Fair Data Society Days - Antonio Gonzalo: IoT data & trends

antonio i'm glad to say is one is part of the sword swarm team uh we're leveraging his extensive experiences in business uh and one of his passions includes iot and data connected with iot so antonio and when you are with us yes you are yes i'm here okay yeah so he'll present some specifics around iot data and the trends in this area so hi antonio thank you please take over hello thank you shark well uh let me share my screen there you go okay so i guess that now you can see my presentation full screen okay thank you so much so my name is antonio gonzalo i've been working in i work actually worked swarmed before before swarm i was working for 12 years in telefonica in the r plus d department in iot so uh well iot new new businesses but iot was the real hype of that uh so uh yeah and then in the so i can provide a very deep knowledge or i would say knowledge of the industry of what happens there what are the thoughts of hardware manufacturers in one side and the guys that that consume iot devices on the other so those those two extremes are the ones that i can i can i can talk about this presentation here is around data about how data how iot data is the only thing that can save iot and it has to be mixed in a place in an ecosystem in a world where where the data could be easily could easily travel and this is where web3 or the actual crypto or blockchain technologies are are up to so mixing those these three these three components iot data and web3 we might be able to get to get to the place where we want to so let's start let's start here data is no there's no uh secret the data is going to be becoming increasing increasingly big and you know the actual number of set of eyes i am i'm lost of how i cannot actually conceptualize how much data is this is absolutely uh out of everybody everybody's mind it's growing that fast it's because not only because we we create this data but because the devices create this data with devices around us provides a constant influx of data that is stored and it is processed somewhere elsewhere that we don't really know but this is the actual key component that will uh that we have to to to to capture to actually dominate to to succeed in this in this deal so iot is a promise basically iot is a promise that everything will be interconnected the air all the objects that you see around you will be connected we'll be talking among each other and we're talking to you in a way in a seamless way that is not very uh obstructive to you but it's actually and it provides some liquid benefits some liquid world where everything is is is uh fluid and uh goes with your your wishes and that's that's the promise of iot but we are not the getting there and this is a trend that has happened for the last year iot is not really happening uh it's actually broken how is that it all starts with this meme it's actually a corporate meme from the ericsson ceo in 20 in 2010 he says that he's gone he said that they were going to have 50 billion devices connected by 2020. 50 billion devices seven connected devices per person in the world which is quite a lot uh not only him but a lot of people just came afterwards to say the same the same discourse even well all those all those classical so this usual suspects uh were given forecasts that the range in the same direction so we all expected a lot of devices and a lot of data to come up those devices by 2020. um did it happen uh well no didn't it did not happen and i took the actual uh work to find out how many devices we're creating on a yearly basis and going to these silicon waffles where the devices are the actual chips are manufactured and what i found is that there are no more factories for creating devices devices are the number of devices created every year is mostly the same there have been no new factories so iot is not really happening we are not unleashing the power of connected things at all it's just the same thing that is around us because it's a complex thing actually iot is more complicated than just uh connecting putting connectivity into a thing uh this is one of the reasons why remotes are not yet universal you have seven or five or six remotes per per house household and it's a complex mixture of things it's a services ecosystem it's really really complex and the state of the art of iot devices is this this is an actual standalone device that provides data and serves for utility but this is iot is not exactly what you have in your wristband because it's not self-sustainable it's not a self entity depends on something else and that ties the whole ecosystem that creates the whole problem because there is no that simple thing that you need a hub to connect a thing creates the interoperability problem that we have that and i'm going to talk straight away so why we have this uh this this problem with the iot has not worked well i'm going to go faster this first of the costs imagine what is to store all the data not only communicate but to store all the data of those devices in order to have it in a centralized fashion such as the big players in the industry wants to the amount of uh data data store um that the warehouses that you will need to build is out of the charts it's unbelievable it really really it's really huge so it's not only communicating but storing all those data and of course manufacturing the devices but we're getting we're getting that the more moore's law is always in our in our favor second problem is security and this is a crucial thing in all iot devices no i don't have to speak about constant and permanent iot leaks and iot hacks and i would like to point out that this thing that security thing is a very