The Data Diva E303 - Rob Tiffany and Debbie Reynolds

Rob Tiffany, Research Director, IDC and Author of Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things

In episode 303 of The Data Diva Talks Privacy, Debbie Reynolds, The Data Diva speaks with Rob Tiffany, Research Director at IDC and author of Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things, about the evolution of the Internet of Things, sustainability, privacy, and the practical use of connected technologies to solve real-world problems. Rob shares his early work developing connected vending machines during the 1990s, before cloud platforms and modern wireless infrastructure made IoT development easier.

The conversation explores how connected vending machines were used to monitor inventory, optimize delivery routes, identify purchasing patterns, and forecast profitability. Rob explains how his team built much of the necessary hardware, software, wireless connectivity, and digital models from scratch. He also shares an unexpected lesson about transparency when some vending operators were less interested in technology that revealed how much money their machines generated.

Debbie and Rob discuss how IoT can help cities and buildings become more sustainable by identifying water leaks, reducing unnecessary energy consumption, monitoring occupancy, and improving the management of lighting and heating systems. They also examine the privacy risks created when sensors, cameras, connected devices, and smart infrastructure collect information about people’s movements, behaviors, and daily routines.

The episode highlights Rob’s book, Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things, and its connection to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Rob discusses precision agriculture, soil moisture sensors, automated irrigation, crop yields, fertilizer use, food storage, and cold-chain monitoring. These technologies can help farmers conserve water, reduce waste, protect food supplies, and produce more food for a growing global population.

The conversation also addresses data minimization, security, and the responsibility organizations assume when collecting information. Debbie and Rob discuss why companies should carefully consider whether information needs to be collected or retained, particularly when a breach can expose personal or financial data permanently. The episode concludes with Rob’s belief that IoT can help address major global challenges while acknowledging that protecting connected systems and the data they generate will remain an ongoing responsibility.

By popular demand, Debbie Reynolds Consulting is now offering executive briefings on emerging data privacy risks and how companies can avoid them. To learn more, visit the Executive briefings page on my website.

Transcript

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[00:00] Debbie Reynolds: The personal views expressed by our podcast guests are their own and are not legal advice or official statements by their organizations.

[00:12] Hello, my name is Debbie Reynolds. They call me the Data Diva. This is the Data Diva Talks Privacy podcast, where we discuss data privacy issues with industry leaders around the world with information that businesses need to know.

[00:24] Now, I have a very special guest on the show, Rob Tiffany. He is a research director at IDC.

[00:31] Welcome.

[00:32] Rob Tiffany: Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Debbie.

[00:34] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah,

[00:35] absolutely. Well, it's so unfair for me to introduce you in such a way because I know you quite well.

[00:42] You and I have a very dear friend in common, Leonard Lee. Leonard. Actually, I was looking back at my archives.

[00:49] Leonard was episode four. And now we're like in three hundreds now.

[00:55] Rob Tiffany: That's amazing.

[00:56] Debbie Reynolds: That's amazing. And so I've known her for many years and actually you,

[01:01] Leonard, and a. A cadre of people.

[01:06] Yeah, Bill. Bill.

[01:08] We participate on the IoT Coffee Talk Show. That's right. And that show, you guys are over 300 episodes too, I think.

[01:16] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, I know. Isn't that crazy? I can't believe. And people are like, you guys are still talking about IOT all these years.

[01:23] Have you moved on to AI by now or something relevant?

[01:27] Debbie Reynolds: Well,

[01:28] for anyone who doesn't know this show IoT coffee talk, check it out. It's on.

[01:34] It's a podcast and audio is also on YouTube, I believe.

[01:39] And it's hilarious. It's quite hilarious. It's like, it's a lot of fun Sports center for IoT. But then we just talk about everything else, you know, so you just never know what we're going to talk about.

[01:49] So. And there's music.

[01:51] Rob Tiffany: Yes, there's music. You have Leonard playing some guitar, opening thing, there's music.

[01:57] Debbie Reynolds: And then just all types of topics get. Get thrown in. But it's a fun show and I'm actually happy to,

[02:03] when I can, to try to wrest myself away and participate. But I really enjoy hanging out with you guys.

[02:08] Rob Tiffany: It's so much fun. It's always great when you're on great discussions. Whatever's hot and tack that week. Right?

[02:15] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly, exactly.

[02:16] Rob Tiffany: Don't dig into it.

[02:18] Debbie Reynolds: And I have to give you credit because you are hilarious.

[02:21] So in addition to being just a very knowledgeable, personable and friendly person,

[02:27] you just bring so much humor to the show. It's just fun to be on the show with you.

[02:32] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, I try. I try. It's fun stuff, for sure.

[02:37] Debbie Reynolds: And another thing we want to talk about is your book. So you Have a book called Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things.

[02:44] But before we get into all that, how did you become interested in the Internet of Things? Like, what's your backstory? What's your deal?

[02:50] Rob Tiffany: All right, so you ready for, like, the Iron man backstory or whatever? It all started I was in a cave somewhere. And yeah,

[02:58] it started a long, long time ago, actually,

[03:01] believe it or not, the early 90s, not shortly after the Internet was made available to people.

[03:06] If you remember those time frames, back when you just had, like, the Mosaic browser came out. And even before Netscape,

[03:14] I was working at a startup. I just got out of the military, out of the Navy, and I joined a startup in Bellevue, Washington, called Real Time Data.

[03:22] And the idea, the founder of that,

[03:25] he had worked for Motorola. Like, when you think of the old school Motorola, like, handheld walkie talkie, that kind of first responder stuff.

[03:33] And he invested a bunch of money. He knew guys at McCaw Cellular.

[03:38] And for all of you who have no idea what Macaw cellular is from the early 90s, it's the world's first nationwide cellular network.

[03:45] Today, you know it as AT and T.

