The Internet of Things, 2014 by Brand Perfect

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The Internet of Things, 2014 The internet of things is evolving, and will begin to have a real impact on the lives of not just businesses, but on all of us.

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Contents

02 Editor’s note 03 What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things 09 How can brands join the internet of things?

15 The changing face of telepresence 20 Android and Apple smartwatches: Ready to wear?

25 Machine Translation 35 Brands’ responsibility to digital security 40 Cisco, on the internet of everything 43 DixonsCarphone 47 About Brand Perfect 48 Imprint

Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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Introduction

Editor’s note

As the ‘internet of things’ passes from a buzz-phrase into a firm reality for many, we decided the time was right to take a look at how it got here, what the potential is for its wider adoption, and what considerations should be taken by brands looking to engage with it.

The report begins with Ed Owen looking to ‘demystify’ the internet of things. Following his prediction in this year’s Brand Perfect Annual, technology journalist David Nield goes on to explore the likelihood of wearable technology going mainstream, following the launch of Google and Apple’s smartwatches, and Design Week editor Angus Montgomery takes a closer look at what brands can get from the internet of things.

Exclusive to this report, long-time contributor Julia Errens, now working as part of Stylus’ marketing and media division, looks at the past, present and future of language translation’s connection with technology, and what a digitally-enabled world means for our relationships with one another and for language itself.

Reflecting on our privacy and personal security, Aliya Whiteley sounds a note of caution over what a world of connected devices means for consumer safety. It’s a concern answered in part in our interview with Ian Foddering, Cisco’s chief technology officer for the UK and Ireland.

We hear from him about the company’s investment in what it refers to as ‘the internet of everything’, which it sees as linking up all possible technologies, further empowering our use of day-to-day technology.

We hope you enjoy reading, and find the report insightful, useful and thought-provoking.

Neil Ayres, editor, Brand Perfect.

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things Ed Owen The internet of things is much talked about, much misunderstood and much more established than you might think.

Going back 30 years, oil and gas engineers developed Supervisory Control and Data (scada) services to monitor pipelines. Sensors attached to pipes in remote areas send information back to headquarters. If something goes wrong, the engineers know not only where to go, but also what might be wrong. Similarly, the internet of things means connecting sensor-laden appliances to a network. Those sensors share useful information and offer unlimited possibilities, from tracking physical activity and pollution levels to monitoring manufacturing processes and the temperature of your home.

Today, consumer internet of things devices are already on the market. Think of smart heating services, the new Apple Watch and Google’s driverless cars, which are already on the road.

The market potential for such devices is vast. Research by Juniper released in February 2014 showed that worldwide revenues from smart home services were around $33 billion in 2013, and should more than double to $71 billion by 2018. But this is small potatoes.

If you look at the total revenues for these services, the analysts can’t remotely agree, although all predict staggering figures. On the low side is MarketsandMarkets (m&m), which believes the internet of things market was worth $1.029 trillion in 2013, and will increase to $1.423 trillion by 2020. Yes, those were figures in the trillions.

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things

idc believes the market will grow from $1.9 trillion in 2013 to $7.1 trillion in 2020. These numbers relate to business services. idate estimates 15 billion sensor-carrying connected devices were in operation in 2012, and will rise to 80 billion in 2020. The majority of these will be items like vehicle tyres that check their own pressure, or shipping containers and pallets to keep track of trade and produce.

So the potential for internet of things services is vast, and the bulk of products will be useful but mundane. The Apple Watch gives a glimpse into a more interesting world. If you wore one, could you one day expect a message warning of an imminent heart attack, for example?

The entrepreneur’s imagination alone limits the possibilities for the internet of things. For those who could not see the point of smartphones, more than a million apps later shows there is a mind-boggling number of useful possibilities. With a combination of household items, smart infrastructure, wearable technology and so on, the number of ideas and applications is likely to grow exponentially.

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things

The father of the modern internet of things, Andy Stanford-Clark, specialises in energy at ibm, developing new ideas for their Academy of Technology.

“I started about 10 years ago with a passion for home energy use and monitoring. I had to create this technology myself. I got into carbon footprint, behaviour change and energy usage. At the time I didn’t even work in the smart energy sector, but I turned my hobby into my day job.”

Stanford-Clark attached sensors all around his house that can, for example, inform the central heating system if a window is open. The system can postpone a radiator turning on until the window closes or even send a message to someone to close the window. He uses his house as a living laboratory, linking everything to Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards.

“It’s about interconnected intelligence,” he says. “Data from sensors is not valuable in itself, but transforming that into knowledge is.

There are two processes—sensors taking data into the network and control commands for actuators to perform a task coming out.”

“When you buy things that are embedded in the internet of things, it changes your relationship with the company you buy it from.”

If a consumer buys a smart product, then they are effectively ceding control to an algorithm to interpret the world on the consumers’ behalf. Imagine you are a passenger in a driverless car and you quickly build a picture of the complexity. Sensors in the infrastructure, as well as other vehicles, would help plot a safe route, updating the journey in real time to arrive when you need to arrive.

Chris Combemale, executive director of the Direct Marketing Association (dma), says privacy lessons exist from cases of predictive modelling gone wrong. US store Target used predictive modelling Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things

techniques to know when a customer might be pregnant, possibly before they knew themselves, by studying their buying habits.

As previously covered on brandperfect.org, tracing purchasing back in time, Target found tell tale habits correlating with having a baby. It’s a clever use of data, but Target made the mistake of sending a letter of congratulations to one 17-year-old. Her parents read the letter, who had absolutely no idea and were not happy.

“Companies that get this right will win. Those in the grey area, people will stop transacting with them. What you do with data is to build trust. It should be an attribute for what you want the brand to stand for,” he says. So brands venturing into the internet of things need to be careful.

Justin Anderson is the ceo of data crunchers Flexeye, and speaks for the Hypercat consortium developing common standards for the internet of things. He agrees that trust is at a premium, but he also believes there are particular concerns for companies venturing into the arena.

“When you buy things that are embedded in the internet of things—either in the product or something else, it changes your relationship with the company you buy it from. You might trust them for a watch or burglar alarm, but they are now shifting to a dramatically new role. That trust issue becomes permanent.

“The company has the ability to collect all sorts of data about you, from personal information to how you conduct your day, things about you, your heartbeat, through to the location of your belongings,” he says.

The internet of things is already intruding here. Insurers provide in-car devices that watch your driving in exchange for potentially lower premiums. Soon, cars will feature internet of things connections so insurers would not even need the in-car device at all. “I don’t want car insurers to know how I drive. Some do. How do you deal with that? Who will control the data?” he asks.

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things

Anderson says the current privacy laws won’t be enough to manage these new relationships. “The data protection act is 20 years old and completely out of date. There will need to be a combination of rules for terms and conditions, some from government regulation and some I can change myself as a consumer.”

Imagine a house with smart heating. The smart thermostat knows who is in the house, which room they are in and how they like the temperature. “Who is in the house? Who gets that information? I have permission to follow other people about the house, but who else? Who should I give access to? How do my family even know it’s me? This is a critical element of the internet of things,” he says. Few people are yet navigating these issues.

“Twenty years ago companies were encouraged to think about web.

Now, it’s time to think about the internet of things and at least the next five years of development.”

He says the Apple Watch will be “a game changer. The messaging abilities I don’t buy, but the sensors are where it gets interesting.

What is the interaction between me and the environment? I’m concerned about independent architecture.” This leads into a second debate. Hypercat develops open standards for the wider environment to set the top-down agenda. He worries Apple and Google will keep their protocols behind firewalls. It’s the familiar argument between open and closed systems.

Moving to the appliance level is Evrythng, which develops devices and how they work and scale, a bottom-up approach in contrast to Hypercat’s top down one. For consumers, the internet of things will live in the hinterland between these two approaches. Anna Kuriakose is Evrythng’s chief product officer.

