All posts by Neil Harwani

Interested in movies, music, history, computer science, software, engineering, management and technology

Mobile & Sensors in IoT world

In this world of IOT, iBeacons, Eddystone, Mobiles with 3+ GB RAM, light/gesture control sensors, GPS, accelerometer, compass and quad/octa core processors with cameras an upgrade for all of this would be to have sensors like:
1. Temperature,
2. Movement/motion,
3. Smell,
4. Pollution, etc. onto the mobiles and then fuse them with IoT/sensor networks. This fusion is simple and easy using Mobile APPs.

Imagine we being stuck in a natural calamity like fire, earthquake, flood, etc. and if we have these sensors fused onto the mobile along with IoT and mobile networks + WiFi there could be a huge combination of information that can be provided to each person to and fro.

They could be part of a sensor network (ad-hoc over WiFi or 2G/3G/CDMA/4G and so on) and could participate in finding better outcomes in any troubling situation. Why I mention ad-hoc/WiFi network is incase of emergency if 2G/3G/4G/CDMA network goes down we can use ad-hoc/WiFi to build a small network which can fuse with IoT sensors and maybe get a temporary VSAT or other internet uplink which are now available on mobile vehicles as well (broadcasters, news channels, etc.).

World of mobility is just opening up for all of us. Information sharing would reach a new level with aim of saving lives. All this can be enabled at the end point via mobile APPs using Android SDK or Apple based APPs.

Social Media Solutions

Social media is an evolving beast. From few sites and systems few years back to plethora of different sites and systems across the internet accessed from laptop/desktop/mobile – this domain is exploding currently.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google+, Yelp and so on. List is endless.

Everybody is talking of social media sentiment analysis and analytics over customer information, yes that’s an evolving and interesting field.

But something that is going to create a problem and will require innovation would be areas like:
1. How do you sync your information across various social media sites:
1-a. LIKES
1-b. COMMENTS
1-c. NEWSFEEDS
1-d. Etc.
2. What is your unique public and private unified profile across social media?
3. What is your network of connects across the various sites?
4. How are you perceived across these sites – a unified view?
5. How do you sync your contacts and network across various social media systems?
6. How do you enable similar privacy settings, access control, etc. across all social media sites?
7. Evolving threat management across social media for individuals

Many such questions will come up as social media matures. Lot of innovation, building of standards/protocols, tools and products would be needed in this new exploding social media sites/systems.

There was a phase where database access/import/export/features across various RDBMSes were standardized, operating systems related standards came out, ECM, integration, etc. came out with standards.

A similar phenomenon should and most likely will occur once social media expansion stabilizes and matures. It will be one level above technology and will be at functional/domain/social media feature level backed by unique new ways of implementing technologies. To give an example: if you export your contact from one phone, if you export CSV/EXCEL from one system you are able to import and sync it at other place, such solutions for problems listed above and many more upcoming areas would be needed.

Open source security platform for security of physical installations

I hope to publish my thoughts on innovation around software on this blog. Starting off with my first post.

We live in a world where security has now evolved from physical to cyber to multiple levels and context. Open source software has been a revolution which now is reaching us at all levels: Mobile (Android), Enterprise software (Liferay, Alfresco, Hadoop, MongoDB, etc.) and it caters to security in a holistic way by allowing people/groups to pick holes in the systems and thus, giving opportunity to authorities to fix them in the background and allow improvements.

Similarly we can device a system based on open source principles for security of physical / real world installations via an open source and collaborative platform

We could create an open source platform on one of the open source support sites like SourceForge

Pillars of platforms around which it should be built (these also give the high level classification of collaboration):

1. Assets
2. Threats
3. Defenses
4. Strategy

Assets: 1. Threat level based classification based on location, work done by asset, importance

Threats: 1. Physical, 2. Cyber 3. Design 4. Evolving and future

Defenses: 1. Explicit, 2. Implicit 3. Mixed

Strategy: 1. Offensive, 2. Defensive, 3. Mixed

People can come and post installations (Assets), then debate/discuss issues (Threats), find and suggest solutions (Defenses) and based on these three suggest overall Strategy to mitigate risks

See you later with another innovation thought in few days