Securing Mobility
 |
| SKT at MWC2019 |
Last year SK telecom announced our True Innovation program (www.true-inno.com) at MWC. True Innovation was founded to make collaborations with SK telecom fast and effective, whether you are a large technology-driven company or an innovative startup. In our first year, we had several successful collaborations in Korea and with global partners.
But more about True Innovation's inaugural year accolades later, having just returned from MWC '19 I wanted to share one of those collaborations in particular: our V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Secure Central Gateway. As one of the founding members of True Innovation, I was personally inspired by the overwhelming interest this collaboration received from some of the world's leading auto manufacturers, mobility service operators, and tier-one suppliers. Based on the feedback from several industry insiders, it's fair to claim the V2X Secure Central Gateway is several years ahead of the competition.
The collaboration combines the innovative prowess of two of Korea's high-profile startups Gint and FESCARO, as well as SK telecom's subsidiary ID Quantique. In addition to representing a technological breakthrough for mobility, the collaboration is a symbolic culmination of the past 12 months as both Gint and FESCARO came through SparkLabs, True Innovation's strategic launch partner and Korea's No. 1 Accelerator; while SK telecom also announced the acquisition of IDQ at MWC last year.
The V2X Gateway ensures the safety of passengers by monitoring in-vehicle networks (called CAN buses) in real-time and without omissions for abnormalities. If any unusual activity is detected, this is immediately sent to the cloud where it is analyzed along with information from every other vehicle in the fleet to determine if it is a security threat, and to determine an appropriate course of action. The gateway encrypts both the in-vehicle networks as well as end-to-end communication between the gateway and the cloud, enabling features such as initiating emergency calls, or secure OTA (over-the-air) updates.
RCS vs. OTT Messengers
This is from a post I recently made on LinkedIn...
RCS promises to be a major upgrade to the Native Messenger on your Android smartphone. But is all the talk about a Sleeping Giant over blown?
RCS vs. OTT Messengers
RCS, or Rich Communications Services, is a protocol that's been around for several years. It allows carriers to provide services like Voice and Video Calls, File Sharing (think Photos), and of course Chatting 1:1 or as a Group. The problem with RCS for years was that it requires Interoperability between carriers, otherwise end users can only use the messenger among friends on the same network. These contracts take time and create a complicated user experience (Johnny: "Why didn't you get my text?").
Jibe Mobile created a Hub to allow carriers to create one NNI (Network-to-Network-Interface) with their communications service in order to create interoperability with any other carrier also connected to the Hub, provide they used their white-label messenger (Messenger Plus). They offered colourful skins so carriers could "customise" the user interface. Google acquired Jibe last year, and at MWC a few weeks ago they made some announcements. Yippie!
Google's new platform is great, don't get me wrong. However, it is great as an upgrade to the native messenger available on your Android smartphone if it supports RCS (btw only a fraction of all Android devices currently support it, though that will certainly change). The idea that RCS will emerge as a rival to OTT Messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat (not to mention Instagram, SnapChat, or anything else new that "tweens" are using) is unfounded in reality, or really optimistic.
The bottom-line is people use OTT Messengers (like other social media) because their friends use it, it's personal, it's unique, and often it's private -- or at least more private than your Google-provided messenger. And more than ever, OTT Messengers are evolving to rival not SMS or other Communication tools, but Operating Systems themselves. They are the new layer upon-which all m_commerce is being built... or rather integrated with.
If App distribution was broken before, it's dead now. The tops apps are almost always Facebook, Google, or Apple (or some other usual suspect). Services, both private and public, don't have the time or money to compete with those giants for audience. Enter the OTT Messenger with a dedicated audience that's big and local. On-demand services, eCommerce, traditional businesses, public services, payment (p2p, c2b, and even c2g) can all be integrated to the OTT Messenger. And these integrations can be surfaced, or not, based on wherever the user is. WeChat is a great example of this, and they are pushing into Subsaharan Africa something fierce with their major shareholder Naspers. That's significant in several ways, but in terms of the above examples that means millions of people who are already using their phones to pay for everything. A nudge may be all it takes to put WeChat and Naspers at the centre of m_Commerce there similarly to how WeChat has positioned itself in China.
In addition to services, OTT Messengers are ideal for content distribution which drive downloads for other types of apps. This could be anything, literally.