[03:47] And so a lot of the pioneers in wireless were happening up there in the Pacific Northwest back then.

[03:53] You may have heard stories about vending machines and IoT in the early days.

[03:58] And so basically the gist of it was, was,

[04:00] hey, what if, by the way, they were dumb vending machines back then, Fully mechanical, no tech at all. And it's like, what if we knew the inventory and the status of this vending machine,

[04:11] we could help optimize these route drivers. So many businesses where first thing in the morning, you're at a distribution center and maybe you're loading up the truck with products and you've got a.

[04:22] In this case, you go visit all these vending machines around a city. Like, for your route.

[04:26] I've worked with Frito Lay and the same thing. They're going to grocery stores or whatever. Anyway, the gist of it is, could we optimize this? What if you knew instead of bringing all the products and visiting all the vending machines on your route that day, what if technology could tell you the inventory of all the items?

[04:44] Snickers, white powdered donuts, whatever, and Cokes and candy.

[04:48] And you can not only bring exactly what you need, but only visit the machines that actually need visiting? And we just use simple kind of KPIs, green, yellow, red to tell you the status of all the inventory in a vending machine.

[05:00] And so that made things super efficient for A lot of the people who own vending machines and these vending companies around the country, and, and it was really hard and it makes life so much easier today.

[05:11] And what I mean by that is, can you imagine if you had to invent every bit of technology needed to make something work from scratch? Like there was no cloud yet.

[05:20] The most primitive Internet, you had the most primitive cellular networks at that time, as you can imagine.

[05:27] We had teams who were.

[05:30] Since the vending machines were dumb,

[05:32] like when you're pushing a button to get a candy bar, basically these spirals move and it pushes the candy bar out. We had cabling inside the machine to detect which spiral was moving and how far.

[05:44] And we preset, when you load up the vending machine, we knew, okay, this one's all Snickers, this one's all Hershey bar, whatever.

[05:51] And so we knew what it was and that's how we measured the inventory.

[05:55] We also measured how much money the machine was making and break ins and stuff like that.

[06:01] And so building like little black boxes, if you've ever heard the term burning an eeprom, like this firmware, embedded C stuff to put a brain in the machine,

[06:11] there would be like a PC. So this is like a 486 PC running Windows 3.1.

[06:16] And we built this graphical interface in Visual Basic.

[06:20] And it looked like you're looking at a vending machine and you could see all the Cokes and candies and the number how many were left and that kind of stuff.

[06:27] And so the customer who owns a fleet of vending machines across the city,

[06:32] they can log into any machine and visually see it and know the current status and how much money it's made.

[06:39] There was no cloud. So the notion of polling,

[06:41] like you would refresh and it would literally call over a primitive wireless network. We put antennas on top of the vending machine and basically ask the little black box in the machine,

[06:53] hey, give me the inventory status of that stuff. And then we pull it back and then show it on a screen. And so we even had people who were RF engineers, like radio frequency engineers.

[07:03] Sometimes we had to build our own wireless modems. And, and there are these public business radio towers that you've probably never heard of. They're like 450 megahertz. We had RF engineers who, we built our own wireless modems and we would bounce packets off of free towers to send data around.

[07:21] And so yeah, it was crazy. But when you're, you're young and you don't know any better and you're Just in the job, and you're doing the job and trying to figure it out,

[07:30] and you didn't know how hard it was, what we were doing.

[07:34] People joke about, oh, it's not rocket science, right?

[07:37] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah.

[07:38] Rob Tiffany: After a while, we started joking. It's like, well, this kind of is rocket science. Actually.

[07:42] We had to. You know, we think of digital twins.

[07:45] We had to each.

[07:47] Each model of vending machine.

[07:50] We would create, like, what we think of as the digital twin model today for each type of vending machine, and then you might have thousands of that type deployed. And so we built a lot of stuff and did a lot of groundbreaking things early on, and it was really hard.

[08:03] And so you can imagine years later,

[08:05] like when I'm at Microsoft, designing Azure IoT,

[08:09] it seemed relatively simple because the technology had evolved so much that a lot of the things that were hard that you had to invent from scratch are now kind of built for you and lots of better tools and things.

[08:20] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. That is crazy.

[08:23] Rob Tiffany: That is crazy.

[08:24] Debbie Reynolds: You all were literally thinking out of the box.

[08:28] Rob Tiffany: Yeah. But what's funny is we were just trying to solve this one problem years later. The whole IoT hype kind of started around 2010, I'd say.

[08:37] And you had all these companies building platforms, and so did we. When I was at Hitachi and Microsoft and we were trying to build horizontal technologies for lots of people to use,

[08:49] and for a lot of people, it didn't work out. If I go back in time, back in 94, when I was at Real Time Data,

[08:55] we weren't even thinking like that. We were just trying to use connectivity and get the data just to solve one problem.

[09:02] And I think, because I hear lots of people today go, gosh,

[09:05] we should have just been trying to solve problems that businesses have instead of trying to build something for everybody else to use.

[09:12] And, you know, it's funny, as we learn things along the way, you know how sometimes you have a mission and you think, this is what we're all about, and then you stumble upon some insight that you didn't even plan for with the vending thing.

[09:23] One of the things we didn't realize is got into merchandising,

[09:26] as it turns out, let's say I've got, you know, how they put, like a bank of vending machines, a bunch of them together, and they put them in different buildings.

[09:33] And so, for example, it might be like three or four vending machines together in, let's say, an office building in downtown Chicago and maybe a law firm is right there over in real time, we would start to know the preferences of the people in that law firm who used vending machines and we would start to find out in real time which products were selling really well and which ones weren't selling at all.

[09:56] And so in addition to making their business more efficient for the vending guys,

[10:01] we also started to be able to make the vending machines make more money than they made before. And so you found out that people really love Almond Joy or Snickers.

