My ThingMonk 2016 IoT lessons

After attending three days of Internet of Things (IoT) talks at ThingMonk 2016, and having never formally learned anything about IoT, I wanted to share some interesting tidbits and gems I heard at the conference…

• Benjamin Cabe (overview of Eclipse IoT): the characteristics of Open IoT stacks are: loosely coupled, modular, platform independent, based on open standards, and have API(s)

• Kamil Baczkowicz (running the UK railway with Eclipse Paho and Mosquitto): while counter-intuitive, QoS 0 (fire and forget) was preferable to QoS 1 & 2 as it’s been more resilient to failures, stateless, and easier to scale and maintain

• Sam Phippen (The Moment Seizes): John Harrison spent 7 years to create sea-faring clocks, and another 13 years to perfect time keeping whereas our industry seems to have only momentary focus

• Haiyan Zhang (expressive interfaces for IoT): we experience the physical world with “thresholds of truth” that mean the difference between disbelief (touching a screen with 100ms delay) and belief (real-time response)

  Thresholds of Truth: perceived quality improves with changes in response time (e.g.: frames per second) #thingmonk pic.twitter.com/iKrAyHbOL4

  — Devin Reams (@devinreams) September 13, 2016

• Tracy Miranda (the 7 habits of highly diverse communities): be self aware, promote shared values, learn and grow together, be open and inclusive, give everyone a voice, acknowledge biases, invest in equality

  We all have to be representatives of diversity to help all our communities be secure and resilient #thingmonk pic.twitter.com/ayzPxulgsy

  — Devin Reams (@devinreams) September 13, 2016

• Alasdair Allan (the little things of horror): to avoid the terrible devices and horror stories (from hacked doorbells to hacked hospitals and nuclear enrichment plants), design needs to consider three things: security, refresh cycle, and standards

• Dave McCory (IoT data agglomeration): value hides in the agglomeration of data and oligopolies or monopolies can arise (firms can get more value from the data, and their customers can too, and they can sell that value)

• Rachel Stephens (economics of IoT): due to economic enablers allowing for more (cheaper) ubiquity, the investments in IoT are huge, growing, and diverse (and that’s just based on public information we know)

  There's consensus the total #IoT devices could be 30 billion by 2025 (3x global population) #thingmonk @rstephensme pic.twitter.com/8g9wDjQhtk

  — Devin Reams (@devinreams) September 13, 2016

• Stefan Ferber (what is different in IoT): the internet needs to be a trustful system for “real world” applications: safety, reliability (not always on), security (physical things), privacy, cost (connectivity), constraints (low power) … and was not designed with all these in mind

  #IoT data has two dimensions: amount collected, time span (different solutions needed) @Stefferber #thingmonk pic.twitter.com/6bsULw1ly4

  — Devin Reams (@devinreams) September 13, 2016

Thanks to all the excellent speakers (there were tons more, 24 over 3 days!) and for RedMonk for producing an excellent conference.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how proud I am of my wife, Rachel (@gitcub), for giving her first conference talk and for representing her new employer, RedMonk, so brilliantly.