Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

If You Build It We Will Hack It

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 18:28:55 +0100

First, an important note. The cinemagraph you see in this page comes from Ross at Second Crop Creative. He has some amazing work in his portfolio that you should check out.

If you build it, we will hack it

Before they were called geeks, and nowadays they call themselves Makers. This change was natural because it is now possible to produce a physical change in what surrounds you and to build anything you want to improve your quality of life.

What I mean is, before, being a Geek was mostly about software and computers. After, being a geek was linked to your desire to learn new things and to your enjoyment in several forms of pop culture. Today, these things still hold true and geeks have move forward to building whatever they set their hearts to.

Sensors, Computers, Robots, Drones, 3D Printers. And they don’t bother starting from scratch, they will use whatever is handy to make their life easier.

Let’s say you’re a product manager, product owner or just someone with a cool idea of something that you think people will want. Let’s imagine it’s the coolest thing ever, and yes we want it so just “shut up and take my money!”

It doesn’t matter how perfect you make your product, people will have different needs and different opinions. Some of us won’t even read the instruction manual before voicing that opinion online for family, friends and strangers. And some of us will simply say “fine” and move on to making it work the way we want to.

There are already a few examples of this. My favourite is Juicero.

This was a “smart juice maker” if we can call it that. In short, you buy juice packs and the automatic system will pour the juice for you with the push of a button. The juicer comes with a wifi connection to receive updates, it will analyse the juice pack and make sure it’s still drinkable.

It’s kind of expensive. Consumers who like the idea but disliked the price tag started buying the juice packs and simply squeezing it with their bare hands.

The company stepped forward to make a point about how consumers shouldn’t do it, but it was of little help.

This is not new. We have been messing with products for years. People have hacked their xbox consoles to install Linux, turned old laptops into media centres, changed their cars to make them look cooler, faster, or more efficient. It just that these things are now easier to share and therefore spread to a wider audience.

What can brands do about it? Not much, I would say. Recently, DJI announced was on the news about how it’s locking down its drones from tampering by Do It Yourself ‘hackers’. (They aren’t really hackers, they are costumers. Saying Hackers just makes for a better headline.)

Before you think this only happens in technology, remember that there are numerous mentions to “Ikea Hackers” around the web. People who use Ikea’s furniture in creative and innovative ways.

And this brings me to the heart of this article.

Ikea’s opportunity in the maker space

Right, so a while back I heard there was a new line of smart light bulbs that work in the same way as the Philips Hue system. You connect them to your home network with a Gateway and can control them using your smartphone.

Of course I jumped on it. Having already done a few experiments with the Philips Hue, I couldn’t way to try out the more affordable version.

I quickly learned that Ikea’s documentation and manuals don’t tell you much about how to develop around their product. This is the opportunity that the brand could make use of, the DIY community of Makers and Geeks.

With no access to data, we can speculate that these are not their target demographic or key customer. Yet for a brand with such a global presence, any effort in putting out information that will nurture this creativity can expand it to new levels.

Simply creating spaces for these customers to connect and share experience can bring insights on new products, showcases of creativity, and create a community with actual impact on the bottom line.

Yet, I sense some fear.

I have no proof to support this claim other than my (flawed) intuition. It’s a feeling from seeing bold marketing communication on one side and little effort in bonding with the DIY Community.

Hacking the Ikea Trådfri

Alright, but lets take this further. Let’s hack Ikea.

With a few searches and hints from friends, I found an article breaking down the steps necessary to interact with the lights without using their App.

The article uses a Raspberry Pi, which is as cheap a computer as you can get right now, and Python programming. This works because the lights use Zigbee and the COAPS protocol.

The key information was that Ikea is using a standard username and password for all devices, as well as keeping the details in a sticker beneath the Gateway device.

Are you following me so far? Good.

The article above details how you can turn the lights on and off using only your computer or light sensors attached to your Raspberry PI. It’s a great first step but needs a bit extra.

If you are reading this you have probably seen my post about Johnny Five, the clever little robot that controls a few things around my house and texts me important information. (Like, that the new episode of Game of Thrones is out.)

I figured that the next logical step would be to connect the system to Johnny and let him do his regular thing of making sure everything works as if by magic.

This link allows me to extend the usual features of the Ikea smart lights.

Turn lights on or off when I arrive or leave
Set specific lights to turn on with specific color settings ¹
Dim the lights if I start watching tv after a certain time
Control the intensity based on the current progress of the sunset

You get the idea. This goes a bit beyond using the remote, it allows me to make some routines automatic if I wish.