[10:10] And so we would double up the amount of Snickers in the vending machine. And then likewise for the products that were not moving at all, we pull them out of there.

[10:18] And so we helped just through kind of real time merchandising and learning preferences,

[10:24] the vending machine started making more money. So. And we could forecast profitability and how much money it would make in the future.

[10:30] And so it was kind of cool. You never know what you're going to stumble into.

[10:34] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, well, that to me, that's like the innocence Iot isn't was.

[10:39] Rob Tiffany: You were right. We were naive as all get out.

[10:42] Debbie Reynolds: You're right.

[10:42] Rob Tiffany: And we were totally innocent and we didn't know. And here now there's a dark side to this. There's a sad story and it has to do with being innocent. And people talk about a black swan event,

[10:52] like usually financial stuff, like something comes out of the blue. All right, so, you know, a lot of times I know you and I, we mentor founders and startups and give them advice on things.

[11:02] Sometimes something will come out of the left field that you had not planned for.

[11:06] So we're doing great as a vending company.

[11:08] And this is where it gets weird. We're doing pilots and a lot of the cup. You assume that the vending machines are all owned by Coke and Pepsi and all that, but they're not.

[11:17] They're owned by these other vending companies that deploy all that stuff.

[11:21] Most of those vending companies are either in northern New Jersey or outside of Philadelphia.

[11:27] And so I remember us doing a pilot for this group in New Jersey and then it was really successful.

[11:32] And also remember the whole idea of SaaS, which really didn't come about until salesforce.com yeah, we were doing that back in 94, 95, 96 hardware as a service.

[11:43] So that was a subscription. It was like $25 a month per vending machine. And we obviously we had to prove that we made or saved more money than that. Right.

[11:50] To make it useful for them. So we go there and I remember we're in a big room with the board and all these people and we're showing them. They probably thought we were stupid kids and really naive and showed them all the success.

[12:03] And we thought we had this in the bag.

[12:05] And then these guys were like, yeah, that's great.

[12:08] We don't really want that kind of visibility into our operations.

[12:12] And we don't. And that visibility, how much money we're making and things like that and forecasting. And we're like, what are you talking about?

[12:19] Well,

[12:20] it turns out a lot of these vending companies were in the mafia.

[12:24] And I was gonna say,

[12:27] and they absolutely were not interested in transparency or anything like that because in a cash only business,

[12:36] they can skim and take money out of there and not pay taxes and all kinds of stuff. And so I felt like an idiot. And we were innocent, we were naive.

[12:45] We thought we were doing a good thing. And then all of a sudden it turns out that your customer is in the mafia and you didn't know. There was like, I'm not going to say the whole industry is like that, but there were big chunks of it that absolutely are.

[12:59] And they love coin based stuff. They probably don't like it today with people able to use credit cards and things.

[13:05] So that was, that was an interesting learning experience as well. And so every once in a while something will surprise you like that. You never know.

[13:12] Debbie Reynolds: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. That is a crazy story.

[13:16] Rob Tiffany: It really is.

[13:18] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, my goodness. Well,

[13:20] so you and I thing that we have in common is that we both have had a lot of experience in the IoT area.

[13:30] And so my interest in IoT started when I was consulted with a company that was working on smart city stuff and they were concerned about the privacy issues that they were having.

[13:48] And so obviously when municipalities want to take on these technology initiatives,

[13:55] the people in charge, they may think it's super cool, but then they want to put it out and have the public use it or have the public's data collected.

[14:06] And a lot of times they get a lot of pushback there. And so. And some of it is because of privacy concerns. And just almost like your Mafioso story is actually a privacy story, but in a different type of way.

[14:18] Rob Tiffany: In a different kind of way?

[14:21] Yeah, a little bit. You're right. You know, those smart city projects were so tough because you were working with city hall all of a sudden,

[14:30] and you had people who were really excited to do a smart city project.

[14:34] And then when it came time to find the money to pay for the project.

[14:38] They're all, like, pointing fingers at other people, like, do you have the money? Do we. We don't have the budget for that. Or we want to have this futuristic city, but we can't afford that.

[14:47] I. I remember running into that because there are so many great.

[14:50] And so in my book, I mean, I have a whole section, one of the sustainable development goals is called sustainable Cities.

[14:57] And so. And so I've got a whole bunch of use cases around, kind of smart, sustainable city stuff. But you're right, you know, privacy plays a big role.

[15:07] The money to do things plays a role.

[15:09] I just remember when I think about cities, I remember when I found out,

[15:12] what is it like 6 million, 6 billion gallons of fresh water a day is lost in America every day through all the city sewage systems, fresh water piping systems.

[15:26] I was like, how is that possible that we're losing 6 billion gallons?

[15:30] And I remember thinking about that and other things related to cities specifically.

[15:36] That not only makes them smart, but they make them sustainable.

[15:39] And so you can imagine, I mean, what is Iot? We're just measuring something. We have a sensor and we're measuring, this pipe is leaking, this thing's not working. Right. Whatever.

[15:49] Other great stuff in cities,

[15:51] in buildings. Skyscrapers. Buildings play such a role in the things you do in a smart city, right? And so what did we see during COVID You saw all these building with all the lights on and the heat on in the wintertime, and nobody's in the building because everybody's working from home because of COVID And it's like,

[16:07] oh, well, we've all been to a conference room where the light comes on when you walk in. And then if you stop moving for a while, it gets dark.

[16:15] And so you started going, oh, okay. Part of building smart buildings and sustainable buildings is motion detection.

[16:22] And then I found out later also CO2 detection to see you can tell people are breathing and then really shutting down lighting and H Vac in big sections of buildings, measuring how much electricity, sub metering electricity.

[16:37] So many cool things to help save money in buildings in a smart city.

[16:42] But I can imagine the privacy thing, like people don't like people counting, right?

