What’s the Future of the Internet of Things?

If you’ve ever wondered what IoT is then this is the podcast for you.

We also covered:
• So what is the Internet of Things?
• The Sensor as a service company
• Digital Twinning
• What sort of data can you collect with IoT?
• Facilities Management and IoT
• Wellness in the workplace
• Data > insights from IoT
• IoT real-time data can drive SLAs
• How cloud computing is driving IoT adoption
• Low Power Wide Area Networks
• IoT doesn’t need to involve IT
• Customers buy business solutions, not IoT
• The 4 drivers of IoT success
• Why millennials expect a different work environment
• Carbon dioxide sensors help wellness
• Sustainability + ESG + IoT
• Asset tracking and IoT
• New innovations for IoT
• Wearables: sensors in clothes
• Who owns my data?
• Multi-party data ownership
• The data value exchange
• Three things for this week

You can listen to this podcast on your device using this direct link or search for “Actionable Futurist podcast” in your favourite app.

What are you doing to get ready for the promise of IoT?

Episode Transcript

Intro:   0:02
Welcome to The Actionable Futurist® Podcast, a bi-weekly show all about the near term future with practical advice from a range of global experts to help you stay ahead of the curve. Every episode answers the question. What’s the future off with voices and opinions that need to be heard? Your host is international keynote speaker The Actionable Futurist® Andrew Grill.

Andrew Grill:   0:29
Welcome to Season two Episode three of The Actionable Futurist® Podcast. My guest today is Ron Rock, who is this co founder and CEO of Micro. Sheer Run brings three decades of experience as a bridge builder between new technology strategies and legacy enterprises. He was most recently the founder and CEO of Knowledge Rules, an international business process management technology company that was sold to Accenture in 2010. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Ron has sat , as a director on both public and private boards and he earned a bachelor of science in accounting from LaSalle University in Philadelphia, P. A. He has deep ties to the technology and venture capital sectors in the United States and Europe and is active in philanthropic pursuits in his native city. Welcome Ron.  

Ron Rock:   1:11
Thank you, Andrew.  

Andrew Grill:   1:13
Now, before we get into this topic, it’s probably worth hearing your own definition of the Internet of Things, or IoT. I think it means many things to many people. How do you describe it?

Ron Rock:   1:23
Wow, what a heavy question to start our conversation with today. You’re right. IoT means a lot of things to a lot of people. And I’ve actually learned in the last six months that some middle management in large corporations advised me to not mention IoT in the C-suite because it’s got this bad reputation. IoT was first coined back in 1999 at MIT, and the idea was that we had computers running browsers and they were all talking to one another. It was the height of the dot com, and somebody came up with this great idea that wow, what if machines could actually talk to each other directly? What if our refrigerator and our car and our appliances at home? What if all these things could actually be interconnected? What if cars and traffic lights and ambulances were all connected? So this it was a big idea. What happened in the subsequent two decades, a lot of money was spent on IoT and frankly, a lot of failed projects. and so through that the buzz came through, IoT everything’s going to talk to everything to suddenly it became a bad thing to talk about in the C-suite. There were a few exceptions things like the G E jet engine. We were able to put very expensive sensors in that engine. It generates over 100 megabytes of data a second, but the ROI made sense. We’re going to keep planes in the air. So no matter what the expense, it made sense. But we never really saw IoT in it’s vision of 2000 the George Jetson error. We never saw all that automation come together.

Andrew Grill:   2:57
So I agree that I has got a bad rap and I’m also not using that term because, well it’s confusing, and also the other thing, and we may talk about this, people then say, oh, IoT – my Internet camera home that’s been hacked and all those sort of things that just has a really bad connotation. So I know you now talk about Microshare as a “sensor as a service company”. That’s I think a much more compelling view, b ut what does it actually mean?