dangerous thing and just a brief anecdote of those two fellows here uh that actually uh those are the security engineer from twitter and from my acting that hacked a jeep in 20 in 2016 i think to prove that the actual the connected divide connected cars uh can be hacked and for doing this he they want to uh to wired to the actual magazine and put a journalist of you can see his face of terror when he when they cut the transmission out of the car in the middle of a highway so the the cars can be hacked and the iot devices are not secure actually they they ended up throwing him to in a ditch so the security not only is dangerous it it also compromise or privacy all together and iot devices are not at that moment at that place yet they are still breakable they're still hackable third problem is ux this is uh another a complete other realm of problems but comes from a design perspective but they are completely completely and utterly absurd i put some examples here from g0 those toaster that actually reminds you to pay bills uh or this and i love this one this one from this from the ces from the last that samsung fridge that actually helps you tweet because it's what i do when i go to fetch a glass of water a tweet so it's just it just doesn't make sense so from a from a design perspective the ecosystem is also broken and then there we go and the business the business model is absolutely broken and this has to do a lot with data the actual model that they follow is the current model that we follow for the web 2 which is based on ads and it's uh that incentive model of gathering data from users to sell ads has taken us to the place where we are where big corporations actually permeate in in our life in our live day in everyday life to gather the most then the most information that they can in order to as i said sell ads uh there's a lot of leaks in these iot devices that for instance um that nest device from google that had a hidden microphone that wasn't explicitly indicated anywhere which is a way of concern i don't know how to talk about a cambridge analytica and the idea that all the data of for instance health health data is going to those companies whether we like it or not and as i said everything to sell ads and the last one the last problem uh i would say the big one is that interoperability i don't know if you know this thing this little thing here but uh it's supposed to it was intended to mix all the different devices from a house you know everything will be stored it will be all the data from all different devices will be transforming to through this single device into a unique hotspot where you can actually uh edit or play with this data well this thing was uh considered by forbes one of the and revolution in the sector it was then bought by google and discontinued it was closed and the problem here is uh why did they discontinue it well they didn't say that they didn't say why they discontinued this interoperability thing but assumingly it's because if you create interoperability you actually leave a play an open a door open for others to profit on the data in order to gather and to profit all those data you need to close the door it's complicated to create this interoperability it's not an easy feature here i just i just it's a brief uh screen of what are the different decisions that you have to make in order to create an iot product from the from casing to the pro to the protocols actually the biggest problem the biggest hurdle comes in this m2m iot protocols where everybody is using a different one and as the old xkcd joke says when you create a standard another standard comes into place and replace the old standard so you have another standard so there are so many standards around the globe that we actually and this updates from uh from this is from from a couple of months ago we have already 650 iot platforms to create interoperability which means that we are not creating interoperability at all in iot because 620 platforms of course they are not all you may you may know the most the most common ones from amazon from google from those are the usual ones those are the generalistic but there are a lot of platforms specifically tailored for several use cases so there are so many so many youtube platforms the data is not stored and of course everybody wants to become the facebook of iot that creates this interoperability problem that actually takes the the the industry uh back so and then it comes to web3 the web 3 with the beautiful prom sorry hold on before that and the the the problem with this interoperability and i would say the biggest problem with that is that when you come to a company and you for instance for a smart city and you want to sell street lamps the first thing they ask you is okay how long is this contract because that that street lamp needs to be there for 10 years 15 15 years 20 years how long are you gonna keep the contract with me what happens if the connectivity provider changes what happens if the if things go south things have to be alive for a lot of time a lot of years and this interoperability is the main block in the stone rock in the the road preventing to make that sale it's complicated to make these sales to cities because of this because of the length of the contracts that doesn't add up to the uh or doesn't match the length of the intended devices that you are purchasing so then crypto then crypto web3 and everything will be solved through crypto well perhaps perhaps crypto has a really a good thing really really it provides a lot of multiple uh advantages that we can put into iot or multiple characteristics that can make it a better a better ecosystem but a better place the iot industry eliminates central points