[16:47] Debbie Reynolds: And just like, let's say like a smart thermostat, you can connect your phone and you could be away from home and adjust the temperature.

[16:54] But also you're leaving little breadcrumbs about yourself behind as well. Oh, well, Debbie's in Europe, she's not at home.

[17:05] Exactly, stuff like that. So that's. To me, I always say that technology is a double edged sword where this slices both ways. So for my I'm super pro innovation, I want people to use obviously Iot and get the benefits from it.

[17:19] But then I also have to think about the downside and try to make sure we're thinking about that, because for me,

[17:25] I feel like those are barriers to adoption.

[17:28] So, like, back to your smart city example. And I know you heard about this where certain cities, they had done all these flock cameras that like track people's license plates.

[17:39] And that was like a huge backlash. They'll be like, someone's driving in their neighborhood and all of a sudden on a pole,

[17:45] out of nowhere, there's a camera that's like tracking their license plate. And people don't like that.

[17:50] No, there's been quite a few cities that had to cancel contracts because they got so much outrage from the public. But to me, it's like you're almost doing it backwards.

[18:00] You need to make sure in order for your, especially in a smart city, in order for implementation to be successful,

[18:06] it has to be something that the public feels like they benefit from, especially if you're collecting their information.

[18:12] Rob Tiffany: What do you think? Absolutely. No, you're absolutely right.

[18:15] And. And people have seen enough dystopian movies where they're either tracking your license plate or facial recognition and they're repulsed by it, you know,

[18:26] almost on instinct.

[18:28] And so, I mean, you know, the first time you started having cameras flashing was on when they started doing toll roads.

[18:34] And instead of you throwing a quarter or a bunch of change in the basket as you're driving through to attend it, there, all of a sudden they're flashing and checking you either a tag or your license plate in order to charge you for going through the toll.

[18:48] And then to your point, the flop, those cameras, now they're going all over the place.

[18:53] And so. And you always hear both sides. You always hear the same old story. You have people who are like, no, you're invading my privacy. You're tracking me. I'm living in a surveillance state.

[19:01] This is awful.

[19:02] And then you'll hear other people go, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't be worried about it. And I always hear that stuff.

[19:09] It's such a weird deal. It really is. I know people don't like to be trapped.

[19:13] Debbie Reynolds: I guess I'm more on the abstinence side as it relates to data collection.

[19:20] So I'm like, collect less stuff or how long do you need to keep it? Once someone pays their toll, they're through the license plate.

[19:28] How long is it necessary for you to keep that stuff? So part retention to me is part of that risk that people have.

[19:36] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, you're right. You're right. And there's that people. Some people have distrust of government and they think they're not going to do what they're going to say they're going to do or they're going to.

[19:45] The data leaks. And boy, we see that all the time. And privacy gets blown away all the time from private companies and credit cards to government agencies.

[19:55] It happens all the time.

[19:56] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Like you'll get a letter in the mail say, oh, we had a breach. And it's like, who are you? Right.

[20:03] Rob Tiffany: And they try to make you feel better. Well, we're going to give you 90 days of free credit monitoring. And it's like,

[20:12] no, you already blew it.

[20:13] Right. My data is out there out in the wild now.

[20:17] And giving me free credit monitoring for 90 days doesn't save me or solve my problem.

[20:23] Some bad person has my data now.

[20:26] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly.

[20:27] Rob Tiffany: That's the toughest thing about all this, isn't it?

[20:29] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah.

[20:29] Rob Tiffany: Just keeping data secure and private. It's just so hard.

[20:34] Debbie Reynolds: Totally.

[20:35] Rob Tiffany: You know, we keep coming up with different ideas and different best practices over the years and new technologies,

[20:41] but I guess the bad guys are never sleeping either. And so they're always moving ahead as well while we are.

[20:46] Debbie Reynolds: That's true, that's true. My idea is always,

[20:48] I think the way people think of it is like, let's collect more data and then create more ways to protect the data that we.

[20:55] We create.

[20:56] And I'm like, collect less data.

[20:59] Rob Tiffany: Yeah.

[20:59] Debbie Reynolds: So when it gets breached, it's not like a big deal because you didn't keep that stuff.

[21:05] Rob Tiffany: Keep it. I remember when I started thinking about keeping less data. So if you go back to the dot com days and you know, I remember being ata.com and building the E commerce website and you get to that whole part about where the person's got to fill in all their information and the credit card and all that stuff in order to buy whatever it is you're selling.

[21:24] And at that moment you're like,

[21:27] huh,

[21:28] Is it easier to keep that credit card information in my database to help them?

[21:34] Sure.

[21:35] Is it exposing me and them to possible liability and threats? Yeah.

[21:41] And so I remember distinctly making a decision that I wasn't going to ever keep any of that information.

[21:47] And it was a bummer for people who had to keep filling stuff out over and over again because back then they didn't have Any cool automated stuff you have like wallets or stuff like that with Google or Apple.

[22:00] And so I was just like, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to. And you think you're. Oh, I've encrypted it and it's in the database in an encrypted form.

[22:08] There's so much news all the time that you'd see and you're like, it's not worth it.

[22:14] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, that's true. That's true. I want to talk about your book. I want to talk about your book.

[22:18] So the book is Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things. And I want to know. It's an incredible. You actually asked me to write something for the book. Am I in the book?

[22:27] Rob Tiffany: You did, you did. You're in the book.

[22:30] Debbie Reynolds: I am.

[22:30] Rob Tiffany: You are in the book. You're part of this giant thing.

[22:33] Debbie Reynolds: Perfect, perfect.

[22:34] Rob Tiffany: I'm in the book.

[22:35] Debbie Reynolds: I'm in the book.

[22:35] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, absolutely. You're an ambassador for this book now. Oh, man.