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What, when and how: Demystifying the internet of things

“The internet of things is fast expanding. There is a lot of work around standards, but an explosion of connected devices around us. It’s not science fiction to track heart rate and build a profile. There is a lot to think about in how to define that. You don’t want to spook the customer for a start.”

She says appliances could curate the wider web for our benefit, and gives the example of a connected soupmaker that could enter the virtual world to find recipes based on what’s in the house, seasonal produce, dietary requirements and so on. “It could manage your preferences and curate your experience. This is how brands should be thinking about the internet of things.

“But data streams have to be stored somewhere and consumers will need to have something back for that data exchange. It could be free gym membership or loyalty points. But I need to be able to turn those permissions on and off,” she says.

With sensor-laden appliances coming online, the volume of data released about consumers will grow exponentially. “These data services will make big data look like little data,” says Anderson.

He believes the opportunities for marketers are immense, “but if we don’t have principles it could be a scary world,” he says.

Despite all these possible uses and real items like the Apple Watch, the internet of things retains an elusive air.

Something nice to consider that might never happen.

Not so says Stanford-Clark, who has built a smart energy network at scale in Chale on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England. It’s an important test case because it shows how connecting devices to a network changes our relationship with them. The community is actively driving down its energy use.

He says the development of the internet of things will only accelerate. “Twenty years ago companies were encouraged to think about web. Now, it’s time to think about the internet of things and at least the next five years of development,” he says.

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How can brands join the internet of things?

Angus Montgomery The internet of things has been a key phrase among product and interactive designers for several years.

The concept of connected and controllable devices, controls and environments is an appealing one for brands and consumers. It is a world where you can control your home’s temperature and lighting—even lock and unlock your front door—using just a smartphone. This world is well on its way to becoming a reality, with research firm Gartner suggesting that there will be nearly 26 billion devices linked to the internet of things by 2020.

So with the internet of things moving from concept to ubiquity, what are the opportunities for brands, and what are the potential hurdles they will have to look out for?

Making the right connections

The first thing to note is that the idea of connected and automated devices isn’t always met with enthusiasm. For every interactive smoke alarm or automated energy-saving lighting system there’s a gratuitous example of bandwagon jumping.

The most commonly cited example of this is the internet fridge, a mainstay at the annual Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show and described by Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur as “a peculiar dream that just won’t die”.

Beyond the fact that creating a fridge that can text you to tell you its contents “cannot be done”, Arthur points out that “people don’t use fridges in that way… The simplest way to know what’s inside your fridge is to look in it.”

Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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How can brands join the internet of things?

The Nest thermostat allows users to alter the temperature of their home remotely through a smartphone.

It’s an obvious point to make, but before jumping into the internet of things, brands need to work out whether or not it’s appropriate for their offer.

Nest is probably the most high-profile example of a brand that has taken home interaction and made it useful and popular. Nest makes a series of products, including smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and thermostats, that can be controlled remotely through smartphones and can also alert users to alarms or changes when they are not at home.

The products are intuitive and easy to use and have also won plaudits for their design, with Nest picking up a Wallpaper Design Award and a Red Dot Design Award among others. The Nest Labs company was co-founded in 2010 by two former Apple engineers and was acquired by Google at the beginning of the year for $3.2 billion.

Cost benefits

Although Nest seems to have solved two of the major issues around internet of things products—creating objects that are both beautiful and useful—it still battles with the issue of price.

The Nest Protect smoke alarm sells at £89 a unit, which doesn’t sound wholly unreasonable until you realise that the average house would probably require three or four individual units. Typical mains-wired smoke detectors in the UK, meanwhile, retail at around £40–50.

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How can brands join the internet of things?

The price point is obviously a concern for Nest, which has lowered its UK retail price for Nest Protect to £109 since the product’s launch last autumn.

Elsewhere there is a trend towards lower-key and more affordable consumer goods linked up to the internet of things. So as well as seeing major interventions such as environmental control systems or fully connected fitted kitchens, there are a growing number of individual pieces such as Belkin’s $99 slow cooker that can be controlled through a smartphone. Start-up Kolibree, meanwhile, is selling an internet-connected toothbrush that can upload ‘brushing data’ and help users track their brushing habits and dental health—although the $129 pre-order price might provide something to chew on.

The developing trend seems to be, as you might expect, that these are consumer goods aimed at the average consumer and aspiring to a reasonable pricepoint. As Nest seems to be proving with its £20 price drop, once brands and product lines become established and can achieve scale then they can address cost issues without a knock-on effect on quality.

A unified approach

One result of filling your home with individual connected consumer products is that you end up with a series of items that exist in their own isolated worlds. As such, there has been a move recently for companies to create universal controllers and platforms to link up internet-enabled devices.

Nest is concentrating on turning common household items like smoke alarms and toothbrushes, into smartphoneenabled gadgets.

Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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How can brands join the internet of things?

Revolv, which launched this year, is a physical hub that allows you to control different products—including Belkin switches and Philips Hue lights—using a single app. Revolv operates by using seven different radios that communicate with almost any connected home device. It then operates as a platform to let the user control all these devices, remotely if needed, through an app.

The Revolv smarthome hub means compatible branded products can be brought together through one app.

For brands that can do this, there are obvious benefits to designing software and networks rather than creating one-off products.

Creating hardware is hard and costly and a company that creates products without control of the method of controlling them will struggle to get full engagement with the consumer.

What’s the protocol?

As brands begin to move their attention away from the physical manifestation of connected products and look more closely at the systems that operate them, a number of issues come into play.

The first, as we’ve already seen, is uniformity. How can brands ensure that the consumer is easily and seamlessly able to operate a plethora of individual connected devices (and at the same time take control of the internet of things world?).

Revolv is one way of approaching this and the newly established Thread Group could provide another.

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How can brands join the internet of things?

The Thread Group brings together Google, Samsung and other product developers including Yale and Freescale Semiconductor, in an attempt to create a set of communications ‘standards’ for all connected devices.

Nest already uses the Thread system for its alarms and thermostats. Thread operates across different networks, including Bluetooth, Wi-fi and nfc and works with lowpower connections to help device battery life last longer.

The aim of the Thread group is to establish best practice in the field and to certify Thread products in the future.

The collaborative nature of the Thread group also indicates how brands increasingly find themselves partnering up in order to better develop opportunities in the internet of things. As Wired journalist Liat Clark says, “It’s collaboration that will lead to a truly effectual and game-changing internet of things future.”

Safe and secure

One issue that all connected product developers are quick to talk about is security. A good example of this is the August Smart Lock, developed by designer Yves Béhar working with entrepreneur Jason Johnson.

The August keyless lock lets you open and close the doors of your home using a smartphone app. You can also send ‘virtual keys’ to guests or people you want to let into your house.

If there’s anything that you’d want to be secure, it’s your front door lock, and Béhar says the point of the project is to create ‘technology that puts you at ease—that is sure and reliable’.

August operates using the same secure communications technology used for online banking, while the lock itself has its own power source, so will work even during a power-cut.

As a last resort, users can log on using the August website to unlock, over-ride or remove authorisation for the device.

Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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How can brands join the internet of things?

As well as safety, brands are equally quick to talk about how secure user data is—one of the obvious by-products of connected devices is the potential to harvest huge amounts of user data. Nest’s acquisition by Google in particular raised eyebrows, with Nest co-founder Tony Faddell quick to point out that there would be no data-sharing with Google, unless, of course, users opted in.

The August lock allows homeowners to lock and unlock their front door through an app.

Sarah Gold, a recent graduate in industrial design from London’s Central Saint Martins has developed a project that aims to put data control back in the hands of the user and could provide a future model for connected device makers. Gold’s Alternet proposal is based around a co-operatively hosted network that lets users clearly see how their data is being used.