Ron Rock:   3:19
Well, and if I can do a precursor to that, I’d like to say we talk about IoT   under this concept of digital twinning, Digital Twin has a lot of definitions out in the marketplace as well at the highest level, digital twinning is we’re going to create a virtual replica of everything in our physical lives. Why are we going to do this? We’re going to do it to drive operational efficiencies, we’re going to do it to extend the quality of life, we’re going to do to define new business opportunities in the market place. I say, extend the quality of life because data in general has gotten a bad rap lately, and so, just like you’re teeing up of the question hacking our cameras, Time magazine tries to scare the hell out of us every week with “our baby monitor has been hacked”, and it’s watching little James …

Andrew Grill:   4:06
..and that’s IoT so it’s bad …

Ron Rock:   4:07
It’s considered exactly all of that. So what we don’t talk about and the press doesn’t talk a lot about is all the good things coming out of data. So cars that don’t get into accidents in the first place are happening because of thousands of sensors talking to one another and proactively making our automobiles safer. Proactively driving our health care system. To look  for cures to cancer, improve cardiac care. All these types of things are benefits of data, but we take those for granted, and we try to scare everybody with data – it must be bad. So I think one of the first things we tackle at Microshare is the idea that there’s a lot of really good data out there, and the more data we can collect the more efficient, we’re going be able to make operations. The more we’re going to be able to create new business opportunities, new insights,  and let’s face it, the companies that run in a data-centric business model are the companies that are now the most valuable in the world, and legacy companies that have been around a long time are struggling and need to make that switch or risk going away.

Andrew Grill:   5:13
So I agree with the data is so powerful, but there’s so much out there. Let’s let’s make it as bit more personal for our listeners. What sort of data can you collect? If you’ve got these sensors out there, give us a sense of what is the data we can collect and how that might be turned into insights?

Ron Rock:   5:25
Sure, so at Microshare, there’s so many different industries that we could have pursued as an early-stage company, we decided to focus on commercial real estate, and we picked commercial real estate for a few reasons. One is it’s not regulated. Two, everybody has some commercial real estate. It’s ubiquitous across the planet, and it’s typically been underserved from a financial and a technology investment perspective. So why do people care about data and commercial real estate? Well, if I’m the tenant, I want to know how many people are in my room, in my building. Increasingly, we’re now working with a group of investors here in the UK – they lend the money to build the skyscraper, and so I’m going to give you $100 million, but I’m going to build into the covenant of the bonds, that I get to see the data of the occupancy in that building whenever I want.

Andrew Grill:   6:18
So now data has really monetary value.

Ron Rock:   6:20
Absolute monetary value, and why do I do that? Because I want to know that my tenant is potentially going to go away nine months before they typically would tell me, because I’m watching real time how that building functions. So the money people are interested. The landlord is interested, the tenant is interested, and the real low hanging fruit that we have found is that the facilities management folks, that people that clean that building are really interested in that data. Why? Typically, large companies like here in  London, Carillion went out of business. These were big companies, “too big to fail”, billions of pounds running on razor thin margins on a race to zero. What does a company like Carillion do? Among other things, they clean your office space. How did they typically clean it? They have minimum wage employees pushing a cart from point A to point B to point C every day on a schedule, regardless of utilisation. So what if I could actually clean space that’s being used and not clean space that isn’t being used? Fun little fact, the number one complaint in North America and Europe in the workplace is dirty bathrooms, and so suddenly I start cleaning the bathrooms that are being utilised more frequently, and I stop cleaning the bathrooms that, for whatever reason, time of year, time of day are no longer being used. So one of our large global facilities management companies, a Fortune 100 company, we were in a meeting a few months ago and they said, wait a minute, Ron. I think I get it”. Occupancy equals dust, and that is a fundamental game changer. So now you’re in a razor thin margin business, huge big global footprint. If I can suddenly shave a few points off of my cost whilst at the same time improving the level of service, that’s a huge win for these companies.

Andrew Grill:   8:19
It comes back to a wellness thing. so we hear that millennials want to come to work and be inspired and meet their passion, but if they’re working in a facility that don’t like or it’s dirty, then they’re not going to be happy, and I know that if I go to a bathroom facility, there’s a tatty piece of paper that someone signs saying they’ve been there. But you’re right, that’s programmed every hour, I go there whether it, needs cleaning or not. So just to break it down, the sensor basically says this space, this bathroom, this coffee area is or isn’t being used, and so that data goes back to someone who can then take action on it.

