The Uncomfortable Middle Ground: Part 1

Call it what you will – the Internet of Things, enchanted objects, or the connected world – most of us have been plugged into the digital network for longer than we think.

This week I’ve been immersing myself in all things connected as IBM opened the doors to their stunning new Watson IoT Center Munich. Actually, IoT doesn’t go far enough – they call it the Genius of Things.

We live in a time when a connected kettle can sit on the same network as our telephone, television, baby monitor, washing machine and every light bulb in the house. In theory, a chain of events can occur when we pull into our smartwatch-sensing garage in our connected car, unlock our smart-door and enter our digital domain, or ‘home’ as it used to be known.

This networked utopia isn’t a new concept. 1950s visions of the future foretold just such a connected world where all these wondrous gadgets were living in harmony, alongside their human masters. But who’s really in control – us or the machines?

Currently, Artificial Intelligence isn’t that intelligent and we haven’t handed over the reigns just yet because they’re not all playing nice. With so much emerging technology trying to piggyback legacy systems, we’re living in the ‘Uncomfortable Middle Ground’.

The what? UMG is that awkward grey area between the creation of platforms and devices and realising their potential. With great arm-waving comes great responsibility and the need to deliver on a promise. In order to achieve this, our connected world needs to be truly connected.

Much of the public IoT fanfare comes from existing personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft’s OS voice-botherers, but it’s what’s under the skin that really counts or you’re left with a pretty shallow experience.

I was invited to the Genius of Things Summit as a Futurist by WIRED Insider for Watson IoT. It was here that IBM and 20 clients showcased some of the stunning technology that interacts beautifully with the outside world, but does something meaningful with the data. Ricoh’s intelligent whiteboard, Panasonic’s interactive mirror and Bragi’s new Dash hearable for enterprise with built-in language translation were all perfect examples of effective IoT partnerships.

I may have an abnormal interest in future platforms and their potential impact on business and our lives as consumers, but the only time IBM has been on my radar since their early PCs is with a misinformed opinion of Watson, a chess and Jeopardy-playing super-brain. This week changed all that.

The huge glass towers project an impressive facade but the ‘FAB Lab’ and client ‘Collaboratory' inside Watson’s Head Office have a playful air about them. The work environment feels very much like a high tech college, where the IBM’ers and co-working clients all exude a genuine sense of child-like wonder and possibility.

IBM positions Watson as Cognitive Computing – a step above Artificial Intelligence, which is in turn a level above Machine Learning – and this is apparent in the Munich HQ. It’s like Stark Industries, but the Pepper and Nao robots aren’t weaponised.

The smart elevators really do talk to the smart doors, room and desk reservation system, the lights, windows and aircon. If you ever wondered what they say to each other, visit machineconversations.kone.com

We’re nudging closer to that connected vision of the future and we’ll see good (and plenty of bad) ideas fall by the wayside in the rush to offer a seamless experience. In order to be ground-breaking, you need to break a few heads, hearts and rules along the way. That top layer will always face the most criticism as it’s our first touch point but the rewards for perseverance are high when the information backbone delivers results. After my visit to Munich, I’m convinced the future’s in safe hands.

IoC: Internet of Cars

What’s the biggest auto show in the world? Geneva, Paris, Frankfurt, Detroit? Nope, with 180,000 attendees spread over 2.5 million sq ft, it’s CES in Las Vegas. Isn’t it full of robots, drones, augmented reality, touch screens and IoT? Yep, and so are the cars.

I’m not about to write a preachy outsider’s view of the automotive future or an insider’s defence of the industry – rather uniquely, I have feet placed firmly in both camps and a tattoo across my skull that reads ‘petrol head’.

OK, the tattoo’s on the inside and I actually like electric propulsion as well as exhaust sniffing. It’s a good job too as the main headlines at CES were all made by cars fuelled from the wall, not the pump.

Faraday Future made a triumphant return to the Nevada stage with their FF 91 at a glitzy live-streamed event. Last year they revealed a concept resembling the Batmobile, twelve months later, it was a far more practical SUV.

For all the glamour, slick branding and live theatre, the focus was on a record attempt – could the new FF 91 beat the Bentley Bentayga, Ferrari 488 GTB and Tesla Model X from 0-60mph? It did, by 0.01sec, hitting the mark in 2.39 sec. I’m not convinced many in the audience bought into the line that someone torn between the Ferrari and the FF 91 would choose the SUV over the supercar based on a straight line dash. Show them both a series of twisting corners and see who emerges at the other end with a smile on their face and who has their half-digested lunch in their lap.