Gold also proposes the idea of ‘data licences’ that would let users say what data they would like to share and in what way. For example, you might be able to say that you will allow your location data to be used by commercial companies or your financial data to be used by non-profits.

While a speculative project, the Alternet broaches two huge issues that everyone involved in the internet of things will have to tackle soon—as it grows in scale: how is this network supported, and what does it mean for the people who use it?

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The changing face of telepresence Julia Errens Remote robotics, such as Suitable Technologies’ BeamPro, are not the only way in which brands can leverage a sense of telepresence. As Julia Errens finds, curating an interactive community transports users almost as well, and some new social media networks are experimenting with ways to bring people and content closer to each other.

In the summer of 1997, my older sister set off on a year abroad to Texas, while my parents and I spent our summer holiday in Italy. Twice a day, it was my task to go to our flat’s admin office to check for faxes from her or send a reply. To a child who was paying exorbitant amounts to a local internet café for 15 minutes’ worth of dial-up online access, the fact that a letter could be sent, true to form, all the way across the Atlantic within minutes was the height of advancement. Looking for a way to connect with a Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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sibling whose departure I was pretending was the best thing to have happened in my entire life, I teased her with food envy games, taking them to a cross-Atlantic level by leaving the print of a slice of watermelon right across my mum’s letter. The receptionist’s scolding explanation that the juice would at best break their machine was my first lesson in the limits of telecommunications.

In a Design Observer piece on the nature of how we meet, John Thackara recalls philosopher Martin Buber’s view that community and connection are not just about words; they’re also about encounter and presence.

A sense of reality and ‘thereness’ about an online space immediately impacts its power of persuasion.

The validity of meeting in person cannot be denied, but the online world also has a lot to offer through telepresence. Scholars Lombard and Ditton have defined telepresence as “an illusion of non-mediation; the extent to which a person fails to perceive or acknowledge the presence of a medium during a technologically mediated experience.”

For instance, my conviction that the watermelon print would arrive as a perfect copy that would cause my sister’s mouth to water. In terms of digital lives, this describes the sensation of perceiving things that happen online as being equally real to the physical world.

Philosophically speaking, questions over what is ‘real’ weren’t just thrown up by the first virtual reality headset. In the 17th century, René Descartes argued that we never truly experience the world, but only a version mediated by our own senses and the minds processing that information. Some 250 years later, John Dewey countered that reality lies in the experience of being an autonomous agent in the world, rather than being a spectator locked away in our own mind, as Descartes had surmised.

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The changing face of telepresence

Neither of these views would invalidate the reality of digital experiences. However, a sense of reality and ‘thereness’ about an online space immediately impacts its power of persuasion. Not to mention that interactivity and community (or in short, quality experiences) forge better and more lasting brand relationships than one-way message delivery. To build communities, it takes more than just words, to reiterate Buber.

Enhancing a sense of presence

(Tele)presence in general is increased through sensory richness.

One way to achieve this is to use current technology to provide the best possible transmission or imitation of reality. Back in February 2014 for instance, Topshop gave a select group of customers the chance to experience a virtual live stream of its 2014 Autumn/Winter Fashion Week show via Oculus Rift headsets in its flagship store on London’s Oxford Street. Meanwhile, ikea impressed its customers with augmented reality features in last year’s catalogue, which had home decorators project 3d models of furniture into their houses on iPad screens.

However, it also transpires that “the number of actors in a mediated environment also enhances a sense of presence, because we are accustomed to interacting with others”, according to Cheryl Campanella Bracken and Paul Skalski’s book Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life. This is good news for mobile platforms, as it means that they can compensate for a lack of immersive technology with pithy concepts of interaction.

Non-verbal interaction

Many of the most successful social media apps function around non-verbal options. For example, the photo-messaging app Snapchat, which reported in May 2014 that users now transmit 700 million photo and video messages a day. And developers are floating new community ideas to engage our senses for high presence experiences. For example, Justin Cooke, former Topshop chief marketing officer and vice president of pr at Burberry is the driving force behind the recent release of the Tunepics app. Branded as a “multi-sensory social network”, its

Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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users can pair photos with 30-second music clips from the iTunes library. Followers then “retune” contributions and add how they made them feel via a somewhat laborious “emotion wheel” that will in time form a pie chart of feelings. The core is strong: music is a powerful form of non-textual communication (and income, as each Tunepics post comes with an iTunes purchase button for its corresponding song), and the format covers an intersection of sharing culture that has not been tapped, yet.

In terms of innovation however, it doesn’t quite take the cake from Frontback, an app that snaps a photo on both the front and back-facing camera of a smartphone, thus providing context alongside a selfie.

Digital meets physical

Social media participation is mostly seen as the departure element of experiencing telepresence—mentally leaving a physical location and spending time in digital spaces. This of course ignores that social media is about interacting with other real people, and the arrival destinations of our data are increasingly found in spaces that are just as real.

There’s San Pellegrino’s ‘Three Minutes in Italy’ campaign, which had customers remotely steer a brightly-coloured robot, pitched somewhere between a Dalek and Johnny 5, through an Italian seaside village and interact with people on the street.

BeamPro’s remote-controlled telepresence system enables colleagues to take part in discussions from the other side of the world.

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The changing face of telepresence

Or the Nike Chalkbot, built by Deeplocal, that sprayed digital messages from supporters of the Livestrong campaign onto the streets of the Tour de France. Not to mention that Beam telepresence robots are already being used to allow ill children to be “at school” and to split physicians’ time between remote hospitals in the US. The mit Media Lab is of course also on the ball, looking to further develop remote rendering of 3d content.

Beyond using robotics to manifest data physically, there is also the potential found in app concepts like Wallit, which provides digital content walls that can be accessed via mobile devices at their physical geo locations. What sets this apart from usual check-in apps in the vein of Foursquare is a feature that allows walls in similar physical locations across the world to link up.

The developers suggest using this feature to share in the global experience of Apple product launches. Other retail and food chains could make good use of a daisy chain of location-specific content, as could international film releases or sporting events.

Additionally, think what a centralised platform like that could have done to further amplify the global Occupy camps that sprung up in 2011, or for any splintered protest movement.

Interaction is key

With access to the right tools, telepresence could be not primarily an experience of being elsewhere, but part of autonomously augmenting reality to create that sense of ‘thereness’, with the social focus shifting from departure to arrival. Instead of siphoning data from a place in the documenting culture we have now, communities might enrich locales with permanent conversation spaces.

Again, from Thackara: “Conversation, more than any other form of human interaction, is the place where we learn, exchange ideas, offer resources and create innovation… what our times need are more interactive and less choreographed forms of encounter.”

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Ready to wear?

David Nield Will new Android-powered smartwatches and the Apple Watch do for wristwear what the iPod did for portable music?

Pinterest is one of the first apps to be made compatible with Android Wear.

In July 2014 Google launched its first Android Wear devices, smartwatches that act as an extension of a connected Android phone or tablet. Samsung and lg were the first manufacturers out of the starting gate with watches, and we’ve since seen other models from Motorola and Asus (while htc is rumoured to be jumping in too). As with mobile phones, Google provides the core software and services, while partnering manufacturers build the device.

Anything Google can do, Apple can do better—or at least try to. At September 2014’s iPhone 6 press event in Cupertino, Tim Cook showed off the Apple Watch, a new device he described as “a revolutionary product that can enrich people’s lives.

It’s the most personal product we’ve ever made.” From the company that built the iPhone and iPad, that’s a bold claim. As is Apple’s wont, it takes full control over both the hardware and the software, and the watch will be on sale in spring 2015.

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Android and Apple smartwatches: Ready to wear?

These smartwatches, like the Pebble and the Galaxy Gear before them, are designed to bring notifications and alerts to your wrist. But can the 1.6-inch screen prove an effective companion to the five-inch screen? And what exactly does it mean for mobile apps developers and the brands behind them?

