This is a video of a presentation for the VOLTTRON Users’ Conference last week, covering both where we are now with opentaps SEAS development and what our business model is for open source energy:
Why are we developing a smart energy software after creating open source ERP?
First, the Internet Of Things means that the future of software, especially business applications, is connected devices:
Second, falling cost of renewable energy means that this huge industry is ready for major transformation:
Finally, we need to do something about climate change–and do it now:
For a longer version of this post, please click here.
Today, a new opentaps is publicly available on github at https://github.com/opentaps/opentaps_seas
Here’s what it looks like:
This new opentaps helps you to manage energy more intelligently by collecting and analyzing energy data. It lets you create and track a portfolio of your buildings and equipment, gather data from your devices through standard protocols such as BACNet and MODBUS, and run applications to make your all your assets more energy efficient.
At a more technical level, it is written in Python with the Django framework and combines several great open source projects, including VOLTTRON, Project Haystack, Grafana, Crate DB, and PostgreSQL. These projects let us collect, tag, and analyze a huge amount of data from building and energy systems. On top of this, we’ve created a services architecture using Haystack tags to make writing business applications with device-level IOT data much more efficient.
To distinguish it from the Java-based ERP and CRM, we’re calling this new opentaps the “Smart Energy Applications Suite” or SEAS. So take a look at the videos on our Youtube channel, so check out the code, and let us know what you think.
What would you do if you could go back in time? Way, way, way back to the days when Nokia and Symbian ruled the mobile phone world? Would you have known that one day, you could develop Instagram?
Amazingly, we have a chance to do it over again. The energy industry is digitizing, and it’ll go from hardware to platforms. (Read more about it here.)
When it does, those platforms will have to be open source, because energy is just too big an industry. With phones, Apple could create a non-open source iOS platform because it could put together a complete phone, and you could buy a complete phone from Apple. With energy, though, no vendor is big enough to put everything together, from the electric grid to local renewables and batteries to the HVAC and lighting inside your building. No customer or corporate entity could own all these pieces either.
So we’ll always have a mix of manufacturers and service providers that communicate through open protocols, and that is the foundation of open platforms and open source.
Energy might be the biggest and most important industry in the world. Everyone you know, everything you use, everything you do — They all depend on energy. Our decisions about energy also change the world in big ways: From the Industrial Revolution to Climate Change, they all happened because of decisions we’ve made about energy.
Amazingly, open source can play a big role in energy in the near future. The renewable energy revolution will be a software revolution. Whether you’re interested in smart devices, IOT, business applications, or machine learning and AI, there’s a place for you to make a difference and create a better future.
For more on this, please read this Medium post.
Is blockchain an even more disruptive technology than the web? Could IOT be the best place for blockchain to take off?
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has been talking a lot about the blockchain recently, so I decided to learn more about it. I read the Marketing the Blockchain e-book, watched The Grand Vision of a Crypto-Tech Economy video and the video keynote of Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne at the Bitcoin 2014 conference, and did some more research on my own. While far from an expert, I do see some interesting parallels to the adoption of open source software. Here’s what I’ve learned — please comment and tell me if I’m wrong:
What’s the Big Deal about the Blockchain?
Blockchain is a distributed ledger system using crytography and open source software. The goal of the blockchain is to allow anonymous and secure record-keeping. Record-keeping not of the mundane, high speed data in databases, but more critical information like money, transactions, and identities.
But here’s the big thing: instead of those records being kept in one central, allegedly secure place, it is kept distributed in a peer to peer way, while also being (allegedly?) secure.
Ok, that’s nice. So what?
Now stop for a moment. Think about this: What does every institution in our society do?
What does your bank do?
What does the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, or any other central bank do?
What does your local registrar/recorder do?
What do eBay, etsy, Paypal, uber, airbnb, Facebook, Amazon, Yelp do?
What does every business, big or small, do?
They all keep records in a central, allegedly secure, place.
So what if there was a technology (open source no less!) that could replace every single centrally kept source of information with a peer-to-peer distributed alternative?