Ron Rock:   8:50
That’s right, and typically those sensors in that data create insights. Those insights are integrated in with your dynamics 365 accounting system, or you are Pegasystems Business Process Management BPM System or SAP and these insights than drive action. So, for example, being in a bathroom and having a push button there that allows a consumer to say, Hey, this bathroom needs to be cleaned. I now have a date time stamp of when they push that button – it needs to be cleaned. When the cleaning person shows up, they have a small magnet on their key chain. They tap the bottom of that sensor, and I now have a date-time stamp as to when the response showed up. As we look at some of these big global facilities management contracts, the margins are so thin that they’ve begun crafting service level agreements: SLAs and so now the facilities management company can actually get an increase in revenue if they meet certain service level agreements. We now provide the data that shows real time feedback from the people using the building and the facilities management companies real time response as to how they are servicing the facilities that they’re engaged with.

Andrew Grill:   10:04
So then to break that down – the way you do that today is a supervisor would have to go around with a clipboard and actually look at the tatty piece of paper to see if it had been cleaned, which means another person essentially just looking at data that’s already there. So give me a sense of how you get the data back from a sensor in the bathroom into someone’s dashboard. Give me a sense of how IoT, the whole sort of data flow happens?

Ron Rock:   10:24
So that’s That’s a great question, Andrew and the world has changed so much in the last 24 months. I talk to a lot of customers who have tried and failed expensive IoT projects, they want to beat themselves up a little bit, and I try to talk them out of that. The kind of technology the kind of data insights that we’re talking about didn’t exist. 36 months ago, it’s brand new, so there’s really two things at play. First is companies like Amazon. Web service is AWS and Microsoft Azure. They didn’t have fully robust IoT offerings just 24 months ago. So even if you were savvy enough to find the sensors and figure out how to plug the man and program them, you still had a whole infrastructure that you needed to worry about. The second piece is a whole new body of sensors in what’s called LPWan –  Low Power Wide Area Network sensors.

Andrew Grill:   11:18
The power thing is important, because if you stick a sensor there, you don’t want to have to run power and cabling and ethernet to it, so it’s got to be stand alone.

Ron Rock:   11:26
You’ve been doing your homework. Absolutely.

Andrew Grill:   11:28
I’d like to think as a Futurist I know what’s coming next.

Ron Rock:   11:30
Absolutely. That’s absolutely right, Andrew. The big breakthrough here is that we have sensors now that in many cases cost less than $US15 with a five year battery life and that those kinds of economics I’m going to put a sensor on every dog, cat, kid, manhole cover, soap dispenser, toilet seat, refrigerator …

Andrew Grill:   11:50
Mousetrap? 

Ron Rock:   11:52
Mousetrap – even a better mousetrap. So the question that you asked was architecturally, then how does this work? We have this new generation of low power wide area network sensors,  we call it “lick and stick”. You simply stick them on the wall, you scan them with apps that we’ve built, it automatically digitally twins that sensor, so it gives that sensor all of the details around its location that you need to make the information meaningful. That sensor broadcasts as frequently as every second as infrequently as once every 20 minutes, and it sends information – “I’m  occupied, I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m wet, I’m moving”, any one of a series of basic pieces of information. That information gets transmitted wirelessly to a gateway, a gateway – think about an analogy – the router that you have at home. So it’s a small box that’s plugged in, it has radio communications to all these sensors.

Andrew Grill:   12:52
But the important thing here you don’t need the existing WiFi it is its own network.

Ron Rock:   12:56
That’s exactly right.

Andrew Grill:   12:56
So you’ve got I t people. That would be the ones that would say No, you can’t do that cause you can connect to a corporate secure wireless network, and I think that the solution that you’ve got and you’re putting it on the market doesn’t need I t. Involved. The lick and stick is literally going licking stick. It then connects to these guys. Dwight’s through proprietary, unlicensed spectrum and your wife, and you have to worry about getting onto involved.