Speaking of smiling faces, that’s exactly what I’d had earlier the same day as I spent quality time with the team from Lucid Motors – another EV startup focused on disrupting the automotive industry. Their forthcoming ‘Air’ also makes a fast dash from 0-60 but the story behind it is one of driving dynamics, rather than straight line bragging rights. Lucid’s CTO Peter Rawlinson, formerly Chief Engineer at Tesla and Lotus, put forward a strong case for his passionate team of 300+ employees and why they’re convinced driving and design appreciation will be just as important as battery range and autonomous tech to the Lucid audience.

Rawlinson believes their battery, developed in partnership with Samsung SDI, is a genuine differentiator in a new world of range anxiety. “It’s not just about distance, but sustained range. The breakthrough cell density is resistant to battery charge depletion usually experienced with repeated fast-charging.” The automotive industry faces many of the issues we already encounter with our personal technology, such as connectivity and mobile phone batteries caught in a recharging memory cycle of decreasing shelf life – not something we’ll tolerate when spending $100,000+ on a luxury car.

VP of Design, Derek Jenkins, former Director of Design at Mazda and VW told me he’d relished the creative challenges when starting with an automotive clean sheet. Sensors for autonomous driving need to be integrated, rather than added to a familiar silhouette and the interior design maximises the space around the electric drivetrain, rather than one inherited from the mechanical components of a traditional combustion engine.

It’s Rawlinson’s engineering appreciation and Jenkins’ design skills that brought the aforementioned smile to my face as we headed out onto the dusty Vegas roads in a development prototype. Peter eagerly hanging the back end out at every opportunity, putting that passion for driving into action!

Lucid now needs to start work on their $700M Arizona factory. This has been previously misreported as a similar model to Faraday Future’s, with funds coming from their own Chinese billionaire – not so, as Rawlinson stressed “this is an American company.” Despite their intentionally understated message, they seem to be heading in the right direction at the right speed as the Air is slated for production in 2019, with first year projections of 8-10k units, rising to 50-60k.

Although Lucid seems to be on track, Faraday’s FF 91 still lacks one important ingredient – money. Vital funds need to be released by Chinese backer, Founder and CEO of LeEco Jia Yueting so work can resume on their Nevada factory. Many keep referring to Faraday Future as the ‘Tesla killer’ as if this is a good thing. It’s not, and Elon Musk has frequently said the industry needs many EV-first players to shake up the competition, not kill it!

So where does this leave everyone else? Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes and others had CES concepts to show off their latest vision for the future of vehicle connectivity – inside and out – and how they’ll all drive themselves, but BMW took out the most real estate.

Here I put my cards on the table as I drive a BMW, but it’s a petrol model and I haven’t made the jump to hybrid or electric yet as I’m still addicted to their turbocharged straight six. However, this doesn’t stop the Bavarians from trying to tempt me into an ‘i model’ every year at CES. In 2015, I piloted BMW’s petrol-electric supercar around the streets of Vegas. This year, they drove me to the ‘Speed Vegas’ desert racing circuit in an i3, then let me loose in an i8 around the track!

Compared to Faraday Future and Tesla’s unnatural obsession with straight line speed, this track session was a superb way to demonstrate the benefits of a car that is just as comfortable in the corners as the straights – and that’s a fun vision for the future!

And that future isn’t all about speed and performance. All manufacturers need to connect – with devices, the consumers that use them and the world around us. We already have a reasonable expectation that our phones will talk to our cars and in doing so, will add functionality. When our cars become fully autonomous, the safety restrictions fall away and we’ll demand entertainment, office functionality and more.

More? Well, I spoke at FutureFest in London last year and Cindy Gallop was on stage before me, talking about the statistics for sex in cars. It’s higher in countries where larger families share smaller houses as the car naturally presents an intimate space – but auto manufacturers continually fail to recognise this. Imagine the potential to relieve the boredom of a long autonomous journey with some connected sexy times. Auto brands take note, if the car is rockin’ time to come knockin’.