The internet is a big deal because it fundamentally replaced centralized information repositories such as newspapers, TV, and encyclopedias with distributed, peer-to-peer alternatives. If the blockchain could replace all these other parts of our society, right down to our monetary and banking systems, wouldn’t it be a 10x, 100x, 1000x more powerful force for change than the internet?
IF.
Could it Really Happen?
Blockchain enthusiasts would tell you that it is already happening: Openbazaar is out to replace eBay, Amazon, and etsy. Steemit is out to replace reddit, twitter, and Facebook. And then, there’s bitcoin, out to replace your money with a digital currency outside the control of any government! Not only is it accepted at Overstock now, but there’s actually an impressive list of places that take bitcoin for payment, including Expedia, Microsoft, Whole Foods, Dell, Home Depot, and Sears.
But here’s the catch: These places are accepting bitcoin based on its spot exchange rate to mainstream currencies. For example, when you checkout at Overstock, your shopping cart is quoted in dollars, and then Coinbase will quote you a bitcoin price based on the current bitcoin/dollar exchange rate. This bitcoin price is good only for a short period of time (10 minutes from when I tried it.)
So in reality, “accepting bitcoin” today is like accepting the Discover card. It’s certainly a necessary step if bitcoin is to go mainstream, but it doesn’t mean that bitcoin is replacing established currencies. For that to happen, we’d actually have to see an economy that’s priced in bitcoins. This means a group of people must be willing to take a relatively fixed amount of bitcoins for their goods or services, instead of pricing them in dollars, euros, or another established currency. Usually, that means other people must be willing to take their bitcoins in turn.
For example, you might bill $100 per hour for your services. You probably wouldn’t change that rate as the dollar fluctuates from $1.05 to $1.2, $1.3, or even $1.6 to the euro. Would you similarly accept 0.1 bitcoins instead of $100 per hour, whether 1 bitcoin was worth $700, $1,000, or $1,300? That depends on what you can do with it, doesn’t it? If you live in the United States and pay rent, buy groceries, and go to restaurants and movies with dollars, it won’t matter to you what the dollar to euro exchange rate was, because all your expenses are still (more or less) the same in dollars. Similarly, until you could buy all sorts of stuff at relatively stable bitcoin prices, you’re taking quite a risk fixing your price in bitcoins.
Hence we have the classic adoption problem for new technologies: Until we get a large group of people to adopt it, most people wouldn’t want to adopt it.
Lessons from the Quiet Revolution
Most blockchain advocates deeply believe that a de-centralized economy is a fundamental virtue, but they also realize that the rest of the world won’t care. They know that for the blockchain to take off, it must be an invisible part of the apps that power regular people’s lives.
Which sounds just like open source software: Most open source developers believe that software freedom is fundamentally good, and software copyrights and patents are fundamentally evil. Richard Stallman’s The GNU Manifesto could practically be translated into a manifesto for blockchain just by changing some words. Yet that’s not what drove the adoption of open source software in the end. We did not, as a society, all rise up to overthrow the shackles of commercial software. Instead, open source is a quiet revolution: When you open your smartphone, check some reviews, surf the web, play a game, or buy something online, you’ve probably used at least a dozen different open source technologies. But most people don’t even know what “open source” means (although it sounds nice.)
What drove this quiet revolution? In retrospect, open source software has been most successful when three conditions are met:
For example, Linux, Apache (actually just the httpd web server), MySQL, and PHP (aka “LAMP”) were all successful because they were used for building web-based applications in the early 2000’s. Commercial alternatives like Solaris, Microsoft IIS, Oracle, and ASP .NET were not dominant the way Microsoft Windows and Office or SAP were. Funnily enough, back then websites weren’t considered mission critical by most companies, so it wasn’t a big deal to let the geeks try out some new technologies. And it was much easier for those geeks to download and install LAMP and start making a website than go through the long procurement process with Oracle, Sun, or Microsoft. So open source took off.
What Don’t You Like About Establishment?