Ron Rock:   13:17
That’s absolutely correct is more fact. I like to say that most of my customers can’t spell coyote because that’s not what they bought. They bought occupancy, predictive cleaning, environmental monitoring, smart parking, space utilization optimization. They’re buying business solutions around business problems. The fact that we’re running an I o. T network under the covers escapes them, and one of the key benefits is You don’t have to get I t involved, and that’s really there’s. There’s a few benefits. One is obviously I t is always busy. It creates a lot of overhead, but again, the press scares us about how people have hacked in to legacy. Mainframe computers through security cameras and door sensors are data never touches your corporate data. The data goes to that gateway via a SIM card up into the cloud and into Azure and by the time it gets into Microsoft Azure. You’ve got all the power of Microsoft’s security and encryption data sovereignty, storage, all of the features that a global cloud provider brings to the table. So from that point, if you want to start ingesting that data back into your corporation back into your accounting systems, whatever it may be, you have the ability to do that. But you’re not being forced day one to marry that sensor data with your precious behind the firewall, corporate data

Andrew Grill:   14:47
you touched on a couple of things there, and I think the promise of iron has been coming for a while. But without an inflection point. You talk about the full things that have to come together. You might like to expand on

Ron Rock:   14:57
eyes. Sure. What? Why has I ot exploded in the last 24 months? Well, it’s a couple things that we’ve already touched on, issue said. First, the back end infrastructure wasn’t there. Azure, IBM, Watson, Google. To a lesser extent AWS, they now all have basic coyote offerings, So you’ve got a place to store the data. That’s kind of table stakes. You needed that to get started. The second thing is that you’ve got this growing catalog of off the shelf sensors. When we started in earnest tracking this LP one market place five years ago, there were three or four sensor manufacturers. There’s now over 100 and success begets success. Laura is the fastest growing LP when network in the world. Laura is long range sensors.

Andrew Grill:   15:50
Yeah, I believe so. This is the radio network that is the unlicensed spectrum that connects them all together,

Ron Rock:   15:55
correct and was started by some tech and IBM. And the lower alliance now has over 500 members.

Andrew Grill:   16:01
And you guys a K in that, don’t you? Which is

Ron Rock:   16:03
important? One of my partners, Charles Prom all, is the chairman of the marketing committee. So

Andrew Grill:   16:07
you get to see the standard so you’ll write up with what’s happening next.

Ron Rock:   16:11
We get to see not only the sensors that are available today. We know what sensors are coming on the market in the next 6 12 and 18 months, and that’s really exciting to see all the innovation. But for example, Tata has flooded India with Laura. Airwaves are engined wig have flooded France. Vodafone is working on Germany. British Telecom’s working. He

Andrew Grill:   16:32
tells strike thing, have a solution as well.

Ron Rock:   16:33
Direct. And Comcast is exploring doing it in the U. S. So that kind of success attracts innovation. So if you and I came up with a really cool sensor tomorrow and we said, Okay, how are we gonna take it to market? We would look at WiFi and Bluetooth and zig be an Ethernet and Laura, and we would probably pick lower. Why? Because we have the best chance of having customers wanting to buy our sensors today in that space. And

Andrew Grill:   17:02
the thing here is that it’s the long range also low power because, as you say, if you got a sense of stuck on the wall with a battery, these things last up to five years out there. I don’t know any device I’ve got that has five year battery life. Even a clock will go flat. This is the key because, as you say, it’s licking. Stick of it’s up on a wall or under a desk or in a bathroom. The last thing you want us to have to go on, Dhe maintain and change the batteries. So I think you’re right that the sensor technology has come in leaps and bounds. The cloud technology is there. This is why I think we’re at that inflection point.