[22:44] Debbie Reynolds: Well, the thing that fascinates me about this book and what you've done,

[22:50] it's quite remarkable because.

[22:52] And then I want to talk about why the sustainability goals are really important for you.

[22:58] We've been working in Iot in many different sectors for years and doing all types of crazy things and people may not be front page news. And then I think the ordinary person,

[23:11] their eyes glaze over when you say IoT or Internet of things. They don't have any idea what that is, what it means to them.

[23:18] Rob Tiffany: But.

[23:18] Debbie Reynolds: But I feel like what you've done with your book is that you've brought a lot of practical examples and practical use cases and given people direction about if they want to use it, like how it's used.

[23:32] A lot of people, you go through their day and they don't understand how much Internet of things they interact with on a day to day basis. But that's what I really like about the book.

[23:42] It's very practical. Where a lot, I feel like a lot of times people try to be ivory tower or pie in the sky about Iot and you did exactly the opposite.

[23:52] But tell me your own story. That's just my impression.

[23:54] Rob Tiffany: Sure.

[23:55] I think not everybody's even heard of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but it was something all the countries signed onto back in 2015.

[24:05] And it was a ground poverty and hunger and health and education and affordable energy,

[24:12] climate change.

[24:14] 17 different. Some of them, they kind of categorized what are the most important things we need to solve in this world and the goal was by 2030, we will have solved all these.

[24:22] And everybody was excited. We're all going to go in and help do this.

[24:26] And sadly, it's 2026, and I honestly don't know how many of these are actually going to be solved by 2030.

[24:33] And I always wonder. And so the way I got into it, when I was at Erickson and I was doing this special project where I was doing Iot on farms.

[24:42] And so I was in the summertime in eastern Washington in apple orchards and hops farms and putting these IoT devices,

[24:51] kind of soil moisture sensors that would go into the ground and they'd measure soil nutrients and temperature and humidity, all that usual stuff.

[24:59] And they were using cellular and sending telemetry back to our platform that we put together.

[25:04] And I think that's where it really hit me, because I was working with farmers so often we've been doing. We do all this tech stuff,

[25:11] and it's such a city thing. I talked to these farmers and they're like, never seen anything like this.

[25:17] And I also noticed they were. I know it's cliche to say they're the salt of the earth people, but they were so grateful. They're like looking at a tablet, an iPad, and going, oh, my gosh, my farm's talking to me.

[25:29] And now this is going to help me, because if you'll remember the timeframe going back several years, we started talking about how California was running out of water because Colorado river is drying up.

[25:38] And so water conservation and agriculture is the biggest use of freshwater in the world.

[25:44] And so I remember going, well, gosh, with Iot, I'd heard this term precision agriculture, and I was like, how do you do that? And it turns out IoT is how you do that.

[25:53] And so you're measuring the moisture per acre, maybe, and whatever the farm's doing.

[25:59] And then as you're doing your measurements. And automation is the big thing.

[26:04] And so when it's going into the red zone or yellow or heading in towards the red zone and we're getting dry,

[26:10] if it's a real sophisticated farm, you might turn on an automated irrigation system and have it watering the crops right up until they're good enough and then shutting it down.

[26:22] Other farms, you might send a text message or a message to someone who's working out on the fields, and maybe they go turn on a valve to do the same thing.

[26:30] And I started learning and spending time with these farmers. Then I started hearing things about,

[26:35] well, gosh, did you Hear that by 2050 we might have 9 or 10 billion people on the planet.

[26:41] And we need to create. I forgot what it was 70% more food than what we have today.

[26:47] In fact, I remember hearing some farmers going, we have to create more food than we've created in the history of farming in order to be ready for that many people.

[26:57] And you're like, wow, what a tough goal. And it just kind of started hitting me that, you know, sometimes there are these challenges in the world that are bigger than yourself,

[27:05] and you're like, is there anything I could do to make a dent in that? And so I was like, well, this precision stuff of Iot fertilizer was another deal.

[27:17] Fertilizer costs a lot of money. In fact, you know, right now,

[27:19] with this war going on in the Middle east, people talk about the straight of Hormuz blocking oil, but the other thing they forget about was they're also not getting fertilizer.

[27:29] A whole bunch of the fertilizer that farmers need actually comes from over there,

[27:33] and it was disappearing at the absolute wrong time when they're planting crops right all over the country.

[27:40] And so all these little things you put together, you know, how can I increase crop yields, how can I use less water, how can I use fewer amounts of fertilizer, how can I use less weed killer?

[27:54] All those kind of things. And so you see a lot of really cool innovations helping there. And so, and then I started expanding and I'm going, oh, well,

[28:02] this thing helps with hunger and poverty,

[28:06] but at the same time, because it's about feeding the world,

[28:09] but it also turns out the most very poorest people in the world actually, actually work in agriculture globally.

[28:16] And so I can get two birds with one stone. And so I remember drilling deep. In fact, in this book,

[28:22] my chapter on zero hunger, rather,

[28:25] is probably the biggest one. It's. I think I have, like 14 different use cases, and most of them are all related to agriculture. You know, when you found out that,

[28:34] gosh, for produce, we lose about half of produce after harvest between there in the grocery store or the restaurant or your home, like 50% of it is just lost.

[28:46] And you're just like, well, gosh, that could solve a lot of problems if we weren't just losing all the food. You may have heard terms like cold chain, where you've got Iot measuring, because as soon as things harvest, it might go into a storage facility at the farm that needs to be at a certain temperature to keep it.

[29:02] You know,

[29:02] like, if I'm. If I'm harvesting apples, I can put apples in cold storage and they will Last a whole year, actually.

[29:09] But then going to the 18 wheeler semi trucks, I got to ensure that they're cold at the right temperature and then they might go to a distribution center along the way and they have different hops along the way.