Apple unveiled its smartwatch in September 2014 but it doesn’t go on sale until next year.

Among the first Android Wear-ready apps to hit Google Play are offerings from PayPal, Pinterest and Soundwave. As you would expect, Google has been keen to add Android Wear compatibility too, with its Maps app one of the first to be upgraded. While any Android app can display simple notifications on an Android Wear device right away, once its developer adds the necessary code it can take advantage of extra features on the smartwatch: more detailed notifications, additional responses, voice control and so on.

We’ve yet to see the Apple Watch in action, but during his presentation, Tim Cook emphasised the health and fitness aspects of the device—it’s designed to replace your fitness tracker as well as show you who’s calling your phone. As on Android Wear, thirdparty developers can edit their phone and tablet apps to provide Apple Watch compatibility, so users will be able to control music playback, reply to text messages, flip through photos and so on.

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Android and Apple smartwatches: Ready to wear?

The underlying aim of all these devices is to free us from the bind of checking our phones every five minutes and make the most relevant notifications more accessible. As Google’s senior vice president for Android, Chrome and Apps, Sundar Pichai, explained as Android Wear was launched: “Most people check their phones more than 150 times a day. Often it’s to read a text, look at a notification, or get some other simple piece of information. That’s a lot of time spent unlocking, swiping and entering passwords, when your hands could easily be free handling more important things.”

“Enter Android Wear, which extends Android, and its ecosystem of apps, to that most familiar spot for a wearable, your wrist,” Pichai continues. “You get the information you need, quickly at a glance—just like you’re used to doing with your watch… it’s all right there, on your wrist, easy to see, right when you want it… Your thumbs will thank you.”

So how exactly are we going to be using these devices? According to the utopian vision put forward by Google and Apple in their demo videos, these smartwatch platforms will open up a whole new world of talking to our wrists and glancing at information.

Get a buzz when it’s time to leave for dinner, even if you don’t have your phone nearby; view directions while you’re riding a bike; send a text using your voice when your hands are full; see how many steps you’ve taken today. You can even find out what song’s playing in the background while you’re stood in a queue at John Lewis. These are all features available on a smartphone, but with the added convenience of appearing on your wrist.

As we’ve already mentioned, Google is opting to partner with a whole host of manufacturers to get its software out into the world.

Even fashionable watchmaker Fossil has signed up to get involved, a move that boosted its share price as investors recognised the significant role that smartwatch technology could play in the future. Not everyone wears a watch, but Google wants to persuade those that do to make it a smartwatch, and that’s a threat that brands such as Fossil need to think about.

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Investors may be enthusiastic, but what about the general public?

The Pebble smartwatch has the advantage of being able to connect to both Android and ios phones to bring notifications to your wrist— having launched off the back of one of the most successful campaigns in Kickstarter’s history, the company recently launched a premium Steel edition to go alongside the original smartwatch. Unlike Android Wear and the Apple Watch, the Pebble uses a monochrome e-ink display, but the company announced in March 2014 that it had shifted 400,000 units, an impressive total for a small startup.

The smartwatch still has a long way to go before it’s as ubiquitous as the smartphone, however: Apple has announced a record number of iPhone sales for its latest models—10 million in the first weekend—but right now we don’t know what the reaction to the Apple Watch will be. We do know prices will start at $349 in the US and go substantially higher for the models that use premium alloys. That’s significantly more expensive than Android Wear prices, with the Moto 360 (currently the most costly model) at $249 in the US or £199 in the UK.

The Moto 360 was the first rounded Android Wear smartwatch to make an appearance.

For brands and businesses with an established mobile presence, these new smartwatches are something new to think about. As an extension of the Android and ios ecosystems, it’s not a niche that every app, brand and business is going to need to have a presence on—with a small screen and limited input capabilities, Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

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Android and Apple smartwatches: Ready to wear?

smartwatches are best suited for quick information updates and interactions, particularly when users are on the move and unable to operate their phones, and app developers need to recognise that.

Take a browse through the Android Wear apps that are already available to get an idea of what this could mean in practice. You’ll see a wealth of fitness apps, so joggers can check their progress mid-run, as well as some useful smart home tools like one-tap lighting controls for the Philips Hue range. Travel and location apps feature strongly, and the Guardian has taken the plunge by updating its news app, presumably so the most important stories can show up on your wrist as well as on your phone.

For brands, any kind of push alert that can be shown on a phone can appear on Android Wear or Apple Watch, though an unnecessary or overwhelming number of notifications are likely to be even more off-putting on the wrist than they are on a phone: think special offers related to a current location, directions to the nearest outlet, or travel updates. Airlines and rail companies in particular should be thinking about how to make life more convenient for travellers as they dash between stations and stops.

Android Wear, Apple Watch, and the other smartwatch platforms of the present and future, are going to require an even more precise and thoughtful approach than the smartphone has up to this point—screen space and attention time are at a premium, and must be used wisely. Perhaps it won’t be until apps can prove the worth of a smartwatch that the hardware begins to shift in really serious numbers: one tap check-ins, emergency alerts, moneysaving deals, and so on. Whatever the future for this new product category, it’s going to be an interesting year as we see the reaction that these new smartwatches and other wearable tech receives.

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THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION Julia Errens

- .-. .- -. ... .-.. .- - .. --- -.

Julia Errens traces the course of machine-augmented translation, from Turing to Google Translate.

Douglas Adams had the Babel Fish, Doctor Who’s tardis does the job for its passengers in a process that is mostly fictional with very little science, and the unplugged rebels of the Matrix can download language skills in seconds.

Modern myths are full of machines (or eardwelling lifeforms) that would help humanity reclaim Babel and overcome the barriers that separate the 6,000–7,000 human languages.

The scenario is tempting on principle and seems closer than ever, seeing as smartphones already handed us the hitchhiker’s guide to the known galaxy by giving us handheld access to the majority of human knowledge. Before we look at where we might be headed, we should glance at where we came from, as the point of origin determines our trajectory. On 4 March 1947, mathematician and director of the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Warren Weaver, sent a letter to Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

cyberneticist colleague Norbert Wiener, reflecting on the war-time machine decoding achievements: “one wonders whether the problem of translation might actually be a problem of cryptography.”

Like wwii’s decoding machines—developed by the likes of Alan Turing to break German military communications’ code—the earliest Machine Translation (mt) systems were government funded. For one, because governments felt the need during the rising tensions of the Cold War. Further, because a computer at the time would easily take up considerable space in a government office—and cost a considerable amount to build. There was no personal computing market, and technology was far too costly to make mt an economical pursuit for business.

Networking these campervan-sized machines globally wasn’t even on the horizon. The original struggle was to build computers that could perform rule-based translation within their own confines. The goal of this is, in essence, to teach a machine the full vocabulary and 25

Machine translation grammar of multiple languages, so that it may translate autonomously as a closed system.

In 1954, the ibm 701 was able to translate 49 sentences on chemistry from Russian into English, running one of the first non-numerical computer applications. It also took up two rooms at ibm’s New York headquarters. After the initial euphoria of the possibilities, the realities of unsound syntax and lack of grammatical correction soon caused the US government to cut back on funding. What followed is two decades of relative silence on the circuits and slow growth outside the interest of the public, until the next spike in rule-based mt crops up, and for utterly civilian purposes.

In 1976, the Canadian Meteo system began translating meteorological forecasts for the French-English bilingual nation. This was more realistic as weather forecasts work in reasonably limited stock phrases (“throughout August, scattered showers”). As the Cold War

drew to an end, it was evident that mt was shifting from military to civilian interests. This is also evident in Jonathan Slocum’s 1985 essay, ‘Machine Translation’, which pointed out that, at the time, the Japanese were pushing the market as they considered translation “necessary to their technological survival, but have found it extremely difficult—and expensive—to accomplish by human means”. Meanwhile in the West, the biggest mt effort was Eurotra, which aimed to provide translation between all European languages.