Ron Rock:   17:30
And there’s also in addition to the cloud technology, there’s a whole new management challenge. When I have 100,000 sensors in a building with 100,000 batteries and because they’re stick, they’re easy to install. Their also easy to walk away. So I have to put new kind of capabilities in place. And that’s one of things my company micro share is done. We we talk about delivering digital twinning infrastructure at scale. It’s one thing to do 100 sensors in the building. It’s another to do 100,000 in a campus, and so we’re solving for a lot of those problems and managing those sensors at scale. So getting back to the perfect storm of why do we see I ot exploding right now? We talked about Infrastructure Cloud. We talked about sensor availability through LP win. The third thing we’ve touched on a little bit earlier as well is failing business models looking at the wake really and imploded, looking at what happened with we work recently. Ah, lot of legacy businesses have been talking about innovation for a long time. Uh, Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovating in legacy companies is hard. We’ve reached a point where you innovate or you go away, and it’s a vory riel reality facing these companies. So we’re seeing movement now in the C suite, where it’s no longer okay to sit on the sidelines and wait. And frankly, a lot of this change is also being driven by activist investors, private equity firms. So we’re watching this pressure and suddenly we see companies taking action who three years ago we’re happy to just stay on the sidelines, consume a lot of our time. People want to talk about this stuff, but now actually pulling out a checkbook and paying for it. We’re actually seeing that change now, and that leads me to the fourth component of the perfect storm and you touched on it Andrew a little bit earlier. One is we have millennials coming into the workforce and they they don’t demand they expect a very different kind of working environment because of the things like we work funky new space. Andrew and I, for our listeners don’t know that we’re sitting at a we work right now

Andrew Grill:   19:37
in one of the offices. Yeah,

Ron Rock:   19:38
and it’s really cool. You’ve got the exposed ceilings, you’ve got the hardwood floors.

Andrew Grill:   19:43
Are these senses up here looking at with We’re here in the room or not?

Ron Rock:   19:45
Sadly, no. Those sensors were just there to let us know if the room catches on fire, they need some.

Andrew Grill:   19:51
I need some senses here.

Ron Rock:   19:52
They do need some sensors, but it’s a very cool vibe. And this is, you know, one of the one of the rumors that often has had to get to spelled around. We work. It’s not all startups we work in. Philadelphia was our home for a few years, and on one side of me was IBM, and the other side of me was Comcast. So even large organizations air coming into this new funky space. Well, if you’re gonna have space like this, you have tohave sensors understanding how it’s living and breathing and being utilized to figure out how to optimize the space.

Andrew Grill:   20:27
One thing one of your guys was talking to me about was carbon dioxide senses. It makes a lot of sense if there’s a lot of people in a room breathing out CEO to you get really sleepy. If you sleep, you’re not productive. So this becomes a wellness discussion on a sense of discussion. And if I was talking to head of HR to say, Do you want happy, productive employees here, she’s gonna say yes. If you reverse engineer that Ah, carbon dioxide sense, I could tell you what the spaces like and whether you’ve got an issue with carbon dioxide. For example, we

Ron Rock:   20:54
had a client with 800 employees on the floor by 11 o’clock every day. They were legally drunk because of Theo to they were shocked, shocked to find it was staggering. And think about it. These people are walking around making very serious decisions about how to drive that business.

Andrew Grill:   21:12
So without the data, they don’t know there’s a problem and that the introducer ventilation or they reduce the density. They then solve a problem. People more productive, they make more money. That’s right. Why on people buying more

Ron Rock:   21:22
well and they are that’s that’s what we talk about. The perfect storm and the last piece on that on that perfect storm pieces sustainability and he s G. It has become the topic in C suite. It was the topic and Dave owes this year and Switzerland Ben off, the CEO of salesforce dot com, made the bold statement that capitalism as we know it is dead. Of course, that’s a great attention grabbing headline, but when you read it, what it means is that corporations used to define their singular purse purpose as driving shareholder value. It’s now about people and planet and shareholder value. You can’t reduce your carbon footprint if you don’t have the data in the first place of how your building is behaving, living and breathing.

Andrew Grill:   22:08
One other really interesting use case eyes, asset tracking. Could you talk us through what that might in Thailand and how it’s helped solve problems?