[29:22] And so you have to ensure that cold chain stays,

[29:24] you know, connected the whole way. And you can prove it all the way to the grocery store,

[29:30] all the way to the restaurant, and even at the grocery store, monitoring the temperature, all the freezers and coolers that you see there at the grocery store,

[29:38] at restaurants, walk in coolers, freezer monitoring that. And so I know it sounds like a lot,

[29:44] but this technology is really simple. It's not rocket science at all. These are simple low cost sensors that can make all the difference between losing lots of food and making sure everybody gets fed.

[29:56] So I think that's where it started for me. And then it just grew from there.

[30:00] Seeing all the other scenarios, all the other use cases and categories of things where IoT could help lend a hand.

[30:07] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, yeah,

[30:08] I think, and I want your thoughts about this. And I think IoT,

[30:14] I don't know, I guess we were hoping that IoT would have a moment. Like AI is having a moment right now. Right,

[30:21] right. And I think the reason why it really didn't have that moment is because people didn't.

[30:30] I guess the term maybe was too broad.

[30:33] Like, they didn't explain how does that help me?

[30:36] Yeah, what does that do for me? Like, so I was like, okay,

[30:40] it's this big thing over here that's happening, but I don't know how that works for me. And believe it or not, you're with idc, so you guys are our stats all day, all day, all night.

[30:51] You know, I think that the projections for IoT growth over the years has. The actual growth has like overblown the projections.

[31:02] So the amount of IoT that people are using now is just like off the charts from what they thought it would be years ago. Because I've tracked these statistics year over year and we've like totally gone past that.

[31:15] But a lot of people don't even think about it because it's like it may be your smart speaker, it's your thermostat, it's the way that the cameras work and you're, you know, your town or it's like the license plate reader or whatever.

[31:26] Rob Tiffany: Right.

[31:26] Debbie Reynolds: It becomes so ubiquitous that people don't even know that it's there.

[31:30] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, that's true. And you know, like lots of technology,

[31:34] when it succeeds, maybe that's because maybe that's when it goes invisible. It just becomes part of everyday life.

[31:41] Because you're right, we never got the Big Bang excited moment like AI has had, where I remember in the early days, I remember back in 2010,

[31:49] you had Ericsson and GE and folks came out and said it's going to be 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

[32:00] And McKinsey came out and said it's going to be an $11 trillion market.

[32:04] And that caused every company to go all in on IoT. And they're all building platforms, building devices, all kinds of things.

[32:12] And a lot of them didn't make it.

[32:14] The ones that are visible that made it or almost reminds me of what we did at real time data back in the 90s. We just were trying to solve this one problem and build this one solution.

[32:24] And so when I think of the ones that succeeded that people know about,

[32:28] it's like I think the poster child was always the nest thermostat.

[32:32] And that was, was the model for a consumer IoT device that used a little bit of machine learning and things like that, which was a hit the ring doorbell ended up being successful.

[32:44] There were a lot of kind of point solutions where a lot of times they didn't even say iot. And it was, maybe it was time to stop saying iot.

[32:51] This is just this thing that does this solves this problem for you. And who cares how it works, you know, because what's iot? It's, it's sensors, it's devices, it's. It's power, it's connectivity,

[33:02] it's an enclosure. If it's outside,

[33:05] it's sending data to some platform, it's doing some kind of analytics or AI and it's doing insights on a dashboard or it's doing, you know, automation and taking an action or actuating and things like that.

[33:18] And we, a lot of times,

[33:20] especially my time at Hitachi, I was totally living in factories in Japan.

[33:25] And you know,

[33:26] industrial IOT was all we were doing. And it was all about industrial machinery and equipment.

[33:31] And so it was invisible to a whole lot of people out in the world.

[33:35] Whereas we're getting hit with AI every day. And you can see it, but you're right, it's quietly,

[33:42] silently, invisibly become a big success.

[33:45] Debbie Reynolds: It's funny cause I look, I think you go to CES every year.

[33:51] I don't go, but I read the reports, but it seemed like every year, the last couple years has been like about vacuum cleaners.

[33:59] A lot of vacuum cleaners coming out,

[34:02] Rob Tiffany: a lot of vacuum Cleaners, a lot of robots this last year, I thought it was the year of the robots.

[34:07] Lots of AI robots. I saw robots playing ping pong and doing karate and all kinds of stuff,

[34:14] which was kind of crazy.

[34:16] Debbie Reynolds: The humanoid robots.

[34:18] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, yeah. And that's growing and that's what people see and their people are reading it in the news every day. And so, yeah, it's interesting. And you know what? Imt what was it?

[34:26] I was just saw that it's a collection of enabling technologies and we just kind of threw together this little acronym that refers to like 15 or 20 different discrete technologies that we have to pull together in order to accomplish whatever the goal is.

[34:41] Which is kind of interesting, as opposed to saying it's a light bulb and it makes light.

[34:47] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, right. It helps you make your dinner.

[34:51] Rob Tiffany: Exactly.

[34:52] Yeah, exactly. But you're right. So when he's making dinner, you started seeing people now have temperature probes in their food inside of oven, and they got it on their smartphone and they can control that.

[35:03] I know I've been using that when I make steaks. And what is that? Oh, it was. It turns out it was Iot.

[35:09] It was a device that can handle extreme heat and it has temperature sensors in it and it uses Bluetooth to talk to my phone and then shows me. Oh, it was Iot.

[35:18] I didn't even think about that. And maybe that's how it should be. I don't know.

[35:21] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah, I, I've been in this area for a long time and I still have questions.

[35:29] Rob Tiffany: Sure.

[35:30] Debbie Reynolds: I don't know everything and I still, like, every day I have like a fresh question about all this stuff. But I want to talk to you about one of the risks that I see and I want your thoughts on this.

[35:40] And this is about end of life devices.

