The Internet of Things is a simple concept: objects being connected to the Internet. What’s not so simple is managing the enormous, almost sublime amount of data these connected “things” (vehicles, appliances…) generate. There’s also the question of how you give people within your organization secure-but-seamless access to specific subsets of data they can actually make use of.  Well, our man Holger knows how it’s done, so start getting your questions together and join our live Q&A on May 29.

Click here to get the full event details and a reminder in your calendar. On the day of the event, join us at:

•   layer7.com/live

And don’t forget, you can ask questions throughout the stream by chatting or tweeting. Alternatively, you can email your questions in advance and Holger will give you an in-depth answer on the day. IoT is a pretty hot topic right now, so this is bound to be a lively discussion. See you next Wednesday!

We’ll also talk about the “-ilities” of an API Management platform: scalability, manageability, extensibility etc. We will illustrate each of these with a real-world Layer 7 customer example. You’ll see why these and other non-functional requirements matter just as much as the solution’s technical capabilities.

So, please join me and Layer 7 Product Manager Dana Crane as we discuss these key API Management criteria tomorrow. There will be time for questions – both technical and conceptual – and all attendees will receive a free copy of the recently-published Forrester Wave for API Management Platforms. See you tomorrow!

Register now for How to Choose the Right API Management Solution >>

Mobile devices and social media have multiplied the number of touch-points available for engaging buyers. The line between retail and “eTail” has grown blurry as location increasingly defines all shopping experiences. Big Data now makes it possible for marketers to tailor promotions to every shopper, based on buying history and inferred intent. And API-driven architectures provide a way to tie all online channels, data sources and cloud services together in an event-driven, context-aware network that can engage buyers wherever they are.

All these elements assembled together suggest a new era of personalized commerce. This will place the buyer back at the center of a commerce universe of disparate data, mobile, cloud and social elements that will converge to deliver him or her a more exact shopping experience tailored to his or her choice preferences at that point in time and that place in space.

For Layer 7, this convergence of trends that puts the shopper at the center of an API-connected ecosystem plays to two particular strengths. Firstly, it leverages Layer 7′s leadership in networking enterprise, mobile, social, cloud and partner services via APIs. Secondly, it cements a concept of enhanced identity, where a fuller user profile can be built around an ID to deliver a more complete view of that subject. Both will be essential for delivering on the vision of highly-personal commerce that spans online channels, is location-aware, leverages multiple data sources and can determine a context-specific action across mobile, payment and Web services.

To learn more, read the API-Driven Omni-Channel Commerce solution brief >>

Smart phones are ubiquitous, social networks are the norm and we are connected to applications on our devices all the time. We love applications like Instagram, Twitter, Evertnote and Snapchat. But we don’t like signing in and out of each of these applications across networks or devices. It’s awkward and cumbersome and we’re often doing it while on the go or commuting, with only one hand to use while tapping in our passwords. Besides, who wants to remember all those passwords anyway? And it’s not safe to use the same one for every application.

This is the major downside of using all these great new mobile applications. Most of us would gladly invite a scenario where we’d only need to log in once to access multiple applications. There’s social login – but is it safe and is our privacy secure? Remember what happened to Burger King’s Twitter account? Enter Single-Sign-On & OAuth for Mobile Applications.

On Tuesday Feb 26, we’ll be hosting a live interactive Tech Talk on security and Single Sign-On (SSO) for mobile applications. And I’m excited to welcome back Layer 7′s Chief Architect and resident OAuth expert Francois Lascelles. He’ll discuss how to provide SSO for mobile applications, without compromising the security of the apps or the APIs that power them. Francois will also be taking your questions throughout the Tech Talk. So, this will be a great opportunity to get answers to your questions about your own applications and the security that surrounds them.

Click here to get the event details and a reminder in your calendar.

