke at the Radian6 Social2011 conference in April, I felt the excitement at the opportunity to meld the Radian6 and Salesforce.com worlds, but I hadn't appreciated how fast this integration would take place. Simply gobsmacking. Read more

How data is transforming digital marketing

Digital marketing has come a long way in the past decade, as we’ve moved beyond putting existing materials online and learned how to really harness the native advantages of digital technologies.

The pace of change continues unabated, and among its most important drivers is data – and the meaning of that data.

Every one of us is going to be producing more data describing our use of digital products and services. This is what I like to call digital detritus. Detritus – discarded organic matter which is decomposed by microorganisms and reappropriated by animal and plant life – is interestingly analogous to our regard for, and treatment of, the data that we’re all shedding.

Big data

When it comes to the increase in data, we’re working on a logarithmic scale: we’re talking about hundreds and thousands of times more. Data in such quantities may well prove to have important new mathematical properties that are attractive to marketers, customer service and product development teams. Moreover, we don’t actually do much with the digital detritus today – it mostly resides in inaccessible log files, although the technology for collating it is becoming increasingly achievable and affordable.

What does this mean in everyday terms? Read more

Influence in the age of the social web – keynote to EUPRERA

It's a beautiful sunny Spring day here at the EUPRERA Spring Symposium in Lisbon. It's my first time at this gathering of the European Public Relations Education and Research Association – the forum for innovative PR research and education – and I'm delighted to have been invited to deliver the keynote.

Thanks to Philip Young and David Phillips for the invitation. Here's the slidestack. I was a bit surprised to get a slide count of 77, but 16 of the slides present the infographic 'Content – An illustrated history', which is easy to breeze through :-)

Marketing and Communications in the Internetome

I've been out of circulation but had a crazy week before I left, including chairing the launch of 6UK for the promotion of the new Internet Protocol and running the UK's first Internet of Things conference, Internetome. Thanks to the Intellect events team for super event management, and to the sponsors Intel, Qualcomm, Consumer Electronics Association, Meanwhile and 6UK.

Here's my presentation "Marketing and Communications in the Internetome":

The next big big thing: it’s happening now

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that's changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you're an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it's the end of 2010, it's the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that's you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition's. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference, in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I'd urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. Read more

Intro to Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the CIPR Social Summer session

@dewilded summed up one of the key conclusions we reached at the CIPR this evening in his tweet:

Companies thought they were laid bare by Web 2.0, they'll feel positively naked w/out reputation mgt set for RDF & the semantic web #CIPRSM [link]

My role was to act as tour guide and polemicist; to introduce the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things in just 90 minutes; and to leave the session attendees with considerable food for thought.

My slidestack is embedded here FYI, but before I sign off I should thank David Phillips (@DavidGHPhillips / http://leverwealth.blogspot.com) for his most pertinent and enthusiastic contributions to the discussion. He's a man who knows his PR and semantics for sure.

And it appears I may have achieved my objective. As @jonnystark and @Mark_Wyatt put it:

@Sheldrake thanks for the talk. Sat with @dewilded and still talking about it. [link]

@Sheldrake Many thanks for the talk yesterday. Really engaged and informative. Discussion carried on late into the night with @dewilded [link]

[Note: the video links in the presentation don't appear to be working in Firefox at the moment, but they do if you cut and paste the URLs into a browser tab. Odd. Investigating.]