The Return of the Crackberry

This week, Blackberry held its annual security conference in London. so it was a good time to catch up with what Blackberry is doing now, after the melt down of its original secure corporate phone and email business model. 

Well, it is still in the phone business. Partnering with TCL, who undertakes hardware manufacture and smart phone distribution, blackberry is still designing new smart phones. The new models look very smart and offer a key pad equipped, touch sensitive android phone at a competitive price point, i.e. several hundred notes cheaper than the equivalent Samsung or Apple model. It would be easy to dismiss them as being a choice for someone who is into retro chic or an old school aficionado of key pads. However, there are some subtleties in the product design which are increasingly relevant in the current environment of aggressive cyber crime. The devices are designed and built bottom up to be resilient to infiltration and takeover, combining both hardware and software features for this. Additionally, the thumbprint security control is implemented in a way which allows the user to differentiate between what is private and what is shared. Which coupled with features in Android enabling separation between personal and corporate personas, makes it very much a smart phone of the age.

However, mobile phones are really only a side show and not the main story. Blackberry has built on its global secure telecommunications capabilities to emerge as a leading "Enterprise of Things" (EoT) enabler. Someone described its primary mission as being to "Secure your Communications and your Data". However the vision is one of comprehensively enabling secure IoT exploitation by enterprises, leveraging industry standard to deliver on government quality security in the deployment of Smart Things, or as one of the speakers stated "Moving from Mobile First to Things First".

There's a comprehensive set of products with SDKs which enable OEMs to develop secure smart products and Enterprises to deploy Thing based business models securely, whilst users enjoy a relatively seamless secure access experience across a comprehensive range of products.

Although what was probably the most impressive aspect of the conference was to see representatives from Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Blackberry discuss how they are collaborating to deliver a new generation of products which integrate securely and build the IoT world of the future.

The Launch of Human 2.0

CES is America's annual gadget show. Whilst the tech giants such as Google and Amazon don't normally announce much here, the ecosystem of companies who exploit products such as Android and Alexa/Echo use this as a platform for launching new products. Apparently, this year's theme is Voice as a host of home automation products, exploiting voice commands and Alexa's AI capability, are using CES as the platform for their launch. Although you may be interested to know that Alexa will soon be available on Windows 10, challenging Microsoft's Cortana assistant.

Meanwhile, the latest cool device in the Wearables arena has been announced by Innomdle. This is the Sgnl which is a wristband cum watch strap which converts your fingers into a telephone receiver. When paired with a phone, it transmits vibrations down your hand to your fingers, so you can hear your phone by touching them to your ears. The device also has notification and fitness features. Initial reviews are positive and the shipping date has been announced as March.

At the same time the range of new Wearables announcements include: 

• The Eagle a wearable home theatre system from Kopin and Pico Interactive. A key feature of this is that you retain awareness of the outside world, lending it to scenarios such as automated plant control.

• Omron's forthcoming Heartguide which promises to deliver accurate blood pressure monitoring (countering reports that many smart watches are innacurate);

• Fitbit's hint that it will be delivering blood sugar monitoring technology.

So what does this mean to people looking at digital exploitation? my thoughts are this is the year when Human 2.0 gets launched. What do I mean by this, well Human 2.0 places people at the centre of automation and control of an extended network of digital assets and automated devices. So a person can control an automated production cell or a power plant with integrated feeds of information, slave AI bots to carry out standard operating procedures, and all relevant KPI information and alerts fed to him or her. At the same time, a raft of wearables will monitor and tend for the person, as it is only a short step from wearable monitoring to automatically administering nutrition, hydration and medecines.

This means that most current concepts around Industry 4.0 need to change.