The very public message from the car companies at CES was “we’re in control”. This is true to a point, but it’s mostly tinged with an air of panic as they all know the future can’t be delivered overnight. Many believe their music and movie-streaming audience will no longer wish to drive or own cars and this is increasingly the message from industry analysts. But this is mostly educated guesswork and the future isn’t predetermined so the automotive business needs to give its customers a reason to love their products, want to drive them (when not having sex) and make them their own.

The only way to do this is to connect to the future audience – the ones who currently have no concept of car ownership and have never even gripped a steering wheel. Don’t neglect existing customers, but enlist their help as they’re the drivers, owners and brand advocates that can help to share the reasons we choose a Union Jack roof for a MINI, spec 20” alloys on an Audi, tick the box for red stitching with black leather on an Alfa, and take a deep breath of ‘new car smell’ when we drive away from a dealership.

I’m a petrol head for life, even if we replace the petrol with a plug socket, the dashboard with an iPhone and the dealership with a VR headset.

Trump, Brexit and Beyond: Switching Negative to Positive in 2017

I think we’d all admit, 2016 hasn’t been the best of years. In fact it would have been endorsed on LinkedIn for ‘shit shower’. We’ve lost some incredible talent – from Bowie to Prince, Alan Rickman to Mohammad Ali and there’s still a few weeks left.

Then politics happened. The Brexit roadshow came to town, we uncoupled the caravan marked ‘UK’ and started pushing it up HS2 without a timetable, a budget or a driver. Cue the Trump bandwagon…

Although I’m based in the UK, I spend a lot of time in the US and I love it. North America features such geographical variety – from snowcapped mountains to desert salt flats, tropical beaches and bustling metropolis. It’s easy to see why less than half the population possesses a valid passport.

But the political and social opinion varies as much as the terrain and, despite the endless election coverage, those views aren’t all reflected in the mainstream media – hence Donald Trump’s shock election win last month.

He swept to victory on a wave of support from disillusioned Americans, many of whom had lost jobs they thought were secure – some direct casualties of automation and the Internet of Things, many feeling intimidated by change. These people don’t like robots, see technology as a threat and Donald Trump as their saviour.

He’s a climate change denier. Expert denier. Progress denier and now Time’s Person of The Year! The US tech industry (and those it invests in globally) are understandably concerned – especially champions of new untried and untested platforms such as VR, AR and AI. It’s going to be a tough fight against a man screaming “No fact checking!”

I have to admit, the 2016 US election wasn’t my first encounter with Donald Trump. In 2010, with my tongue placed firmly in my cheek, I applied for The Apprentice. The US show couldn’t be further from the BBC’s quality production and its endearing figurehead, Lord Sugar.

Before his departure from the show, Donald Trump presided over a tasteless dark wood, marble and gold TV empire, full of overly-sincere candidates, forelock-tugging co-workers and overbearing sponsors. I loved the show for its window into a world so different from our own. How could I not apply?

Unfortunately, meticulous planning went out the window as, in the most English way possible, we arrived at Trump Tower so hungover that we missed our NBC Apprentice audition. I was briefly connected to Donald Trump on LinkedIn as a result but It’s difficult to endorse a man for ‘hair weaved from gold’ or ‘professional orange face’. The relationship didn’t last long.

Most Americans I work with are Democrats and a few Republicans who didn’t support their appointed candidate. None of them wanted a ‘Trump era’ or seriously thought it would ever happen. However, I find it hard to believe that I’m the only one who listened to my Uber drivers – who were all pro-Trump, mostly male but also predominantly immigrants. They were all looking for a change from the establishment, even if they were relying on ‘The Donald’ for salvation. I predicted a Trump win in my FutureFest talk earlier this year, with parallels to Back to The Future’s Biff Tannen, followed by Elon Musk’s run for the Presidency in 8+ years. Sometimes it’s painful being a Futurologist.

On the eve of the US election, my eldest daughter’s teacher told the whole class that if Donald Trump won, World War III was inevitable. Whether it is or not is besides the point, I’m not comfortable with scare tactics for kids or adults and this style of shock headline also turned off many ‘stay’ voters during Brexit campaigning.

These weren’t the only US Election/Brexit parallels. Following both unexpected results, Facebook was full of parental hysteria. Previously level-headed mothers and fathers were on the point of breakdown, wondering how they were going to explain to their kids that we’d destroyed the world for future generations and we were about to enter a new dark age.