Contrast this with the blockchain today, and we see that in all the niches we’ve talked about, there is a dominant player: Our currencies and banks, major corporations, and social networks are very much established. Furthermore, they are very much mission-critical. We get paid with dollars and know that we can pay our rent or buy groceries. We put it in the bank and trust it’ll be there tomorrow, and we don’t have to worry about losing all our money if our hard drive crashed and we lost our bitcoin keys. We trust the reviews on Amazon and eBay and know that when we buy something, the goods would get to us. We trust that uber will send us a driver who is not going to hijack us, and the driver trusts that uber will pay them for our trip.
We may not like everything about them, but how many people are ready for a peer-to-peer, de-centralized alternative? And if anything went wrong with that alternative, “who would I sue?”
So can we find some non-mission-critical applications where there are no dominant incumbents?
We might think that blockchain is a natural fit for places that fall outside the established monetary and banking system, for example in countries with failing currencies. But the dominant incumbent currency in those countries is usually the US dollar: there are apparently more dollar bills in circulation outside the United States than inside for that very reason.
We might think that technologically, the blockchain is a natural fit for peer-to-peer transactions, like eBay or uber. But those are very mission-critical applications. There are plenty of eBay sellers whose livelihood depends on getting paid and getting good reviews. They’ve learned how to get those through eBay and Paypal. Would they trust that livelihood to someone else easily? As for uber, it’s the driver’s livelihood and the rider’s life that are literally at stake.
And then there’s health care. Here’s a great one: Our health care system is antiquated. Records are not even kept electronically. We don’t trust our doctors, hospitals, and especially insurance companies and government health departments. There is no dominant incumbent. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to keep all my health records in the blockchain, so I can share them with doctors and insurers and even other physicians at my choice?
But what if something happened to my health records? What if they got stolen, tampered with, or simply lost? It could be life or death. Talk about mission critical. So would most people trust Google or a peer-to-peer distributed ledger?
One interesting blockchain application is micro-payments. Today’s payment networks, such as Paypal and credit cards, have a minimum threshold below which the costs are just too great. It’s not worth it to send someone $0.05 electronically, but it is with blockchain. So can we have an economy where blockchain is used to transact in such small amounts? Perhaps. I don’t know of anybody who does.
But what if micro-payments is paired up with smart contracts like Ethereum, which allows transactions to happen automatically based on rules. And then tiny payments, perhaps even smaller than $0.01, could be sent between computers and devices as they connect and work together. By 2020, we’re supposed to have 20 billion (according to Gartner) to 38 billion (according to Juniper) Internet-Of-Things (IOT) devices in the world. Maybe all these devices could just accumulate small amounts of money for us on the side, and this could be a new, non-mission-critical field without an incumbent technology. Hmm….
As you can see, I haven’t figured out a break out application for blockchain. But then again, like I said at the beginning, I’m far from an expert–not even much of a beginner in fact. If you think of something, please let me know in the comments.
Before you flame, take a look at this ad:
MS-DOS Emerges, 1983, courtesy RegMedia.co.uk
This is a historic document that shows the exact moment when Microsoft began taking over the world. Its main products at the time were BASIC and DOS, but DOS was the indispensable layer of the Personal Computer (PC) industry. It sat between the hardware and software of the IBM PC and its myriad of compatible clones.
What’s most amazing about Microsoft and DOS, though, is that everything above and below them were open sourced. If you wanted to build an IBM-compatible PC (like Compaq and Dell), the architecture was openly available, as long as you built it for DOS. If you wanted to write software for IBM PC’s and compatibles (like Ashton-Tate and Lotus), Microsoft and DOS provided you with open standards too. As a result, millions of IBM-compatible PC’s were built and millions of programs were written for them — far more than ever was the case for Apple’s Macintosh. They turned IBM and Microsoft into the standards of the industry and made companies like Dell, Lotus, and Intel wildly successful.
But not as successful as Microsoft.