By the 1990s, the need for international communication was brought to the forefront of the global conscious, both by the collapse of the Soviet Union and because accelerating globalisation set brands the challenge of localising their products for foreign markets. Additionally, private consumers had been putting personal computers into their homes for nearly a decade, and were now hooking them up to the internet. The first online mt service went live in 1992, when Compuserve started

Punch card operator: ‘Mondadori/Getty Images’

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Machine translation

Manchester Mark I: ‘sspl/Getty Images’

offering translations of forum content to its subscribed users from English into German. This was followed up by the 1997 launch of Altavista’s (now part of Yahoo) infamous BabelFish (named after the inner-ear dwelling lifeform from Douglas Adam’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that had universal simultaneous translation skills). BabelFish could translate between English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, and was free to use, blowing the mass market for accessible mt wide open. However, despite being a novelty, BabelFish had considerable performance issues.

The translated sentences were semantically challenged and unreliable when it came to picking the right translation whenever a word had multiple meanings in the goal language.

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote more extensively on this issue of disambiguation in mt in his seminal 1960 essay ‘A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation’.

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In it, he puts forth this sentence: “Little John was looking for his toy box. Finally he found it. The box was in the pen.” He then elaborates that “no existing or imaginable programme will enable an electronic computer” to come to the logical conclusion that the pen in question is a children’s playing enclosure, not a writing utensil, as that conclusion relies on knowledge that lies beyond the text, in human common sense.

“What [the suggestion of mt] amounts to… is the requirement that a translation machine should not only be supplied with a dictionary but also with a universal encyclopedia. This is surely utterly chimerical and hardly deserves any further discussion.”

Well, we’ll forgive Mr Bar-Hillel for not foreseeing the arrival of the internet. The internet has made big data accessible and omnipresent; and modern processors have the computing power to manage it, to boot.

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Machine translation But within that accessible knowledge, computers still aren’t quite smart enough to make the sort of unprompted connections needed to help us disambiguate words in our natural languages, using extra-textual knowledge. In other words, the knowledge that a pen (as in ‘writing utensil’) cannot contain a box within its dimensions, while a pen (as in ‘enclosure’) can.

Of course, computers were built to make clear decisions based on unambiguous commands.

A computer that acts in unpredictable ways is viewed to be malfunctioning. However, as we explore ways of synthesising creative thought, randomness is becoming a compelling challenge.

In 1949, when British computer scientist Alan Turing tried to make a computer emulate human thought, he included a random number generator into his Manchester Mark 1 machine, so that it could deliver occasional wild guesses on top of stringently computed answers, claiming that “if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”

Controlled failure is a bit of a human speciality.

It is estimated that the neurons of the brain misfire 30 to 90 per cent of the time. This is a very broad scope of failure. Human thought process thus doesn’t function along tried and true algorithms, but through constant trial and error. It is reasonably estimated—as summarised by science writer Carl Zimmer— that the human brain runs on about 10 watts of energy a second. In terms of human bio power, this translates into 250–300 calories per day. Your brain runs on a Mars bar. Meanwhile, Stanford University’s Kwabena Boahen, (who is following in Turing’s path by working on 28

Neurogrid, a hardware platform that mimics the working of the inner cortex) estimated it would take around 10 megawatts to power a processor built the current way that could mimic human level intelligence. That’s the energy output of a mid-sized power station.

Of course Turing also developed the concept of the Turing test to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. The task to be solved? Holding a conversation with a human in a natural language. No machine has passed the test, yet.

Perhaps asking computing systems as we’ve previously built them to master the human brain’s major frame of reference is a bit like expecting a fish to climb a tree. So, instead of using the internet to continue our attempts to teach computers human language, we opted to tab it to speak computer: raw numerical data.

Statistical mt—which powers Google Translate— is based on the idea that if you feed a computer (with its massive memory but non-existent capacity for improvisation and leaps of logic) enough data in the shape of parallel texts in two languages, it will be able to spot and recreate the statistical patterns between them. The upside of this approach is that the system is

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

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Machine translation self-learning, not in need of intense human curation like the closed rule-based mts. Once the command is given, all you need to do is keep feeding the machine material so it can grow its corpus—like the Audrey ii plant from The Little Shop of Horrors. A corpus is a body of parallel texts in two or more languages. Like the Rosetta Stone, but much, much larger in volume; anywhere upwards of 30 million parallel words is considered a decent training corpus.

The way the machine does this is by trawling parallel texts of a million or so sentences in two languages and breaking them down into small word groups of two or three, called n-grams. Once that’s done, the system can distinguish patterns between the two parallel texts, drawing the rules of translation from the order in which n-grams appear on both ends.

In so doing, the system takes all its cues from its corpus, with no grammatical guidance. It doesn’t need to. All it sees is which jumble of English letters correlates with which jumble of French letters, in relation to its nearest secondary jumble of words. The human mind attaches layers of meaning to every sentence—the machine only recognises strings of commands.

However, as Gestalt theory, a school of thought from visual culture, teaches: it is impossible to understand the whole by merely examining its parts. The statistical approach has issues.

James Fallows explained a central one with Google translate feeding itself from the same bowl it spits up into—the internet—for The Atlantic: “Computerised translations are better than nothing, but at best they are pretty rough.

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Try it for yourself: Go to the People’s Daily Chinese-language home site; plug any story’s url into the Google Translate site; and see how closely the result resembles real English. You will get the point of the story, barely. Moreover, since these side-by-side versions reflect the computerized-system’s current level of skill, by definition they offer no opportunity for improvement. That’s the problem. The more this auto-translated material floods onto the world’s websites, the smaller the proportion of good translations the computers can learn from.

In engineering terms, the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse… This is the computer-world equivalent of sloppy overuse of antibiotics creating new strains of drug-resistant bacteria.”

On a more nuanced but equally detrimental level, consider also that the problem in approaching new texts on the crutches of old ones is that old thought structures will corrupt the content. For instance, German has gendered nouns, including job titles. A male engineer would be ‘ingenieur’, a female one ‘ingenieurin’. The problem with corpora of pre-existing texts is that they are, well, old.

“Given that male pronouns have been overrepresented throughout history in most languages and cultures, machine translation tends to reflect this historical gender bias,” said Nataly Kelly, vp at Smartling, a cloud-based enterprise translation management company.

This means that statistical mt erases female engineers and male nurses as it churns.

Presently, online mt relies on analysis. But natural languages, even at official standard levels, aren’t analytical. Their words’ meanings morph in the hands of time, context and 29

Machine translation

Arabic and Korean characters in Noto, Google’s ‘Universal’ typeface.

intonation, because humans aren’t consistent in their use of language, themselves. It follows that for now, mt delivers best results with scientific and technical writing, anything that adheres more strictly to formulas. Wherever the use of language deviates from standard, where it is more colloquial or artistic, mt falters. This impacts concepts that have strong cultural roots. Researchers at ucla raised red flags this summer to draw attention to the fact that a lot of traditional Chinese medicine is lost in translation, because many of its concepts have no English language correlation; they are tied to an understanding of the Chinese language’s culture, which cannot be gained without cultural immersion. Supposing mt is on its way to producing accurate, semantically sound text documents, we’d still need the human hand, as content translation doesn’t end with a true text document.

On the simplest level, there’s shrinkage and expansion of text—different languages take 30

varied amounts of line space—longer or shorter or simply a different number of words—to communicate the same content. German lines run up to 30 per cent longer than English ones, which can seriously compromise a layout when re-flown automatically without attention from a designer. Not to mention that the higher density of capital letters in German impacts text colour. Then there’s quotation marks, which come in a rainbow of cultural applications and shapes. And while we’re talking punctuation, consider also the inverted exclamation and question marks in written Spanish.

And this is only for translation between languages using the roman alphabet.