of failure autonomy and peer-to-peer autonomy and this is i would say this is crucial integrity and traceability another thing very important identity and enabling microtransactions so how does how does the uh crypto helps to to solve iot well first it reduces the costs and i would say that this is crucial as i said before costs storing all the data from everybody in a single warehouse it's something unbelievable if we try to store all the all the economic transactions it will be a real problem you want to store all the doors that are open all the cars that are taken all the coffees that are making on a single every day on a single day on a daily basis it's the data can be amazing so how do we store it well there's no other way but to store it in a decentralized fashion that's the only way that all the data from all these devices can be stored there's no there's no possibility to make it in a centralized fashion and this is for instance and please allow me to to just to insert this slide where swarm has something to say and it actually takes the storage to the to the borders it actually gives the storage to the actual devices and replicates it in a way that it's sustainable this is a this is a really possible way to store all that iot data uh another another problem that actually solves uh crypto is the integrity and fault tolerance through through uh security by transparency and not through obscurity uh this this is solvable and of course of course because through uh cryptographic keys and i'm going no i'm not going into this but there are a lot of people that are all companies that actually working on this matter as locket uh that is known for multiple reasons um and now rebranded to a blockchains blockchains.com i think that no not rename they have this uh they are following this this trend is following this this idea of having the identity of having the actual uh firewall updates and everything well tailored so that the incentives from different things are aligned and there is no and you can actually download a firmware with enough guarantees that it's not tempered in an offline and on sync i'm not sorry i'm not of sync off-chain way of changing fashion so you don't have to be strictly connected to the blockchain to download it which is quite quite valuable i would say and then we go to interoperability and interoperability there are a lot of companies well i would say around six or seven that are claiming that the interrupted crypto will help interoperability between between things and i am not that sure about that because uh well i put here two examples chain of saying chain of things uh that is actually um has one of the advisors is vitalik buterin has two use cases two supply chain and uh and uh and uh solar panels and this is what this is why it's very that's why it's very very hard to store in one blockchain although as i said all the transactions that happen into things so the amount of data i can grow spend exponentially so this is why they are keeping it short or keeping it constrained to you two use cases and trying to make it fly with this and then iota who has a different approach into blockchain it's not as you know eot is not a strictly a blockchain it's what it's called a tangle and i think i would say that this is a more um pragmatic approach into having a blockchain into this into this into this world this is what a jungle looks like and well it has some several states so he has some adaptation periods for the things to confirm transaction and all this but does it solve interoperability no it does not what it does what this thing does is basically create a transport layer but it's not enough data it's still not interoperable their data is not still shared it's just uh like tcp that need for our computers it actually creates a transport layer for things which is valuable but not enough to create interoperability with data so this is where the last part comes and it's the business model the business model using web3 what is it going to be with data is it going to be ads again well it's hopefully not so the way and this is where i leave it open because it's a it's food for thought how do we create a new business model with this data um well the way that the the from uh from the last problem of iot that i didn't that i mentioned i didn't solve the ux we can take ux and data and create something that can actually uh be valuable to break those silos so it will be it will start and i'll give you a vector so starting enforcing functional value and things and this is a a slide that i like to put because it's kind of it's very design-ish and it comes from a guy i used to work with and he saw that they are the things that are around us empower empower us as a human beings so things that are connected are even more powerful and that's one of the that's how the functional value has to grow but where he has to point and this is the thing well it has to point breaking data silos the only thing that can travel those silos is data the only thing that can travel use cases is data the the is the only component that can travel for instance if i go and this is not yet solved if i bought buy a tier a theater tick a ticket uh here the ticket and i go to the city center i still don't have the ability to have a parking space for me where they know exactly where at the time that i'm going to be there breaking those data silos in the different layers that they are because interoperability is not just technical interoperability there are several as you know several layers breaking those silos is the only through data and to expanding the the functional value of the things is the only way to create those use cases that people will use and will flourish in