This is not an April 1st joke, though I know it is going to be interesting and exciting. Today I start work at 451 Research – Analysing the business of IT innovation. Specifically I am an analyst for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry. IoT is of course the underpinning substrate of almost everything that is going on so it covers an awful lot of new technology and evolving businesses.
The role entails a lot of writing and finding the important and salient facts to share with 451’s subscribers and customers.
I will be working from home, but with a fair amount of travel to conferences, customers and briefings. Those of you who work in the IT industry will be familiar with analysts making sense of the marketing and sharing their perspective on company developments and products.
Feeding Edge is continuing as a company, but not as a consulting one, as it has no employees. Having written the two sci-fi novels (that are strongly IoT related) it is now the publishing company for those books. The third book in the trilogy will be a little way away as I know the work load and writing load for my new role will be pretty intense.
What about virtual worlds and augmented reality? I am not leaving that behind. There are a lot of industrial uses in the IoT space that fit with AR in particular. When the world in instrumented you need a way to see what is going on. Likewise for VR and dealing with Big Data visualisation. When you consider the Wimbledon Second Life project in 2006-2008 a centre piece of that was the rendition of the real world trajectory of the ball pulled into the virtual space. It is a flavour of IoT. I have also worked on pushing and pulling data in and out of virtual environments making them, in some cases, an IoT simulator. So the quirky and the virtual still sit within my sights, though the focus is on the big stuff. Smart buildings, cities, corporate infrastructure, manufacturing, cloud integration, platforms and services etc.
I am going to be working for the Research Director, Internet of Things at 451 Research. Someone many of you may also know from the 2006 Virtual World days, and many other things, Christian Renaud. The role is global, but it is handy that I am over here near London and Europe to cover all the things happening here. I already have 4 conferences to attend in London this month. If you see me around say hi.
It will take a bit of getting used to the cadence of the work, but I am really looking forward to getting to hear the details of what companies are up to and sharing that with the written word, conference talks and webinars. It is a natural, but still challenging, step to take.
Thank you all for the support and interest over the past 7 years with Feeding Edge.
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