Ideograph languages such as Simplified Chinese are often hard to balance for uniform colour due to imbalanced symbols. In any case, they will need a much more generous leading (space between lines) to remain legible due to their higher stroke count (the amount of lines that make up a character) in a brandperfect.org

Machine translation single character, much like the syllable blocks of Korean. As for reading direction, Japanese tategaki format is read from right to left, as is Arabic, which, additionally, doesn’t hyphenate, but has other ways to solve justification issues.

Kashida justification elongates characters (rather than the white space between them) to compensate text colour. In, short, text representation and its meaning changes with the language, like gestures do when they are spoken. To appropriately set a translated text, you’d need a translation engine of its own. Or, more realistically, a well-versed typographer.

In its constant drive towards blessed uniformity, Google has an ongoing project that aims to design a universal typeface family that supports every natural language. The family is called Noto and currently contains 96 typefaces.

Text to text translation is only the beginning.

Google is working full throttle on instantaneous

voice translation to be integrated into Android phones, while Samsung has acquired mt mammoth Systran to retain a cutting edge for its own products.

Meanwhile, Microsoft previewed a breakthrough demo of Skype translate in May 2014, which runs real-time translation of Skype video calls. Youtube should be very interested in this, as it has been working on instant subtitling options to increase accessibility for deaf people. Microsoft, again, is following suit, with impressive work by its Chinese development team who are making use of the Kinect camera to provide instantaneous mt of sign language. In 2013, the global translation market had an estimated worth of $34 billion, and it continues to grow at a rate of over five per cent. mt is anything but a niche market. However, for the past two decades, the focus on driving down the cost of translation by teaching it to computing systems that are ill-equipped to do the job means that we’re currently working with lackadaisical tools in a field where demand will keep growing.

reCaptcha improves the accuracy of book digitisation.

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Machine translation To meet that demand and clean up their data, Google Translate has an improvement function that lets users enter suggestions for smoother translations. This is a very direct interaction, but there are different, incentivised ways to put human minds en masse to work on improving mt data sets.

The free language-learning app Duolingo is ambitiously described by its developers as a push towards “translating the web”. The mind behind Duolingo is Luis von Ahn, who has a previous track record of providing humans with a perk so they help machines handle human output: his reCaptcha verification system lets online users prove they’re human by deciphering a scanned text computers can’t read. Yet. Because the data they feed into the system teaches computers to do the job in the future, which greatly improves the accuracy of book digitisation.

The popular Duolingo app uses powerful gamification techniques to help users learn new languages.

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Duolingo is a game-yfied learning environment to keep students on the ball, especially at early stages. Once they’ve progressed to higher proficiencies, they are given text chunks to translate so they can hone their skills. Duolingo then applies an algorithm to users’ cumulative translations to determine a final version to be sold commercially.

As long as computers cannot emulate a network of failing and improvising neurons jacked up on a Mars bar, humans have to provide it.

In terms of a five- to 10-year horizon, machineassisted translation networks will certainly prove very successful by crowdsourcing translation to user communities. One way to achieve this cooperation is classical remuneration. However, this is not economically feasible. Another is Duolingo’s approach of incentivising assistance with a smart knowledge bartering system. A third is just goodwill and enthusiasm.

Members of online fan community Viki. com band together in volunteer tag teams to produce subtitles for video content in over 200 languages—for what many would consider to be even less than a chocolate bar.

After the latest episode of a Korean drama, Mexican telenovella or UK mini series has aired in its home market, Viki holds regional or international rights for that content and makes the video available for streaming on its website. Teams of volunteers descend on the video, segment it into manageable units, and start writing and timing subtitles. Meanwhile, fans waiting for content at the front-end receive real-time information on the percentage of brandperfect.org

Machine translation

Electronic circuit tracks on a circuit board. Image by creativity103.com

the video that has been subbed in their chosen language. The most popular shows usually have teams of 10–20 translators, who manage to have the content fully subbed in English just a few hours after its first broadcast, with other languages trailing within the week.

The translators of Viki commit considerable amounts of their time and energy to these projects, simply for the fun of it. For recognition in the community and the pleasure of showing others content they love.

This love is a strong motivator and guarantor for quality. “Because the community is so very passionate about the content, they really care about getting the nuance of the original language and its meaning across,” says Viki community director Mariko FritzKrockow. That said, Viki does offer a coveted bonus for its well-established and reliable community members: Qualified Contributor status—the biggest perk of which is access Brand Perfect / The Internet of Things, 2014

to all content available through the Viki site, free from regional licence restrictions. The reward of a legal all-you-can-watch.

Fans have translated video content for other fans since the first torrents went live. This means traditional licence holders trying to spread content into foreign markets have been up against a formidable online army of volunteer labourers who take joy and pride in taking down the language barriers for the rest of the world. The development of high-functioning MT systems is a lucrative goal for the culture sector as it speeds up translation to match consumer’s expectations of quick turn-overs, and Viki has managed to domesticate—and legalise—the hydra.

Viki’s director of communications, Michelle Laird, stresses the social nature of the site’s translation process, with no plans of going automated: “It’s so great to see communities pop up and grow.

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Machine translation One of our most active ones is actually in Romania. And they are absolutely amazing about harnessing and teaching each other how to translate specifically into Romanian. Since launching out of beta in 2010, we’re now at over 200 languages.

A lot of Taiwanese content is getting really popular at the moment, and there is now also a lot of Chinese content that has never been distributed outside of China. Conversely, Hollywood content is becoming more popular across Asia. It’s exciting to see these developments.”

Asked about their most desirable future developments to improve the process further, they agreed that their focus is to continue reiterating innovating tools to help the community communicate with each other. By doing so, volunteers may better navigate idioms and metaphors together.

Meanwhile, Turing-level mt would eradicate the necessity to meditate on the cultural backgrounds of metaphors and figures of speech. It would make everyday interactions more serviceable, but arguably not contribute to a deeper understanding between cultures.

“Because language plays such a fundamental part in connecting each of us as thinking creatures with the world around us, the subtle nuances of language (which are different even in similar tongues, say the Latin-derived Spanish and Portuguese) actually shape how we think about the world. Learning something of how somebody else speaks from a foreign country actually helps you to understand their mindset a little,” wrote Kit Eaton on Google’s foray into simultaneous voice translation.

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We’re not exactly tantalisingly close to universal mt. Back in 1954, the developers behind ibm 701 were pretty confident that translation would be fully in the circuits of computers “in the next few years” after it had chomped through those 49 sentences of scientific writing on Russian chemistry.

For scale: Google translate currently covers 80 of the estimated 6,000–7,000 languages spoken on the planet. Saying we’re a long way off is not fatalistic. In part because removing the human mind from translation might not actually be a utopia after all.

Alan Wilson Watts said: “It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.” This reflects the problem Chinese medicine faces in its dilution in translation.

Ultimately, the morsels that get lost in translation create breadcrumb trails into the backyards of people’s cultures. If those breadcrumbs vanish, we’ll be less likely to follow them down a new path.

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Brands’ responsibility to digital security Aliya Whiteley Aliya Whiteley argues that with the advent of the internet of things, educating the public about online security presents brands with both a responsibility to their stakeholders, and also an opportunity.

As a theory, the internet of things promises much that can either excite or disturb; a lot of this depends on your own personal opinion. Do you want a smart fridge? Millions do, apparently.

Whether you want to reach a stage where your fridge communicates with your online supermarket and starts ordering supplies for you is a murkier issue. And what would you do if your fridge started sending out spam emails? As ever with complicated conundrums, the first step in reaching a solution is to understand the problem, and understanding springs from education.

So to what extent do we, as a society, educate both children and adults about the online environment, and why should some of that responsibility to educate fall to brands? This doesn’t just mean having the conversation about cyber bullying and password strengths; these are important areas but they only cover part of the issue. Personal data usage, controlling your online identity, and living a connected life are key concepts in the information age, and to achieve understanding we all need to have a grasp on them.