This attitude was mirrored in business conversations where the only action left was to wail in despair on every social platform or proclaim our last remaining options were a series of recounts, second-chances or full-blown revolution.

Pull yourselves together. It is what it is, now shape it. Make the future work for us, not the other way around. We have to make the most of the hand we’ve been dealt and turn the situation to our advantage.

It may not be good news for British tourists abroad but the devalued pound does make the UK an attractive investment opportunity. Brexit (hard or soft) has put in motion the red tape and queuing associated with a loss of free movement of labour around Europe but to focus simply on our neighbours has always been shortsighted. We now have an incredible opportunity to place the UK at the centre of the design, technology and creative world, rather than lurking on the periphery of an existing club.

If under Trump the US regards us as a 51st Trade State and China continues to see us as a skilled leader in so many fields, we’re going to be more than OK, we’re going to flourish. Donald Trump wants to bring manufacturing home and deliver foreign investment via threats rather than incentives but digital industries are globally transient and skills are transferable across so many platforms that the UK can and should be a leader, not a follower.

When everything around us seems to be going backwards, moving forwards is often furthest from our minds but this is the time to be positive about what we can do, not negative about what we can’t.

We need to ensure we’re doing more than sprinkling glitter on a turd – our next moves are vitally important for the future of mankind. Hysterical? Nope, essential.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post

Now Listen Up

The next big revolution is gathering pace. No, not Virtual Reality – that’s the current revolution, the next battle for digital supremacy will take place in your ears. Say hello to Hearables.

OK, I admit I could have written about this last year, before everyone else, got in with the scoop and taken all the glory for shouting about the next digital platform. I chose not to because everyone wants me to have an opinion on VR. That’s no bad thing, with #StereocastVR about to launch and enough virtual reality projects to last us years at Brandwidth, but I’ve been speaking about IoT, Connected Cities, Wearables, FashTech, Movie Innovation, Retail and much more at events around the world. I’ll just stop briefly to add Hearables to that list…

I’m not going to review the current contenders, you can find that elsewhere but I will comment on the potential for this platform. I’ve just spent the last week in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara and you can count on all the big players to join in with this audio revolution.

Hearables aren’t really standalone items (much like headphones are pretty useless without an input device), they offer an information layer on top of existing apps and operating systems. Push notifications, emails, Tweets and text messages read aloud and sat nav directions straight into your head. Hearables could allow you to leapfrog an entire platform, making smartwatches irrelevant and offering a more useful 1-2-1 voice communication with the smartphones in our pockets.

AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now will make this process as seamless and friendly as possible, if we can all get over the social stigma of seemingly shouting at ourselves in public. This was never a good look for estate agents and city traders in the era of bluetooth headsets. Swipe gestures and heart rate monitors are likely to add extra hardware value but software is the main driving force.

I have a confession to make, I don’t like wearing headphones. This means adopting Hearables is a bigger leap for me than anyone already happy to plug themselves in on a daily basis. A smartwatch was an easier step as I’ve aways worn a ‘regular’ wristwatch – it’s just a shame most are crap at being watches.

I was one of the first to test a set of Here headphones and I was keen to realise their potential. Accurate audio selection, digital filtering and app control - sounds good, right? Actually I switched on the oversized in-ear wireless devices, pushed them in, blocking out all audio, then dialled up various preset filters via the app. The novelty of slightly quieter street or office noise or reverb added to voices or music wore off very quickly for me and I was relieved to remove the devices. It certainly made me appreciate ‘real’ sound, using my own ears rather than a bionic pair.

If you fancy a genuine glimpse into the future, put your money down for a pair of Pilot Hearables - a Smart Earpiece Language Translator on Indiegogo. They will translate a selection of languages live in-ear, fulfilling your secret agent fantasy, or just making you the ultimate global traveller - for business or pleasure. Now that will be genuinely useful, when they launch next year… probably.

With the growing popularity of VR and AR headsets, headphones are more useful than ever when attempting to add 3D audio to the 3D imaging. Unfortunately, we face a real problem when demonstrating the tech. It’s hard enough knowing what someone is viewing in a VR demo - try it with headphones, especially in-ear. Who wants to share someone else’s ear wax? 

You want my advice? Forget early adoption as the current crop of Hearables are expensive and attention is on features rather than audio quality. If you need new headphones right now, buy the best you can afford. If you don’t? Wait a little longer and the audio revolution will happen anyway.