Ron Rock:   22:15
Sure, so So that’s another breakthrough in the industry. One of our investors is a company called Curling HQ. They are publicly traded on the French market, and we talk about LP when technology and Laura, every gateway that is being deployed in an industrial scale, is manufactured by curling, so they’ve invested in us as well. We’ve been solid partners for a number of years, and they, together with us, started looking at indoor asset tracking. Why do we care? Royal Post has 750,000 carts. They need to track across all of the UK hospital beds. Turns out your relationship with your hospital bed is more important that your relationship with your room I use your hospital bed to transport you to pathology. Physical bed? Yeah, exactly. And so, depending on the sickness that you have, there are protocols how that hospital bed needs to be recycled before it gets redeployed. I don’t know. I may send the recycling team into your room, but your bed was left down in, you know, the heart department. So tracking beds, tracking wheelchairs. I can’t discharge a patient in any hospital in the United States or in the U. K. Without taking you out in a wheelchair. If I’ve got available beds, I can’t bring a patient in until you’re discharged. Guess what people do in hospitals. They hoard wheelchairs. They hide them. Turns out maternity is one of the worst culprits of this. So now we’re simply tracking where all the wheelchairs are. There’s another added benefit. You’re pulling up to the hospital with your pregnant wife and which entrance has wheelchairs available. So now I can make that information available on a nap. So we’re doing indoor asset tracking with wheelchairs, hospital beds and infusion machines to start with. And this is a combination of Bluetooth and L P Winn technology again, something that economically, it wasn’t feasible in this case. Even 12 months ago, the competition was products like R F I. D. Very expensive to install

Andrew Grill:   24:27
the cable in together and everything

Ron Rock:   24:28
exactly. Tear walls open all that type of stuff, just like the easy licking stick sensors are asset tracking solution is also a very low cost, easy to install. So we’re actually talking to clients now that have over a 1,000,000 assets that they’re trying to track across warehouses and trucks. So we think that indoor asset tracking is going to be a killer use case. Another vertical that expressed a lot of interest is the pharmaceutical industry. Lots of expensive equipment, lots of interesting drugs in various degrees of preparation being transported in special containers all around these campuses, So being able to track where those things are is really important.

Andrew Grill:   25:12
So what’s the future of IittIe? Maybe you could share some predictions from where you sit about what will happen next. Is it winning the sensor races of the data? Where do you think that the innovations will come in this industry?

Ron Rock:   25:24
Oh, that’s that’s a great question. I think it’s gonna take a little bit of time. Where we are right now is we’re going to leverage these low power sensors, and we’re gonna put sensors on everything. And I we talked about indoor asset tracking. Outdoor asset tracking is right behind it that once we have countries covered with this low power wide area, radio waves will be able to put a simple tag on spot or fluffy. And wherever our cats or dogs go, will be able to find them with our phone. Eventually will see sensors on a golf ball, so you’re no longer hacking through the golf courses. I am frequently looking well off of the trail for for my golf balls, so I think we’re going to see a lot of sensors. I think we’re going to see automobiles increasingly being able to talk to one another. I think we’re going to see an explosion in wearables. I’m working with a client right now in the UK. Imagine you paying a company £19 a month, and you’ve got sensors in your Thomas pink shirt and your nice shoes and your sports coat. And all of a sudden, one day you get a push notification. It says, Hey, Andrew, you better go to the hospital. We’re tracking 100,000 men just like you. Your height, your weight, your activity level, your age. Every time one of them has a stroke, their data looks just like yours the day before. What’s better than rapid treatment for a stroke, not having the stroke in the first place. So we’re gonna just like we’ve done with airbags versus sensors and car’s airbags were all about saving your life after the accident. The technology now is all focused on. Let’s not have an accident the first place. So it all that this idea of predictive becomes a theme, whether it be predictive cleaning and bathrooms, or whether become predictive healthcare, predictive automobile transportation. So I think that there’s going to be a whole lot of synergy created with all of these things talking together. Increasingly, we’re not consumers and employees and citizens were simply a kn individual that traverse is through homework. The places we lived the places we travel were were just one entity and were one entity creating lots of data and consuming lots of data. So I think the future of I O. T. Is bringing all that data together, and I’ll come back to a really important point to improve the quality of life. Will there be bad things that happen? Yes. Will nefarious people take advantage of it? Yes. But just because there is fraud with payments doesn’t mean we’ve stopped using credit cards or Apple pay or Google pay. We figure out a way to contain the nefarious behavior, bake it into the business model in the economics. Why? Because the good far outweighs the bad.