this in this ecosystem and it's a game of costs we need to break those those coasts with these use cases they need to be powerful enough so it's accessible and then the economic flow comes from places that we haven't thought of and we're going to give you some examples uh those are examples that you already know but let's let's get so so that you you follow my my line of thoughts uh the first one is the kindle which is basically not a book it's not an electronic reader something something more it's a bookstore it's a bookstore and within their amazon realms it's confined but if you take this information and make it fly it's even bigger tesla well i don't know i'm not going to go to tesla because you know it's normally a car it's much more than that the nest thermostat that actually controls your temperature the idea of that green leaf over there was to sink all high consumption devices in your neighborhood so that the actual electricity bill the electricity consumption is flatter it's more flat and and the alternative electricity companies like that and provides you with discounts and that thinking out of the box it actually has has only to do with data and the last one is dwarfist those amazon has the same the same idea of mailbox to for reverse um for reverse uh a little bit of shipping that actually can be used for selling things it can be used as a selling point so the idea would be to take that thing connect and empower them in other data realms that are not initially thought of and if you need inspiration for that well you just need to go to madison avenue where you will find that the things have already so moral so going to these ethics and the souls and the branding that actually the the market the marketed people put into things you can actually come into an idea of how to empower a coffee shop a coffee a coffee maker a coffee machine into a way that i could actually serve people so once we get into this once we arrive to this realm where the data can be shared into different layers different places creating new use use cases in the crypto space we'll arrive to this property which is an example example thought about 20 euros 20 years ago about the iot where they say that the things have to be autonomous and when once they autonomous they know who to who owns it where's in space time communicate securely and recognize other things around putting everything together it's only possible in web 3. and this is why this is how web 3 empowers iot and can solve it but it's we are not that yet we are not yet that we are not there yet so this is uh this is what i what i would like to do what i would like to tell you the hardware costs which is the the first thing that comes to mind to our mind it's already being solved i don't think it's gonna it's just a matter of time more is our or our side but it is not the abstract world the data thing it's still still fixed and still siloed and then we'll arrive as i said before at the very beginning into a place where the customer with the actual user is in the center the the things create liquid markets around us and everything is highly customizable uh and this is what i wanted to tell you this is i will end up with a quote from glenn gibson that i just love and that was it thank you so much if you have any questions i'll be happy to answer thank you antonio that was very lively and i'm not sure if it was optimistic about iot or not but definitely it's realistic realistic yes so yes questions please i'll just wait five seconds because maybe somebody's typing otherwise i'll be selfish again and i'll just so um in connection with cities so the iot devices there just so you mentioned street lamps and things like that but um what will what will appear first in cities so what's the use case the use case in cities well actually the cities wanted to save to to save money on to have efficiencies that's all they they ask for that i haven't met i i was actually working for with with some conversations with some of them and the only thing that they worried about was waste management and saving water and all that which are good good things are there there are good things to start with but they're not game-changing they are not what they wanted at the very end from a smart safety perspective and with data was to being able to switch providers in an easy way from but not actually share the data or control or create a more beautiful or more um to say a more powerful ecosystem of connected things or connected data it was basically saving money and being able to switch providers fast and effective so data has not was and where little to do with them so we have we have a question so how does 5g affect internet of things 5g is an optimization for iot the idea is we would i just as i said there were there cost all around iot from hardware to plan to plenty of layers and connectivity is one of them is one of them it's uh i i had these fights back in the day back in the day how it's unbearable that you still don't don't leverage like a telefonica or any operator don't leverage sms to communicate with things but anyway uh 5g it's a more efficient way and channel to create those um wireless and uh you know from a wire from a broader perspective the things are very very confined and they don't speak in a broad in a wider wider sense so i don't have to say um so 5g offers this long-range common communication and a very cost-effective way that we don't that we don't have but things still don't have and this is why on your i your apple watch you need a sim card full sim card with a full for almost for a person almost like like like increasing the costs okay thank you so um we'll move forward since we're short on time thank you for presentation