On the day of the event, click here to join:

•   layer7.com/live

Submit your questions:

• Tweet using the tag #Layer7Live
• Email techtalk@layer7.com
• Post a message on Facebook

I’m particularly excited about a very ambitious EU-funded project to map an IoT reference architecture. Whether it will really become the reference architecture or simply a collection of best practices is subject to debate but I think the simple fact of trying to pull together all the different knowledge domains into one set of documents is bound to be interesting.

Forbes recently published an article by Alex Brisbourne called The Internet of Things Isn’t as New as It Seems. The article offers some really fascinating insights into the renewal rates for built-in 3G services in iPads and OnStar. Reflecting upon my own positive experiences with a 3G Kindle, I have to agree with Alex that, for connected devices to really reach their potential, connectivity must be simply built-in without requiring a separate subscription.

Another indication of this trend is the fact that car manufacturers are apparently switching from built-in mobile connectivity (requiring the owner to carry a subscription) to tethering off the driver’s existing smart phone. This highlights the challenges telco providers are facing – as summarized in a recent blog post on telco2.net.

Alex Bassi has provided another look at the way IoT is affecting business models, making the point that technology is enabling us to use things without having to own them. In my humble opinion, we’ll see this service-based model, which we normally associate with SaaS and the cloud, extending more and more into the domain of physical “smart” things. We can already see this usage pattern emerging in the automotive sector: car sharing a la Zipcar; limo service from Uber; electric car solutions from Better Place. FastCompany calls this the new “self-service” economy in an article that explores these issues in depth.

To get a good overview of the Internet of Things, I suggest heading over to ZDnet, which regularly posts articles on IoT and M2M. Postscapes, meanwhile, is completely dedicated to tracking IoT – I particularly like this site’s (currently incomplete) directory of companies in the space. There’s also a good collection of relevant essays gathered together on Bundlr.

Finally, here are a couple of links for the technically inclined. First here’s a presentation on the impressive set of open source building blocks developed as part of the m2m.eclipse.org project. Second is a piece that touches upon some technical aspects of the semantic Web that have a good deal of relevance to IoT. This is an area I’m personally very interested in and it might be a good topic to explore in a future post.

In any case, I expect to have plenty of interesting things to report on after Mobile World Congress. If you’re attending the show, be sure to stop by the Layer 7 booth for a chat. We’ll be at booth  #8.1A47 in the App Planet zone.

As usual, we’re likely to see a very broad sweep across various areas of telco innovation and mobile strategy but there are some fundamental questions facing the community and these will dominate many conference sessions, seminars and exhibits:

1. Connected Living
   As the Internet of Things gains momentum, how can the service provider community deliver the kind of enriched connectivity the broader ecosystem increasingly demands?
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2. Mobile Commerce
   For years, mobile has been a key banking and commerce tool for certain markets. With the rise of NFC (near field communication) and success stories like the Starbucks mobile payment app, will mobile become the preferred payment instrument for us all?
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3. Next-Generation Communications
   The world of communications moves quickly – too quickly even for service providers at times, with the runaway success of technologies of iMessage, WhatsApp and – next – WebRTC. In this ever-innovating world of mobile communications, can service providers regain some ground and demonstrate their value?

Layer 7 has answers to these questions and will be at MWC, demonstrating a variety of solutions that can help service providers address the challenges ahead. For example:

1. We have been collaborating with AT&T and have planned an M2M solution that will capture anonymous information about visitors as they move around the exhibition halls. This information will be presented as intelligent APIs via the Layer 7 platform.
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2. Security and authentication are very familiar terms to Layer 7 and we’ll be showing how mobile payments can be easily and securely integrated with a mobile app without compromising the user experience.
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3. “Communications as a Service” opens many opportunities for service providers and the new partnership between Layer 7 and Voxeo Labs will show how easy it can be to capitalize on these opportunities.

Come and meet the team at booth 8.1A47 in the App Planet zone or email info@layer7.com to schedule a meeting. See you there!