Andrew Grill:   28:16
Final question. And I’m a big believer in this, this whole issue of the data, I talk all the time about my wearable. I’ve got a Fitbit. I wish I could share that data with my GP in between my visits and when you talk about my clothing having in better data in it, I would much rather want to know if I have a healthy episode coming up after it. But who owns the data? So I’d like to know that I’d like my physician to know that I may not like my health insurer to know that if all this data is around, some of it is physically on my person. Cause I’m wearing the device is where I know it or not, who owns the data and who should own the data.

Ron Rock:   28:49
That’s a great question. And I think that that will be a debate and a conversation for the next couple of decades to come. Because first of all, most people aren’t aware of data other than again being scared by the nefarious things that are happening and not being educated all the positive. I think the one simple answer is you own the data. The question is, who’s you? When you swipe that credit card? You own that data, but so is the merchant. Your bank owns that data as well, cause they just funded the transaction. The Merchants bank owns that data because they just received the money for that transaction and, of course, globally, whether B Visa, MasterCard, Swift American express, they on the data. People talk about health care and now that your data, but it’s also your doctors, your doctor has to fill out forms every year to be certified and get insurance premiums, and so they need to talk about their performance as a doctor. The hospitals need that data to make the entire experience better. So there’s a concept called multiparty data ownership. And when you really start to think about multi when you start to think about data as much as I do and yeah, that’s pretty boring, you find that I can’t think of a single piece of data that doesn’t subject itself to multiparty data ownership. It’s complex. There’s another piece of the conversation that makes it even more interesting. And that is the concept of data models. So thanks to GDP, are any one of us can demand from Facebook that they send us all of our data and they will do that and they’ll send you a bunch of files and you look at it and you’ll you’ll find it mildly interesting. But you’ll say, Well, wait a minute, though this doesn’t tell me why you keep trying to sell me a Tesla every time I’m on my smartphone, my laptop. Every time I walk by one of these dynamic billboards in London, why does it always make me a candidate for a Tesla and Facebook will say, I don’t have to give you that. That’s not your data. That’s my data model. That’s my I. P. So we’re going to first, I think start to have a conversation about multiparty data ownership. I think the next evolution of this conversation is gonna be around data versus data models. And I think increasingly we’re going to have lots of heated conversation about it because the date is worth something and there’s money involved.

Andrew Grill:   31:13
Okay, my pet topic here, I’ve got to ask this before we in the podcast. It’s the value exchange. So I believe the moment. Yes, with Facebook. It is a one way transaction. You won’t be on Facebook or not accept decline to your point. There’s all this data there in the data modelling, and they own youand. My favorite expression is if the product is free. The product is May I think you and I know because we’re empowered consumers that our data has value. In fact, I’ll put a price on my data in London. What I do where I go, what I buys worth 5 to £10,000 a year, I’d like a piece of that. I don’t like a piece of that in a discount. Some Cryptocurrency money off, whatever. But I think there’s gonna be a value exchange. And the Australian government did a big report on the power off both Facebook and Google and the fact that they have ultimate power. Do you think over the next five years consumers will become more empowered and they’ll say I want in exchange for it? I don’t want it to be free, but I see the value in my data and where I do go on what I’m doing. But I wanna have more of a relative relationship where I get some of my value back for this data.