What does this have to do with Marketing

For starters this is long roundabout post is about understanding your stakeholders. Customers and other parties that will use your product and wish to expand it to do something else.

The rest, well the rest is a practical example intertwined. I don’t want you to think that I am discussing hypothetical scenarios. This can be done, is being done, and this article includes links for you to do it too.

Next, this is about planning. When you conceive any Strategy, you need to be aware that these things are a possibility and their impact will vary. It depends on the community of stakeholders and the context of the product or service.

The approach is to either go against it or take it as an opportunity. I suggest the last one, of course.

In the great scheme of things, this is about the need to be more than a Marketing Manager. If all you are doing is managing the relationship between the brand and the agency, keeping campaigns (projects) on track and on budget, what real value are you bringing to the process?

Do yourself a favor and follow some of the ~~clichés~~ lessons we get from startup culture. Get out of the office, talk with your stakeholders face to face. Try to be as flexible (agile) as possible when these opportunities present themselves.

In the end, if you really want to make a difference, you need to drag businesses away from their comfort zone and closer to their customers. Doing whatever it takes.

My notes about the difference between the IKEA Trådfri and Philips Hue

	Ikea Trådfri	Philips Hue
App	Works in home wifi only	Works anywhere
Gateway	Optional ²	Required
Color temperature	Yes	Yes
Colours	No	Yes
DIY	No ³	Yes ⁴
Technology	Zigbee	Information Not Available
Triggers	Time based	Time and location based

You can’t really control the color, but you can set the light to 3 different color temperatures. ↩︎

Sparrowatch, Technology to save the forest

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 13:00:35 +0100

This story starts last year, when a few friends and me participated in the Lisbon Maker Faire.

It happened on a whim, we had about 4 weeks to come up with an idea that was cool enough to display and useful enough to worth people’s time. It just happens that at that time the guys were talking about the new NodeMCU and and the wifi module ESP8266.

You know the feeling that you’re the dumbest person in the room? And that’s ok because everyone else is cool and teaches you stuff? That’s the feeling I get from being around them. So please hang in there with me a little longer.

The NodeMCU kits let you connect pretty much anything to wifi network. The idea was simple, we make these modules talk with each other and pass information along the network until it reaches one that is connected to the internet.

And since we can include all sorts of sensors in the system, we started with temperature and humidity modules.

To help these devices blend with the environment we decided to turn them into birdhouses. It made sense, right? Forests are systems and you can’t start messing with it without giving something back.

The endpoint of the SparroWatch is a dashboard where we can monitor the variations in the forest. Which areas are dryer, which are more likely to be the starting point of a forest fire.

In a nutshell, that’s it. There are many other questions open but the small proof of concept we did for the maker faire was good enough. The next step would be to run a pilot project because there are a few things we still don’t know or are unsure about.

What is the range of the sensors?

We’re not sure at this point.

How resilient is the system?

We know the batteries can hold up for 2 to 3 weeks without solar energy, but dust and other debris may require maintenance on the nests.

How long is the range?

Our estimation is that 250 meters is a safe distance. This means 6 nests could cover 1.5 km.

Lisbon Maker Faire 2016

Pedrógão Grande

You may have heard there was a huge forest fire in Portugal a few weeks ago. 64 people died as a result.

This sparked some interest about technology that could be used to detect or prevent forest fires. Flávio Nunes heard about the SparroWatch idea and wrote a sum up of that and other projects.

The fire began as a result of a dry storm. I was driving to Beirã-Marvão that day, 100 km from Pedrógão. Even there you could feel the dry air and see a few strikes of lightning in the sky.

I have serious doubts whether our systems could have been of any use to prevent such a freak occurrence of circumstances and weather. Experts are still trying to determine the exact reasons besides the dry storm.

The large plantation of eucalyptus tree is being looked at as a factor, as it burns quickly and is not indigenous to the region. To make matters worse, its seems there were issues with the emergency communication system that the fire brigades were using.

We are looking for one single cause, someone or something to blame. This is a useless exercise of finger pointing. A constructive approach would be to legislate the plantation of eucalyptus trees and to improve the way we manage our forests.

I would love it if a system like the SparroWatch could be useful, and the code with instructions are available on GitHub for anyone to use. And more, there is an article with details on the OneOverZero Labs website.

There’s nothing to stop you! Just make sure to credit back to the ! OneOverZero Labs when you do build your SparroWatch net.

Johnny Five is Alive!

