Mobile Monday London Event Review by Ericsson Labs
Posted on: May 20, 2011 – Filed under: Global
On Monday May 16th, I joined the M2M event in downtown London organized by MoMo London. It was a great experience seeing the crowd of developers, start-ups, M2M engineers and mobile business people. The hall was packed with no empty seats.
The panel of Camille Mendler Informa (@cmendler) moderator, Dan Warren GSMA (@tmgb), David Wood Accenture (@dw2), William Webb from Neul and myself gave short presentations first before entering the hot seats.
A few take-aways from the panel and presentations:
- We have talked about M2M before; now it’s going to happen.
- Smartphone technology and its miniaturization will enable advances.
- Many believed there is money in billing, tracking and managing devices.
- White space spectrum radio was a proposal for UK-based vertical radio for coverage.
- There is a diverse set of requirements from the different verticals.
- Someone taking responsibility for service enablement needed.
- Security is a main issue and some verticals are more sensitive than others.
- Embedded SIMs were both proposed and opposed by the panelists.
My main message was that Ericsson envisions 50 billion connected devices by 2020 . We believe the business potential is high and there will be space for many developers of applications, devices and solutions. I presented the Social Web of Things (SWoT) concept about how we could see ‘things’ being part of our social network. During the networking I demoed it on an iPad.
There are a lot of challenges though. We need global scale to minimize end-user costs and reach for the developers. There will be a huge amount of data produced by all of these devices including sensors, meters, cameras, cars, medical devices, public equipment, fleets, screens, etc. How can all this data be aggregated, processed and analyzed? Also, engagement in a diverse set of verticals such as healthcare, transport, automotive, utilities, retail, consumer electronics is required. The engagements need a horizontal approach to reach scale.
Ericsson is active in the connectivity space and in M2M service enablement offering products and APIs to developers building M2M solutions. Experimentation is currently ongoing at Ericsson Labs. One example of a useful API is the cell-ID-based location API for tracking and locating non GPS-enabled devices. Via the Ericsson Labs Developer Community Blog.