Children

The obvious place to educate effectively is in schools, and it’s true that governments are beginning to step up to that task. In the UK plans were recently announced for cyber security lessons for pupils over the age of 11, with the emphasis on training a new generation to address a skills shortage in the workforce. Ben Rossi, writing for

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Brands’ responsibility to digital security

Information Age, argues that, “for too long this vital skillset, which should accompany ict skills training, has been badly neglected. This has left a generation comfortable with computer use, but unable to make the link between online actions and their impact, and thereby weak on recognising and tackling the threats that can accompany it.”

The more brands get involved with education, the less chance we all risk of a future in which the technology outpaces our understanding, and people get left behind.

Some brands have an immediate connection to this issue, such as McAfee, which has announced a five-year deal with Bletchley Park to set up cyber-security workshops for children. McAfee already runs Online Safety for Kids Courses, and states on its website that “McAfee lives for the challenge of protecting and liberating our customers by staying ahead of the bad guys in our relentless search for safe.” Every potential customer who is educated in the myriad of online threats is more likely to purchase cyber security tools one day.

But educating from secondary school-level misses the fact that children are interacting with computers at younger ages; even babies get in on the act with products such as the VTech Innotab 2 Baby. If they know how to play Angry Birds by the time they get to school, perhaps educating about the online world needs to start even earlier.

Tablets are a rapid growth area for children, with Ofcom’s 2013 report, Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes showing usage shooting up from two percent of five- to seven-year-olds using a tablet regularly in 2011 to 39 per cent in 2013. Other age groups show similar rises, and tablet usage in schools continues to increase. At primary school level the emphasis on cyber safety falls into the camp of restricting access rather than educating to use safely, and tablet manufacturers have responded accordingly.

For instance, Amazon’s Kindle Fire allows parents to create 36

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profiles, hide apps, choose appropriate content, and set time limits. It also advertises the Kindle Fire as light and durable, designed to take knocks so “you can let your child play without worry”. Interestingly, a lot of online content relating to how to get the best out of your tablet for your children doesn’t come directly from the manufacturers but from third parties: parents who make websites or videos, or from media sources such as techradar who find there’s public interest in how-to articles. That suggests there’s a real market for manufacturers to engage more directly with parents and even schools about their products.

Illustration by elhombredenegro

Where there’s a lack of understanding about the online environment, is it a valid solution to prevent a child from seeing what a product is capable of ? Perhaps the answer lies in a two-pronged approach.

Getting confidence in the digital arena at a young age might come from initially being able to experience without fear, but at some point that must change into channelling curiosity with knowledge.

Adults

Einstein said, “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.” Too often we worry only about children in formal education, but how do adults get their information about the digital age? Are they well-informed enough to make decisions about their online profiles, and therefore set a good example to the generations to come?

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Brands’ responsibility to digital security

Certainly we are more security-conscious than we used to be; a 2013 study by Pew Research Center showed that 86 per cent of adult internet users have “taken steps from time to time to avoid surveillance by other people or organisations when they were using the internet”. Social media sites such as Facebook have responded with additional privacy settings that can be hard to digest. Again, third parties stepped in with videos and articles.

In this instance, bt has put a guide to using Facebook on its own website, which certainly might make internet users feel more confident of bt’s dedication to transparency than Facebook’s.

Training people to use the internet for free has fallen to libraries and charities, but with both of those sectors undergoing hard times it’s difficult to see where help will come in the future—or do we simply assume we’ve reached a point where everyone knows what they’re doing, and those who don’t keep quiet out of shame? The International Longevity Centre points out that this is an issue of age—79 per cent of households below the state pension age had internet access in 2011, but only 37 per cent of households over state pension age enjoyed the same access. And that’s just for the basics of internet usage; the complexities of security issues are rarely addressed directly by brands, but a few are heading in a positive direction.

Toshiba recently collaborated on an online safety video with McAfee in which the dangers of internet shopping are highlighted, giving generic advice about the internet. Google has its Safety Centre, and this is a collection of invaluable information relating to the specifics of Google’s policies and also to the whole business of having an online life. One of my favourite aspects are the tailored videos showing parents who work for Google talking about how they protect their children online. The business of being able to understand and use a website effectively is such a huge part of the information age, and the more brands get involved with education, the less chance we all risk of a future in which the technology outpaces our understanding, and people get left behind.

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Brands’ responsibility to digital security

The future

You might say that increasing the consumer’s understanding of the internet is a waste of time as it changes so quickly—we use passwords today but might use body parts tomorrow, and who knows what else could change? But by opening a dialogue with consumers about how to get the best out of a brand’s website you also gain a sense of their needs and expectations about the future of online security. We currently ask people to store a vast amount of passwords in their head, and recommend they use a different one for each website, including a mixture of numbers, upper case and lower case letters—how many people actually do this? At what point does it become impossible to remember? For instance, Craig Grannell writing for Stuff commented that, “Heads need bashing to make these systems more human and—crucially—more usable and secure.”

Again, third parties have stepped up to the task of acting as a gobetween; for instance, Agile Bits 1 Password will create fiendish passwords for each site you frequent, and secure them all with a master password. All you do is put in the main password and it does the hard work of unlocking everything else. An awareness of this need is easy to see, and yet few brands address it directly.

Getting brands more heavily involved in educating consumers about what steps are being taken towards a cyber-secure future will also help to tackle that great problem of technology—fear. If we’re afraid of identity theft and we don’t really understand how to check if a site is safe, then the chances are we’ll be less willing to participate online. So, if people are getting left behind, and both adults and children are finding it hard to understand what’s safe and what’s dangerous, isn’t it too important an issue to leave to third parties? A dialogue about what the internet of everything will mean in terms of our interaction with brands is a conversation that would go a long way to making consumers feel more secure.

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Cisco on the internet of everything In this interview, we speak to Ian Foddering, Cisco’s chief technology officer for UK and Ireland, about his views on what brands need to know about the ‘internet of everything’, something that is, according to the company, a $4.6 trillion global opportunity.

How would you define the internet of everything?

The internet of everything… brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable—effectively turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals and countries.

Ian Foddering, Cisco chief technology officer

Is it the same as the internet of things?

for UK and Ireland

It’s bigger than the internet of things because it adds network intelligence that allows convergence, orchestration and visibility across previously disparate systems. People will continue to connect through devices, like smartphones pcs and tablets, as well as through social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. As the internet of everything emerges, the interaction of people on the internet will evolve.

For example, it may become common to wear sensors on our skin or in our clothes that collect and transmit data to healthcare providers—over time it could end up being able to produce a constant stream of static data.

The explosion of new connections joining the internet of everything is driven by the development of ip (Internet Protocol)-enabled devices, the increase in global broadband availability and the advent of ipv6.

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Interview: Cisco on the ‘internet of everything’

How does it work?

The best examples of this would include evolving technology, business, organisational and other processes that will be needed in order to manage or even automate growth in connections and communication of data. It includes many physical items like sensors, meters, actuators, and other types of devices that can be attached to any object, that are or will be capable of connecting to the network and sharing information.

These things will sense and deliver more data, respond to control inputs, and provide more information to help people and machines make decisions. Examples of ‘things’ in the internet of everything include smart meters that communicate energy consumption, assembly line robots that automate factory floor operations, and smart transportation systems that adapt to traffic conditions.

Some brands, such as mobile provider O₂ and sportswear giant Nike have already embraced the internet of things.

Rather than just reporting raw data, connected things will soon send higher-level information and insights back to machines, computers, and people in real time for further evaluation and decision-making.

It will enable faster, more intelligent decision-making by both people and machines, as well as more effective control over our environment.

