January 19, 2018 - Building Automation
By Ken Sinclair
We are all involved in today's digital transformation and have an amazing opportunity to create a new softer mindfulness face for the greater good. This month we talk about how we can improve our image as we digitally transform and inspires us all to envision what the world will see when we pull the string on our transformation mask to expose our new inner selves to the world.
Will our new inner digital transformed face be for the greater good of all? An image that reflects our human-centric mindfulness of the functionality features of our digital transformation. Can we create a new softer more welcoming mindfulness face with IoT superpowers?
For more spiritual guidance...big smile, please read my complete review, Our Digital Transformation Mask.
My last off the wall review had me Teaching the IoT Monster to Ride a Bike. Just one of the steps to carving out our digital transformation. “The Octopus looks like the IoT monster we are all wrestling with; smart, soft, slippery, flexible and able to change form, but to be useful the beast needs to learn how to ride our existing industries bikes, which are old, ridge, hard, and tippy.”
Enough of my meddling metaphors.
How does this all relate to our digital transformation for 2018 and our edgy education sessions at AHR Expo Chicago?
Just as we were starting to get our minds around the transformation open software will bring George Thomas invites us to see how open hardware is going to influence our industry. “I was curious that within a show displaying highly engineered industrial equipment if hobbyist computing platforms such as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard would appear and they did.”
In this interview, Troy Davis says: “That’s where the beauty of wireless comes in, and wireless is what’s allowing the industries to coalesce into one platform.” The word coalesce — come together and form one mass or whole — is another great word for digital transformation but we must preserve our tenets in the process.
How deep and how quickly is the transformation occurring? This article provides great insight into the rapid transformation to voice with many talk to me products. "Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri or Google Home, have become an increasingly common sight in homes across the world through smart speakers."
This is an interesting article. I am glad we are all playing with this virtual assistant stuff. It’s hard to understand without talking and interacting with these devices. Now we talk directly to the things which greatly simplifies our interaction with them. Voice becomes the lowest cost set up tool when coupled with the ubiquitous cell phone; it is much cheaper than touch screens and even old-school buttons and switches. I am very impressed with how easily it allows very different things to be grouped into one simple voice command. Stuff our industry and others have struggled with. The amazing connections between entertainment, education, and more give it immediate value. Google has a real war on its hands in this arena but as the cost keeps dropping the virtual voice devices are evolving as part of products "the things in IoT" and voice interface is becoming a giveaway item and is destined to be everywhere.
In “Alexa, Would You Like To Go To Work With Me Today?” James McHale, managing director, Memoori, says “Alexa’s introduction to the office appears to be the first step in replacing human office assistants with AI-powered virtual alternatives,” says .
Therese talks this month about What's Happening at the Edge of IT/OT Convergence, realizing smart and connected systems. “One outcome was Cloud Foundry, an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) originally developed by VMware and years later passed to a 501c organization for governing. It is a flexible framework for cloud developers that offers just enough of a common platform to interoperate.”
I am looking forward to our panel discussions in Chicago at AHR Expo with Therese and Anto and our other speakers. Please join us.
Ken Sinclair is the founder, owner, and publisher of an online resource called AutomatedBuildings.com. He writes a monthly column for FacilitiesNet.com about what is new in the Internet of Things (IOT) for building automation.