So sleeping giant? Maybe, those guys at Google are obviously creative and smart. We'll see what they come up with. But on the face of things, Google's new Jibe makes for some fancier Native Messengers, but will hardly impact the impressive rise of OTT Messengers to the centre of our smartphone experience.
Here is a presentation I put together to compare the two: RCS vs OTT Messengers
Wasting Time, Sharing Photos, & Being Happy
People love photo-sharing applications because they provide a false sense of productivity. In reality, they are basically Time-waster applications.
What are time wasters
What is a Time-waster application?
I’d like to attribute this term to Chris Dixon, though I’m not sure if he coined it or not. In the post “Four types of mobile apps” he categorizes mobile applications in four broad strokes:
>Time-wasters
>Core Utilities
>Episodic Utilities
>Notification Driven
Each has a reasonable description, and I encourage you to read the post. I’d like to focus on Time-wasters, which according to Chris Dixon are apps you use while waiting in line -- you could include a lazy Sunday afternoon, or before you go to bed, etc. Often we fill those times with activities we hope are productive like reading a book or magazine, writing in a journal, etc. However, often we fill those times by “wasting” it... watching TV, playing games, using facebook or other social networks, and surfing the web, or using photo-sharing sites like Instagram, WeHeartIt, FFFFound, Tumblr, 500px, Pinterest, etc.
Few people would argue that browsing the web isn’t a go-to time-waster for anyone born circa... well, anyone. Likewise, few would argue that social-networking is not, at least sometimes, also a go-to method for time-killing. Still, other than games, photo-sharing services arguably been the biggest drivers of time-wasting growth in recent years.
Growth of photo-sharing
Writing about the growth of photo-sharing is passe, so bear with me. I’d like to frame it in a slightly different context.
Most readers probably already know the growth of photo sharing has been incredible in 2012. Just how incredible this growth has been can really be exemplified by 3 services: Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Particularly in the case of Pinterest, the incredibly rapid growth is pretty much common-knowledge. Tumblr’s bright future is less commonly known (only 6% of internet users on on it), unless you are a teen. According to Business Insider, Tumblr is more popular than Facebook among teens... at least for now.
But why!?
So why are these services so popular? Please allow me to digress.
One of the best books ever written about human behavior is, in my humble opinion (not to mention the opinon of The New York Times), “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi... or just, “Mihaly.” At the risk of oversimplifying Mihaly’s seminal work, the basic premise is that we find more happiness by creating meaningful experiences, and the happiest people are those who make each moment meaningful; meaningful experiences can be generated any time we are creating order out of disorder, or gaining knowledge. The flow-state exists when the sum of our meaningful experiences is appropriately matched to a circumstance where we can apply whatever value, knowledge, those particular experiences have provided us. In other words, we are up to a challenge... it is neither too easy, nor too hard.
The most interesting part of this theory, however, is not the definition of the “flow state.” Rather, it’s how people find intrinsic happiness by developing some expertise. And that intrinsic happiness is in the process of developing that skill, as much as in the application of the skill.
Taking this to another level, perhaps more abstract, we could infer that our level of happiness would increase any time we feel we have made a moment valuable. This feeling could exist anytime we are gaining knowledge, or making order out of disorder (structured information equals knowledge, yadda yadda).
So web search... makes me happy. In truth it is often a time-wasting activity, but we can rationalize that activity to be more valuable than doing nothing at all. Mobility has added to our ability to create meaning even more.
However, we are also creatures of evolution, and evolution says we are lazy.
Photo-sharing Makes People Happier
Researching takes time, so making meaning through research in the pre-Google days (dare I say pre-internet) was a challenge that made few people happy. However, as Google endeavoured to make information useful, browsing the web became a grand way to satisfy our need for meaning. Still, it wasn’t something anyone would do.
Enter photo-sharing.
Even babies like it... it is the next level of simplicity in terms of finding meaning (if not, at times, false meaning) in our lives from moment to moment. When people create enormous collections on Pinterest it provides a sense of completion and satisfaction. For many it may indeed be an incredibly useful tool, but for most it is an enabler. Photo-sharing enables more people to create meaningful experience every moment. It’s easy, it’s fast, it’s intuitive, and, of course.... since pictures say a thousand words, it gives us a sense that we are conveying (or consuming) huge amounts of information relatively effortlessly.
Assuming that Mihaly is correct, and the frequency with which we are generating meaningful experiences relates to our happiness, photo-sharing has made happiness that much more plentiful for humanity. Thanks Ben.