Sun, 14 May 2017 00:38:54 +0100

The name comes from the movie Short Circuit. Remember? A robot is struck by lightning and becomes self aware. His name was Johnny Five and he was friendly and curious about humans, nature and how stuff works.

A while back, I used the name for a small home automation project I was working on. In its current version, Johnny makes sure the lights are turned off or on, keeps track of when I arrive and leave home. And he takes commands through the Telegram Bot API to turn off the TV or respond to friends saying when he last saw me.

The workings are pretty simple. My television is an old Monitor, which I turn on and off through the HDMI cable’s signal. The lights are Philips Hue bulbs. To trigger my arrival and departure I’m using a service that was recently “Discontinued”, Locative.

If you’re familiar with the lights you are probably wondering why I didn’t just use the Philips App. Well, for starters Johnny is doing a few other things. He could, for example, gently dim down the lights if I’m working late.

Johnny Five is living inside a Raspberry Pi, and with that he also backs up my personal and work computer. This saved me 329,00 €.

Add that the Media Center. It runs Kodi and fetches content automatically, which includes the local public TV and Radio Stations. I’m still trying to hook up my spotify account to it.

Did I mention he runs as a Telegram Bot ? This means he can send messages to notify me of new episodes of my favourite shows. Soon I plan to add a feature where he send an email to a select number of friends if I don’t check in for an extended period of time.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Home automation is just a small part of what bots, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence can do for us. Imagine you are dealing with a problem and after spending days searching the web you gave up. You’ve hit a dead end. You have better things to do than to keep coming back to google and look up new information.

Bots and other agents can handle these tasks for us. And it seems we don’t want another fancy graphic interface, we want something like Alexa, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. These bots are able to process our natural language and execute commands.

(Keep in mind, bots do this at the expense of our privacy. The companies behind these new bots assure we are safe but they are still complex systems that we should keep an eye on.)

Commercial Brands and other organisations are joining the bandwagon of Bots for customer service at many levels. Whether it’s customer support or something more complex, they want to be the first to prove the return of investment on bots. I have been playing around with some services that provide tools to set up Facebook Bots.

Chatfuel, Morph.AI, Api.AI, Mobile Monkey … being able to provide a working bot and prove it’s usefulness is the new gold rush. Even Gartner has a report about it, Four Use Cases for Chatbots in the Enterprise Now.

And don’t think bots are just going to live in customer support or inside little apps. We already see integration of systems with company tools like Slack and Email and they provide information that is critical for the business. These can be system alerts on how your website and service is performing so that your development team can act quickly.

When you build a brand, you are building an artificial intelligence

This is where things begin to get interesting. Heidi Hackemer would say a brand is an operating system, I think it can go much further to a full intelligence.

We have been building brands based on how they look and only after did we worry about how they wrote. With the tools that we have now, we have to be concerned about how they sound and most of all, how they make decisions.

If you don’t believe me come with me to 1943. Johnson & Johnson is about to become a publicly traded company and Robert Wood Johnson is writing what will be known as the Johnson & Johnson Credo. In it you find a mention to all of their stakeholders and a statement of what the company’s values are.

Our Credo is more than just a moral compass. We believe it’s a recipe for business success. The fact that Johnson & Johnson is one of only a handful of companies that have flourished through more than a century of change is proof of that.

People working at Johnson & Johnson have been using the Credo as a way to make decisions, and it seems to be working. Like Heidi says, it’s a system.

Other brands have similar tools. Visions, Values, Mission Statements. Some are better than others, and they all aim to “align” stakeholders. Soon we will be moving towards giving a brand some personality that can be reflected by one or more bots.

This poses a problem, do we let the humans know they are talking with a bot or do we just let that Touring Test take its course? I’m going to leave that for some other time.

What if a robot talks with another robot? This can easily happen, and with the emergence of Smart Contracts these bots may have the power to guide the organisation.

Back to Johnny Five

You may be wondering about the point of all this. Quite simply I believe bots are not just a shiny new object, they have been around since the days of IRC when they were used to let people browse and retrieve files from servers, mediate trades and play games.

These entities will also be a part of several levels of our life. At a personal level, organisational and society. Imagine talking to a robot so that you are issued a new citizen card, for example.

And as for home automation, it’s a growing business with vendors smart enough to require little or no installation. For example, using the wifi, Johnny could easily power an Arduino to raise and lower the shades in the apartment.

On the other hand I feel brands are running and stumbling trying to figure out what to do with the new technology. And as I said, their biggest challenge will be to build a whole personality for their chatbots and give it a good map of Values to make decisions if required.

There are fun times ahead.