[35:44] So this is what is happening. So let's say you had a smart speaker or smart thermostat, and let's say it aged out in a way where it couldn't be updated anymore.

[35:55] But it works,

[35:58] still works. Right. Because the, whatever is happening in the machinery, it works, but you can't really update it. And so the concern is that if people aren't replacing those things and a lot of people won't replace them because if they're working, it's like, why, why replace them?

[36:14] This works perfectly fine. I don't want to do this.

[36:17] But if they can't get those updates, that creates like a risk, especially if they have those things on a network or connect. Connected in some type of way. So that's one thing that Concerns me, but I want your thoughts.

[36:28] Rob Tiffany: That's problematic.

[36:29] I remember,

[36:31] gosh, I won't say it the words out loud, but there was something on Twitter years ago called the Internet of sh.

[36:37] You know what T And they. All they were talking about was IoT consumer, primary consumer IoT devices where the company either went out, you were having to pay a subscription, you pay.

[36:49] Let's just, as an example, let's say it's a doorbell, but instead of it being a normal doorbell, it's a $400 doorbell because it's a connected doorbell. And then the company goes out of business and now you have this device that doesn't work anymore because the only way it worked was because it was connected and you were using some kind of subscription.

[37:07] And the smart speaker is a good example.

[37:09] Sometimes they still worked and sometimes they just died. And I remember a lot of people getting up in arms about this whole IoT and subscription based stuff and what a problem that was because they,

[37:22] they always spent more money on it than the equivalent dumb version of the device, whatever that used to be.

[37:29] And then it doesn't work anymore. Or what if it's just sending data randomly to some other places or whatever it's getting intercepted. And so those are huge privacy concerns. And it's also just horrible.

[37:40] It's a huge customer satisfaction problem where, where people throw up their hands. You know, if the speaker keeps working, you're kind of okay. But a lot of these devices literally would just quit working.

[37:51] And it was a real shame because it made people have bad feelings about some of these connected products. I tell you,

[37:59] one of the most positive connected product things ever for me just to end up on an up note here is when I was at Hitachi,

[38:10] okay, so earlier we were talking about SaaS and then we started talking about how could we do hardware as a service.

[38:16] And this whole notion of subscription based stuff and, or consumption based, like the cloud is consumption based or subscription based for SaaS things. And it's this new model and maybe you couldn't afford it if you had to buy the whole thing with Capex, but if it's opex, you just pay a little each month and that's how you could get into something really nice.

[38:35] So the biggest one ever and this was a huge success. So I was at Hitachi and I got to invent this was great to start from scratch after I got recruited out of the Azure IoT team and get to create this thing.

[38:46] We called it Lumada. All it had was a name when I joined and it was going to be an industrial IoT thing.

[38:52] So we're building this thing. But as your audience may or may not know, these big industrial conglomerates like Hitachi and Siemens and GE and all those,

[39:02] they build big things. And so Hitachi builds bullet trains, among other things, and they are all over Japan and they're well known.

[39:10] So the cool story happens.

[39:12] This is going to be, I'm going to say it was 2014, 2015. Somewhere there, the UK government put out an RFP saying, hey, all of our intercity trains between all the cities throughout all of the UK need to be replaced.

[39:27] They're really old, they're running down, blah, blah, blah. We need new ones and we're going to put an RFP out for someone to come in and build all new trains and everything.

[39:36] And you can imagine that would be just insanely expensive, right?

[39:40] And so Hitachi has no footprint in Europe and never did. It's a Japanese thing.

[39:46] And so the usual suspects in Europe showed up for the rfp. So there's Siemens,

[39:51] but their, their system is called ice. That's going through Germany, other places,

[39:56] Ahlstrom, if you've ever been to France and you've been on the bullet to the tjv, there's.

[40:00] So those people show up to the party and they're answering the RFP and it's going to cost you, you know how, $80 billion or whatever, some insane amount of money to buy these trains.

[40:11] Well, we wanted to participate with Hitachi and so what we did is we go well with our new Lumana technology.

[40:19] I made sure when we designed this thing that it was portable. You know, a lot of times we'll talk about the edge and the cloud and all that.

[40:24] I made sure this thing could run in any cloud and also could run on a bullet train and be at the edge if need be.

[40:32] And so we had Lumada running on Hitachi bullet trains, plugged into 40,000 sensors, streaming telemetry the whole time,

[40:39] and then into the train control system.

[40:41] And then if there are problems, you could use at the time LTE to talk along the tracks, or if it's bigger problems, maybe connect to WI fi when you got into a train station.

[40:51] We had enough confidence in our technology and being able to keep our trains running on time and an uptime and not having problems, then we said, we're going to do trains as a service.

[41:02] And so the cost to you is going to be $0,0 pounds, I guess, in the UK,

[41:09] and it's going to be like a subscription and you're going to pay as you go.

[41:13] And we trust our Lumana technology is going to keep us from having this total loss.

[41:18] Are having huge problems and we won the bid.

[41:22] And because of IoT and because we could provide something. We could provide an OPEX service with hardware that you could never have done before without IoT and analytics,

[41:33] assuring machine learning, assuring the trains are going to run on time. Right.

[41:37] It was just such a huge win for us. And then I remember seeing pictures, what's his name, the guy from Virgin Atlantic,

[41:44] Sir Richard Branson. He's got in front of one of the new trains and it looks like a Japanese bullet train, but it's got all this British stuff. And this line was Virgin trains.

[41:54] And he's breaking the champagne bottle. And I just remember how excited we were. And that's where I felt like we had the proof that giant, really big things could happen because of IoT in analytics.

[42:06] And we weren't using AI like you have today.

[42:10] We used,

[42:10] we had lots of just normal analytics streaming stuff in real time. And then we did, we created models doing machine, you know, normal machine learning on pieces of equipment.

