Simon Fabri

This blog explores different aspects of what it takes to create great tech products. It is meandering journey as I amble around from topic to topic driven by where my curiosity takes me. Sometimes I try to explore different aspects of what makes truly great tech teams, while at other times I try to get under the skin of the latest tech hype or understand what's going on in a particular industry. This blog started off with a distinct IoT flavour, but now is fairly tech-agnostic.

The battle for the mobile wallet heats up

It was easy to be distracted by the wondrous devices on display at the Mobile World Congress a couple of weeks ago, with smartphone vendors scrambling over each other with new device launches. However, some of the more significant announcements were not about phones or networks, but about the rapidly-shifting mobile payments landscape. Google shifts gear Google have made two major payments-announcements over the past month or so. First they bought Softcard (formerly called Isis) from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and … Read more…

Wired: Who cares what OS your car runs?

Excellent article on how a new front in the smartphone Operating Systems war – the car. Ford neatly summarises the auto manufacturers’ positions: ““We don’t want the customer to base the choice of a $40,000 car on the $300 phone that they carry in their pocket,” The article however misses the point that it is by no means a foregone conclusion that either Apple or Google will dominate the dashboard – don’t forget that the useful lifetime of a car (13 … Read more…

FT on the state of the Telco Industry

In the first of a number of Mobile World Congress-themed posts, here’s the Financial Time’s take on the state of the telco industry. With the billing relationship being undermined by app stores, customers feeling stronger affinity towards their smartphone vendors and applications, and competition driving down both revenues and quality, it is a tough time. Yet Ericsson’s CEO sees opportunities too: “Ten years ago, they all did the same things. But now carriers have suddenly got a lot of options … Read more…

ARM, IBM and Freescale in new IoT partnership

In the quest to get mindshare of the maker movement, ARM and IBM yesterday announced an Internet of Things starter kit based on an ARM Cortex M4 powered board, connected to the IBM BlueMix cloud service. ARM’s aim, similar to a previous initiative by Intel covered on this site is to help migrate the IoT enthusiasts who may be the founders of the next big thing away from Arduino towards ARM-based development platforms that can then be easily productised. Intel’s Edison-based development … Read more…

Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Internet of Things – with the help of the Cloud

We have already touched on the role that machine learning and artificial intelligence plays in building smart systems that provide value to customers and companies. From predicting when elevators will require maintenance and service to the advanced voice control functions used in iPhones, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. This blog however has not yet done justice to the extent to which the entry bar has been lowered for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to be incorporated into … Read more…

Amazon still king of the Cloud, though Microsoft is catching up

You can’t go far in reading the tech press before coming across the term ‘cloud’, a term that causes no end of confusion. In the enterprise IT world, the public cloud refers to the setup where IT applications and capabilities are provided to a company by an external provider via Internet connections on a shared infrastructure. This means that the company can benefit from shared economies of scale as other customers use the same infrastructure, and the same scale also provides the … Read more…

Wearables in Healthcare

This is an excellent article by Julie Papanek in TechCrunch providing a very small glimpse of how wearables can aid the monitoring and treatment of a wide range of conditions. Very apt quotation – “wearables are totally failing the people who need them most” – the old, the ill and the poor. Personally, I believe that there are huge untapped opportunities to make use of the combination of passive data collection and machine learning to empower patients in their relationships with healthcare … Read more…

Samsung buys LoopPay. A tactical acquisition?

Yesterday, Samsung announced that it acquired LoopPay, a mobile payments technology company, in a move that was widely reported as allowing Samsung to “build a viable Apple Pay competitor”. Samsung takes aim at Apple Pay with LoopPay acquisition The key differentiating feature of LoopPay is that unlike Apple Pay it does not use Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to speak to the point of sale terminal, but instead relies on its own proprietary technology that emits a magnetic field to simulate … Read more…

British Gas acquires AlertMe – A smart home leader

AlertMe, the Cambridge-based company behind the technology that powers the Hive Active Heating system sold by British Gas has just been acquired by British Gas itself. Originally holding an investment of around 20%, British Gas has now bought the entire outfit for around $100m. As AlertMe only has two large customers, British Gas itself and Lowe, in the US, it is unclear whether British Gas aims to use the platform and technology for its own energy customer base. However in a press release, Mary … Read more…

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