Time is a Flat Sirqul: Rob Frederick on the Second Life of Great Ideas and the Intelligence of Things

I know this may sound a lit­tle passe, but it’s very impor­tant to me: the Inter­net of Things doesn’t have any mean­ing [as a stand­alone enti­ty]. What we paid atten­tion to, and what we focused on, is the intel­li­gence of things, which is actu­al­ly why they’re con­nect­ed. Why the­se things are actu­al­ly con­nect­ed to the Inter­net?

Rob Fred­er­ick has been think­ing about engage­ment and inter­con­nect­ed­ness for a while now. Before he found­ed the Seat­tle-based Engage­ment-as-a-Ser­vice IoT plat­form Sirqul, he got his start as an under­grad­u­ate at MIT in the mid-1990s, form­ing his ear­ly ideas about tech­nol­o­gy while spend­ing time in the sto­ried MIT Media Lab. He went on to work on the ear­ly tech­nol­o­gy that would even­tu­al­ly become Blue­tooth, and led Ama­zon Any­where (Amazon’s first ini­tia­tive for mobile) from 1999 to 2004. He also helped found Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, Amazon’s on-demand cloud com­put­ing plat­form that pow­ers com­pa­nies all over the globe and post­ed $17.4 bil­lion in rev­enue last year.

We recent­ly had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak with Rob about his pas­sion for intel­li­gent IoT and his vision for the future of tech­nol­o­gy (a vision which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hasn’t changed much since the ear­ly days of his career). He explains his ideas pas­sion­ate­ly and asks, “Does that make sense?” quite a bit, in the sort of kind, non-judg­men­tal way of some­one who has learned over the years that the ideas which seem sim­ple and intu­itive to him may lose his lis­ten­er if he is not hyper-explic­it about the step-by-step process of his think­ing.

He’s a lead­er whose think­ing always steers toward engage­ment, and he cares deeply about why cer­tain tech­nolo­gies need to behave a cer­tain way in order to enhance the expe­ri­ence of a user. Fred­er­ick would prob­a­bly tell you that the ideas of the late 80s and 90s — every­thing con­nect­ed to the Inter­net and talk­ing to every­thing else — weren’t far-fetched at all, but that the tech­nol­o­gy itself just had to catch up to sup­port how peo­ple nat­u­ral­ly want to use their devices.

On Bluetooth and ‘Old’ Tech Actually Being the Future

Since about 1999, I’ve been a part of a group that has been focused on under­stand­ing the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of devices and how humans actu­al­ly inter­act with those devices. When I start­ed in the mid-nineties, it was all about device-to-device com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And we looked at what one device could learn about the oth­er so that both devices would provide val­ue to the human near­by.

That tech­nol­o­gy we built led to a star­tup and invest­ment into that star­tup by Intel and Eric­son, and that tech­nol­o­gy, that idea after com­ing out of the MIT Media Lab, became known as Blue­tooth. So you’re talk­ing to peo­ple who were work­ing around things like Blue­tooth before it was dif­fi­cult.

Rob’s book, The Intel­li­gence of Things: A World of Con­nect­ed Devices, Peo­ple, and Expe­ri­ences, expands on his vision of focus­ing on user engage­ment

So what was the idea of Blue­tooth? It was the inter­con­nect­ed capa­bil­i­ties of dis­parate devices that would cre­ate a smart mesh, if you want to call it that, that would allow your device net­work to engage, inter­act with, and provide val­ue to human users, all with­out those par­tic­u­lar users hav­ing to think. It works when you walk into a room, the lights turn on; you want to find some­thing, it’s going to help you find a way of doing that. You’re going to want to use a smart device. You just didn’t know it at the time.

A different network, a different set of services

The orig­i­nal idea that took off was that every­body want­ed to get rid of all the cables and wires. The sad part is Blue­tooth com­pet­ed with WiFi and WiFi won, but now it’s com­ing back for a lot of rea­sons: the smart home, the smart office, con­nect­ed vehi­cles.

You can’t just do every­thing with WiFi: WiFi is all about things like stream­ing video, about the human that is active­ly using it. A smart device is more about things that are hap­pen­ing with­out the human. You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to stream video, but just need to report [things like] the tem­per­a­ture, whether the light is on, if someone’s stand­ing near­by, if your staff mem­ber needs to move to a dif­fer­ent spot because some­one needs some­thing, or if [a store or sta­di­um should change its sig­nage in real-time] because the num­ber of peo­ple in a par­tic­u­lar area has increased.

Things like that require a dif­fer­ent net­work and a dif­fer­ent set of ser­vices that peo­ple who are man­u­fac­tur­ing the­se [IoT] devices can basi­cal­ly glom on to. They can cre­ate cheap, easy, sin­gle-pur­pose devices, and can make use of APIs that extends the val­ue of their prod­ucts and ser­vices. [Intel­li­gent APIs, like Sirqul’s] make it so that you don’t have to recre­ate the wheel every time and can aggre­gate infor­ma­tion in such a way that pro­vides val­ue to the per­son who’s installing it with­in a home, a venue, in a car, or with any wear­able device.

On first figuring out how to make ‘Things’ intelligent

I remem­ber the days when we were doing with it, we said, hey, what are the most pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions out there [for tech­nol­o­gy capa­bil­i­ties like this]? And then what we did with was take those shared con­cepts and ideas and broke them down into dif­fer­ent buck­ets. And inside each one of the buck­ets we came up with a set of fea­tures which we then turned into ser­vices.

Take the idea of iden­ti­ty, right? Like what does that mean? And how do we cre­ate an iden­ti­ty [that can make a con­nec­tion], and what does that con­nec­tion mean? Like the­se are two iden­ti­ties con­nect­ed to each oth­er, right? [And once you have that con­nec­tion], what about ana­lyt­ics? How do we get enough infor­ma­tion extend­ed in such way that hor­i­zon­tal­ly any­one can use it and then have a report­ing visu­al­iza­tion, dash­boards set up so that they can see trends [and see what’s actu­al­ly impor­tant]?

While oth­er peo­ple are look­ing at lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude for where some­one is stand­ing or an alti­tude or what speed they’re mov­ing on, where we’ve been focused is on where that per­son is going to be next week depend­ing upon where they have been over the past week or so. That makes sense, you’re think­ing at that lev­el. Where will some­one be, if you have a lot of data for them for the past sev­en days? You need to be doing some­thing like antic­i­pat­ing where this person’s going to go when they’re in a store with­in the next 10 min­utes, real-time.

Ever the future-ori­ent­ed thinker, Fred­er­ick reminds us that the ideas here are noth­ing new, just that the tech­nol­o­gy to actu­al­ly imple­ment them has final­ly caught up to much old­er con­cepts:

We’ve been advo­cat­ing for this kind of approach and craft­ing tech­nol­o­gy around it for a long time now, and it’s excit­ing to see how the­se ideas are what’s actu­al­ly mak­ing the IoT of val­ue to users. It’s kind of fun­ny how things come full Sirqul.

Spe­cial thanks to Rob Fred­er­ick and Viki Zabala at Sirqul