[42:20] But it all worked. And I became a believer in IoT at that time.

[42:25] And so making things simpler. This book, everything in here is the simplest, dumbest use cases. The technology is for laypeople,

[42:36] doesn't require techies to do it, and it's not using crazy analytics or crazy AI or anything like that.

[42:42] Most of it is all simple KPI kind of stuff where if I have an NGO that needs to work in a village in South America or Africa or wherever,

[42:52] I can give them this recipe.

[42:54] And every one of the use cases in there also has a shopping list and it's all off the shelf stuff, sensors and devices and everything.

[43:02] And so it's like use all these sensors, these devices, this connectivity. Here's where you go to buy them, here's the shopping list. Go fill up your shopping cart.

[43:11] And yeah, it's just real practical. As you were saying, just go do this, do this and you're done. And then you get the value. Move the needle for these people.

[43:18] Debbie Reynolds: Yeah. So in a way, we're talking about IOT is a way to solve problems.

[43:24] Rob Tiffany: It is a way to solve problems. Yeah.

[43:27] There's this pattern and everyone kind of IOT knows it innately, even though you may not say it all the time.

[43:35] I, I, I, I call. There's this notion of inspection. And it started with me when it was the vending machines.

[43:42] If I'm so many jobs and so many things in this world require you to get into a car, a pickup truck, an airplane, a motorcycle, a boat, a helicopter to travel somewhere to inspect something.

[43:55] I need to go read a gauge. I need to go see what the methane level is on this tank farm in Oklahoma. I need to go do all these things.

[44:04] And so there's this, aside from all the use cases and all the value, also have this overriding for most of the use cases of just kind of this inspection and replacement pattern where by default you get value that you didn't have to buy all the fuel for the truck and the wear and tear in vehicles and keep doing all that stuff because we invented these cool little sensors and the magic of cellular networks or Lorawan,

[44:29] and it's just going to tell you.

[44:31] It's just going to. Your machines are going to talk to you. And so that gauge that I need to go look at at this oil refinery,

[44:36] it's just going to send it right back to my system of record automatically.

[44:41] And so I don't let those.

[44:43] This book is about being able to do a lot with a lot less.

[44:48] And so I call out those kind of things because there's value to all that. Lots of people kept saying, oh, we're not going to get great value from it until we're doing extreme AI.

[44:57] And I'm like, no, actually, you didn't have to drive out to West Texas to do a methane reading.

[45:03] And so therefore, you didn't have the pickup truck and you didn't have all the gasoline and the guy driving out there and the wear and tear. That's worth something,

[45:11] right?

[45:13] Simple.

[45:14] Debbie Reynolds: It is,

[45:15] yeah. Well, Rob, if it were the world according to you, what would be your wish for Privacy? Cyber data IoT,

[45:23] anywhere in the world, whether that be regulation, human behavior, or technology.

[45:28] Rob Tiffany: Well, that's a tough one.

[45:30] Obviously, I want to get everybody on the planet to get excited about solving these hard problems with Iot the privacy stuff. I wish we could come up with some kind of foolproof way to protect this data so it can't get captured.

[45:44] I see lots of companies. I see storage companies doing things. I see, you know, you've seen companies that talk about, well, within 10 seconds, we're noticing that a ransomware attack is happening and we'll secure your data, that kind of thing.

[45:57] I wish we didn't have so many people who had evil in their hearts that feel the need to go do these awful things that keep you and I and so many other people up at night trying to fight the good fight to protect that data.

[46:12] And protect those systems and protect people's privacy.

[46:16] I think it's going to be an ongoing journey, sadly.

[46:20] Yeah,

[46:21] we keep trying to solve it, or how many times have people said, we've solved it, it's done.

[46:27] We came up with this antivirus technology for DOS and now it's solved.

[46:33] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, my gosh.

[46:34] Oh, my gosh. I agree.

[46:36] I agree with that.

[46:38] Well, tell people how they should get a hold of your book and how they contact you. They want to know more.

[46:43] Rob Tiffany: Yeah, yeah.

[46:44] So books on Amazon. It can search Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things or Rob Tiffany,

[46:50] the Landing page. My website's robtiffany.com. i'm on substack. We're always writing stuff. And so are you on LinkedIn all the time and different articles.

[46:59] Definitely come see us on IoT Coffee Talk because it's funny and informative and on Twitter X, as they call it. I'm Rob Tiffany there as well. So hanging out in lots of places for sure.

[47:13] Debbie Reynolds: Perfect. Perfect. Well, thank you so much. It's exciting to have you on the show and talk about your book and be able to interact with you in this way. And definitely people definitely join in.

[47:24] Check out Iot Coffee Doc. It's hilarious.

[47:26] Rob Tiffany: Thanks so much for having me. This has been great. Great talking to you, as always.

[47:31] Debbie Reynolds: Yes, yes. Well, I'm really thrilled for you. And about this book. And so definitely check it out. It's awesome.

[47:38] Rob Tiffany: You're in it at the front of the book, too.

[47:44] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, I thought I was in the back or something.

[47:47] Rob Tiffany: There's the back. And I had so many nice people write some nice things, maybe like three,

[47:52] four or five pages,

[47:54] you know, including, like, Vint Cerf,

[47:56] the inventor of the Internet. Oh, wow.

[47:59] We got some heavy hitters, but the fact that we were able to get Debbie.

[48:03] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, wow. I'm so impressed. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[48:08] Rob Tiffany: Pretty cool.

[48:10] Debbie Reynolds: Well, we'll definitely talk soon. I'll see you on Iot Coffee Talk. And thank you so much again for being here.

[48:16] Rob Tiffany: Thanks for having me. Sounds great. See you soon.

[48:18] Debbie Reynolds: See you soon. All right.

[48:20] Rob Tiffany: Bye. Bye. Sam.