The good old measure of progress, mobile subscriber penetration, doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, the real measure is how many other connected devices a subscriber uses – iPads, Smart TVs and even fridges (who wouldn’t want a Galaxy Kitchen or an iPad Mini?) This is just the start of a revolution in connectivity, which will make it easier than ever to consume information and equally easy to emit a lot of information, often through social networks.

But there is another aspect to this – not only will you be able to post your own information but there will be all kinds of devices that can “sense” information about you. I expect to see a lot of this at MWC – sensors and cameras scattered around the floor, mapping passers-by to Facebook profiles and other personal information. Obviously, the capturing and cross pollination of this information raises all sorts of privacy issues.

It will also have a number of significant ramifications for mobile developers. First, there will be a new wealth of information available in the form of Web service APIs, as most of the data will be stored in cloud. The sheer scale of this new information-rich world will require apps to leverage cloud processing capabilities in order to be truly effective. This will create opportunities for enterprises to rethink their mobile architectures.

Second, mobile developers will need to use standard protocols for authentication and authorization. OAuth and OpenID Connect are key standards for protecting resources and allowing app users to authorize apps to leverage their information. Will these standards address all the privacy issues mentioned above? Probably not but they will make it a good deal easier for app developers to comply with privacy laws and regulations.

Third, the most successful app developers will be those that are able to provide a seamless user experience (UX) across multiple devices. This is because the end user of the near future will naturally expect all apps to know about other sessions that user had with an app across all of his or her many smart devices. Devs will therefore want to migrate sessions across devices, to bolster the UX.

If you’re going to MWC, come and say hello to the Layer 7 team. We will be located in the App Planet area Hall: 8.1 Booth: A47. I hope to see you there!

Las Vegas Mobile App Hackathon (November 16-17)
The local developer community is thriving in Sin City, which may be a surprise to many. I was very impressed with the talent of the developers in Vegas, most of whom were writing native Objective C or Java for their iOS and Android apps. Also, the local PhoneGap user group manager was onsite, providing support for Adobe’s app development framework. The apps produced were quite polished and impressive. Several included API integrations while others came with plans for future Web integration of APIs, to add context and information.

Miami Mobile App Hackathon (December 14-15)
This hackathon brought an impressive group of sponsors together including AT&T, Microsoft Azure, Blackberry Dev, GitHub and – of course – Layer 7. With over 200 signups and some highly technical evangelists sent by the sponsors, I was excited to see what kinds of apps would be produced. The developers mashed together numerous Web services using native code or PhoneGap. It was great to see the local developer community come together, with numerous local start-up incubator leaders onsite scouting for new talent and investment opportunities.

For 2013, Layer 7 will once again be joining the AT&T Hackathon team for several events. Many organizations with APIs powered by Layer 7 will be promoting their APIs and providing prizes at these events. Stay tuned – we’ll be helping evangelize a lot of great APIs in 2013!

Find out more about upcoming Layer 7 Hackathons

Of course there will always be a place for a little more talking and I’ll be doing some of this myself as part of the CES panel Privacy & Security in the Cloud. This discussion will take place on Monday Jan 7, 11am-12pm, in LVCC, North Hall N259. The panel is chaired by my good friend Jeremy Geelan, founder of Cloud Computing Expo, who honed his considerable moderation skills at the BBC.

I’m planning on exploring the intersection between the cloud and our increasingly ubiquitous consumer devices. We will highlight the opportunities created by this technological convergence but we will also consider the implications this has for our personal privacy. I hope you can join us.

Tomorrow (that’s Friday November 9) at 10:30am, I’ll be discussing the challenges of mobile app UX at QCon in San Francisco. In a presentation called “HTML5 Cross-Platform Mobile Apps Integrating APIs”, I’ll be outlining significant challenges around API-driven mobile apps, as well as mistakes developers commonly make, and suggesting best practices for addressing them.

I hope you can make, if you’re at the show. Also, be sure to visit Layer 7 at booth #11.