Our research suggests that firms must invest in the right ioe capabilities to improve competitiveness. Cisco identified several

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Interview: Cisco on the ‘internet of everything’

key areas of opportunity for firms in sectors that have the greatest potential to benefit from ioe. The challenge is that [despite the growth in connected devices] there are currently several competing wireless communications protocols for the internet of things that are not interoperable with end user devices out-of-the-box.

To capture the most value, these companies should focus on the following ioe-driven capabilities: – Manufacturing firms: real-time, multidimensional data analysis; integrated video collaboration; remote tracking of physical assets; intelligent robots—AutoBot is a great example.

– Energy firms: integration of sensor data; ability to locate experts when vast distances are involved between experts and energyproduction sources; predictive analytics. We like Hive by British Gas. – Retailers: data visualisation and predictive analytics; byod; location-based marketing—O₂ Priority is a good example.

Consumers are reluctant to create a smart home because current technology doesn’t let them control a whole internet of things from just one app on devices they already own. As Apple’s recent announcement showed, consumers are demanding a unified way to control their environments.

But essentially we must remember that more things are connecting to the internet than people—over 12.5 billion devices in 2010 alone. Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (ibsg) predicts some 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020. So we need to think carefully and seriously about how having lots of things connected could change everything.

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DixonsCarphone Can the newly formed DixonsCarphone successfully bring connected devices to the high street, and address the British public’s changing expectations of technology?

This year’s £3.8 billion merger between British consumer electronics brand Dixons and mobile retailer Carphone Warehouse has resulted in a retail giant that will offer everything from phones to fridges. Over time, DixonsCarphone, which also owns Currys, Currys Digital and pc World in the UK, could gain a lot from the deal. Improved access to economies of scale and the ability to harness overlapping customer bases suggest projected savings of £80 million by 2018, alongside a workforce growth of two per cent.

The public, however, was initially unconvinced, as Bloomberg reported a nosedive in stocks for Dixons and Carphone Warehouse of 10.3 per cent and eight per cent respectively. Why the scepticism? Well, if history is anything to go by, the union of two business families does not always enjoy a happy ending.

Survival of the fittest

Take aol Time Warner. When the media giant Time Warner announced in 1999 it was to merge with the online dial-up service provider and one of the globe’s top 25 companies, aol, the result was a $360 billion monster, and the biggest corporate marriage ever seen. At the time there was some head-scratching over a traditional media provider going hand-in-hand with a dotcom business. But looking back 15 years later, the likes of Netflix and iTunes remind us that the decision to join forces could have positioned aol Time Warner as the perfect forerunner to the explosion of online content—six years before the launch of YouTube.

However, aol Time Warner ailed due to an inability to unite what were seen as disparate corporate cultures and goals.

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Case study: DixonsCarphone

By failing to integrate the two companies effectively, aol did not gain access to Time Warner Cable’s infrastructure and added content for its portal services, nor did Time Warner get down to digitising its content for online consumption.

Presumably, the disparity in corporate culture stalled digital innovation. By digging in their heels to protect their brands’ heritage, the two parties failed to develop a vision for the new company’s future. This left the pitch open to be taken by younger, more nimble presences such as the aforementioned YouTube. In the end, aol and Time Warner de-merged in 2009, in a bellyflop that included losses as big as $99 billion in 2002.

It’s all in the name

This affair comes to mind with the DixonsCarphone merger because these companies are also facing the challenge of presenting their combined interests to the public. The name ‘DixonsCarphone’, bears comparison with aol Time Warner, begging the question of whether the new brand will indeed offer anything new.

Dixons Travel

Marketing Week quotes Carphone Warehouse’s former chief executive Andrew Harrison (now DixonsCarphone deputy chief executive): “We are blessed with a plethora of brands that have pretty much ubiquitous awareness even though they don’t necessarily describe what we do. Carphone Warehouse doesn’t sell car phones and Currys doesn’t sell curries. We’ll think over time about what the best brands are to go to market with to create a seamless offering for customers.”

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Case study: DixonsCarphone

DixonsCarphone appears to be taking the branding issue seriously. Less than two months after the merger, head of brand communications, Benjamin Kaye, who had worked for Dixons Retail for over five years, was replaced by marketing communications director Ian McGregor. And sure enough, DixonsCarphone appears to be assuaging the public’s fear, having celebrated its first day in the ftse 100 with a 2.5p rise in shares to 374.5p.

In-store 3DTV demo

What the public wants, the public gets

A new approach?

Earlier this year, Pew Research published a research report detailing the opinion of some 1,800 experts and stakeholders on the future of the internet by 2025. A common thread in the results were expectations of fully-connected and remotely-controlled homes, as well as wearable devices and sensors that monitor everything from personal fitness and goods tracking to broken water pipes and pollution levels. Notably, a number of experts also raised concerns about security, privacy and human dignity issues.

Unlike aol Time Warner, which largely ignored questions around how broadband networks would change the topography of the media landscape, DixonsCarphone’s offering could see them gearing up to meet the needs of consumers. Reportedly, they are bracing themselves to become the UK’s one-stop destination for gadgets galore, providing connectivity-enabled appliances or devices and their corresponding data plans under the same roof. This reality could be closer than initially thought, as DixonsCarphone

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Case study: DixonsCarphone

faced the unrivalled opportunity in September 2014 to capture competitor Phones 4U’s market share following the decision of four major mobile phone network operators not to renew their contracts. If and how connected appliances enjoy mass-market consumer acceptance remains to be seen, but the stirrings are there. The Nest Learning Thermostat has just arrived in the UK after the Google-owned company took a reassuring amount of time to adjust its functionality to match the way the British heat their homes—notably with boilers rather than furnaces and with naught but a wry chuckle at the concept of air conditioning.

Net neutrality and the future

In May 2014, Verizon became the third big US communications service provider to stake out the digital world by challenging the United States’ Federal Communications Commission’s (fcc) rules on maintaining net neutrality. This challenge resulted in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit effectively eliminating the only existing net neutrality protections in existence, paving the way for internet service providers like Verizon to block websites and apps as they please. The fcc has the ability to turn this around, and would do well to listen to the public, having received a record one million responses during its public comment period, most of which heavily criticised the proposed rules.

For DixonsCarphone, an uneven playground could bolster sales by eliminating competition from startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses. But at what cost? If, as the experts questioned

by Pew predicted, the internet becomes “like electricity” in our lives, a closed internet can only do more harm than good as it’s not conducive to the needs of users. DixonsCarphone faces an interesting dilemma, which could result in a need to de-merge entertainment services, appliances and service providers, effectively countering a large portion of the proposed benefits the merger could have for users looking to embrace the internet of things.

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About Brand Perfect

About Brand Perfect Brand PerfectÂŽ is an initiative

by Monotype aimed at educating brands on how changes in technology and digital media affect the experiences of their audiences.

As well as conducting and publishing research and industry reports on a wide range of pertinent topics, on brandperfect.org we also publish regular editorial features, and our website and events provide a forum for brands, agencies, designers and developers to discuss the best means to use technology to serve brand audiences.

Here is a small sample of some of the content available via brandperfect.org and our newsletter.

We also publish weekly features to Medium and audio essays on SoundCloud.

A new Facebook app, released under the Internet.org partnership, allows users in developing nations to get basic services over the web free of charge.

When it comes to gender, branding still has a way to go. Eliza Williams shows how some brands, such as Black + Decker, are leading the way.

As major internet brands hit our roads, Angus Montgomery wonders what the future holds for established automotive brands and emerging ones such as Detroit Electric.

How do long-established brands such as Leica wield their heritage in a digital age?

Dave Cochrane finds out.

Aliya Whiteley investigates developments in in-game advertising, arguing that the opportunities it presents to brands are coming of age.

Joe Fernandez considers the ongoing differences between the bricks-and-mortar and digital channels of supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, whose tu clothing range is only available in-store.

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Designer Alix Land Illustrator Laura Barnard

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