Ron Rock:   32:14
I do think it’s going to evolve. It may take more than five years. It’s very complicated. But for example, I’m working with a company here in the UK that measures the power coming into each apartment, and they put this sensor on your inbound power line to drive efficiency. But they found out that they also could determine when you’re running your vacuum cleaner when you’re making your tea. When your refrigerator was kicking on, then through more machine learning they figured out that they could predict that your appliances, we’re gonna go bad. So they suddenly had all the state. And they said, Well, who wants the data? While the manufacturers of your refrigerator, they would love it. The local repair shops would love that data. The utility company wants that data and they went out and they started finding buyers for the data. They decided to go back to the tenants and say, We’re gonna share this data with you. And so suddenly everybody was like, Hey, that’s great. So they started out with a £70 electric bill. The technology brought them down to 60. Now with the revenue share brings him down to 45 everybody is more than happy to share that data. So I think we do think my partners and I have talked a lot about this. You can find some interesting white papers about this on my website micro share dot io that this idea of multiparty data ownership and the idea of Global Data Mart and the data will in fact be shared, exchanged for value, we as consumers 24 hours a day. We produce data. People do care about your sleep patterns. People do care about your snoring. People do care even when you are traveling or working. How are you functioning as a human being? Where you looking? What are you buying, What you consuming, how many calories you’re burning And all of this data put in the right hands with the right purpose can radically improve the quality of life along the way. They’ll be some bad people that do things, and and we’ll have to figure that out along the way.

Andrew Grill:   34:08
I totally agree. So as this is the practical futures podcast, I want to see if we can leave our listens with three things they can do this week to understand more about the opportunity for the instant of things.

Ron Rock:   34:19
Three things. So I think the first thing is just go online to Amazon and look ATT. Any of the wireless devices that you can put around your home? Look at the clever camera operated doorbells, the camera operated security systems, the the thermostats, the intelligent outlet devices to control things in your home. It’s a start. Yes, you’re going to get lots of interesting new APS on your phone. And, yeah, it’s a little bit harder to figure out how to make it all work than it should be. But it certainly is gonna broaden how you think about how much carbon footprint you’re creating, how your home is functioning, what kind of power consumption you’re doing, what your kids may or may not be doing while you’re not around. So there’s there’s a whole cool benefit to that. The second thing I would encourage people to do. Andrew, you’re already doing it. I do it with an I watch. It’s really cool toe. Have a Fitbit or or a You know, start tracking how many steps you take a day. Start tracking your heart rate, your resting heart rate, all those types of things. I think that’s just again gives you firsthand ex.

Andrew Grill:   35:31
You could then see Ryan Data.

Ron Rock:   35:32
That’s right. And the third thing I would challenge people to do is start thinking about all the positive uses of data. Start broadening your education of data and ask yourself whether be data coming out of that nest thermostat or data coming out of your new Tesla or data coming out of that Fitbit. Ask yourself, who really owns this data and begin thinking about it. There is no clear answer, and by the way, there’s also no wrong answers, as best as I can tell. But it’s it’s those kinds of exercises I think helped people today start taking a step into the future. Tomorrow.

Andrew Grill:   36:06
Yeah, As I say, if you want to get digital, you gotta be digital. Stop playing with it. Then it becomes really Ah ha. That’s why Fitbit ever has a Fitbit. I’ve really enjoyed our discussion. How can people find out more about you? Contact you find out more about micro share

Ron Rock:   36:19
so you can find me on LinkedIn. It’s Ronald Rock. You can find out about micro share its micro shared dot io. I encourage folks to look through all of the offerings, but also, if you want Cem Cem, good reading. Check out the white papers and our thought leadership section we touch on not just how to get started in the next 30 days, but really trends that we see happening over the next 3 to 5 years.

Andrew Grill:   36:42
Thanks to you, I’ve really enjoyed discussion. Thanks so much for talking.

Ron Rock:   36:44
Thank you. Andrew has been a lot of fun.

Thank you for listening. to the practical futurist podcast. You confined all of our previous shows at Futurist stopped London on If you like what you’ve heard on the show, please consider subscribing via your favourite podcast app. So you never miss an episode. You can find out more about Andrew and how he helps corporate sand navigate a disruptive digital world with keynote speeches and see sweet workshops at Futurist Start London until next time. This has been The Actionable Futurist® Podcast.