Because through it all, Microsoft didn’t open source its products. There were no DOS (or Windows) alternatives that a Compaq could package with its PC’s to run Lotus 1-2-3. There was never an open “PC operating system standard” that would allow software and hardware vendors to write once (or build once) and run any operating system. Competing operating systems like CP/M, Xenix, OS/2, and BeOS all failed because there wasn’t enough software written for them to attract hardware manufacturers, and not enough hardware manufacturers making computers to attract software developers. As a result, Microsoft ended up controlling the entire PC industry, eventually even muscling giant IBM out.
Microsoft’s succeeded during the PC era came by making knowledge freely available, essentially open sourcing the architecture of PC hardware and software. Decades later, Microsoft would stumble because it couldn’t make ASP.NET, Silverlight, and Windows Mobile the standards for web and mobile. Today Google is trying the same strategy by making Android the platform of choice for both hardware manufacturers and software developers. (Funnily enough, Apple didn’t play this game with Microsoft back then and doesn’t care to join Google now. They just march to a different beat altogether.)
Moral of the story?
For open source developers: Open sourcing of software is just small potatoes. There is so much information that, if made openly available, could create whole industries and make people’s lives better. So isn’t it time we stopped thinking just about the code and started thinking about how to create openly available knowledge that could benefit the world — and build great businesses?
For everybody else: Do you still think open source is a charity? Or are you thinking, “What kind of openly available knowledge could grow my business?”
Ten years ago we started with the (immodest?) goal of bringing open source to enterprise software. Today, there are even greater opportunities for open source — not just in software, but as a fundamental force for positive change in the world.
Imagine a world where smart devices could be 3-d printed anywhere. Further imagine all those devices connected, through the internet, to every other person and organization in the world. This should be a world where our homes could respond to our movements to turn appliances on and off. We could grow food using less water because sensors would know when to turn the irrigation on and off. Our physicians could know if we need to come in for a check up.
But will this be a world where a few large companies control all the devices, and only their chosen partners are allowed to provide us services?
Or will this be a world where the designs for smart devices will be openly available? Where there are open API’s for many startups to innovate and create new business models?
That is the opportunity — and challenge — for open source.
Has online shopping become boring? Every website shows you grids of categories and products, with cross-sells and up-sells. Scroll down and you might see a few reviews. Somewhere are the same add coupons, sign up for our emails, and free shipping offers you’ve probably seen a hundred times already.
The sad truth is that there has been very little innovation in e-commerce. Online retailers seem content being electronic catalogs of products, competing with each other on pricing and fulfillment. (Save an additional 5% and get free next day shipping!) In other words, we’re all stuck imitating Amazon.com.
Does it have to be like this? May be not: there are actually other reasons why retailers exist in the first place. Imagine you just invented The Cool Gadget ™. Here are some good reasons for signing up resellers:
1. Distribution. Retailers get your product to the end consumer by putting it online or in a store, warehousing, fulfilling the orders, and collecting payments. It’s a lot of mundane yet important steps.
2. Support. The retailer helps answer your customers’ questions, so they could understand and use your product properly. Often this means answering the same questions over and over again.
3. Integration. Your product is great, but how does it help me look better, get connected, and stay cool? The retailer could show the consumer how to meet these important life with your product, often by combining it with other products.
But today, most online retailers function solely as distributors and just list products and fulfill orders. Customer support is limited to basic order fulfillment information, and few online retailers even think of themselves as helping to meet their customers’ life needs. Hence the sad trend of “Showrooming”, where customers go research at local stores then try to find deals online.
Which is where we are today: After nearly 20 years, ecommerce is settling into middle age as a junior partner on the retail scene.
But it would be dangerous to get complacent: There is a new generation of online shoppers. They were born after the Internet, and to them, online is the first and best way to learn about…everything. They will want to use the web (and their phone) not just to buy products they’ve already seen in a retail store, but also help satisfy their deepest needs.
Would you be doing that for them?
What do you say when people ask, “Why do you do your job?”
Is it a mix of I’ve-done-it-for-years, I’m-good-at-it, and it-makes-me-money?
That’s all fine and good, but please take a moment to think about the bigger picture: Our world is heading to a peak population of 9 billion people within our lifetime. More than two billion people have no access to drinking water. Over a billion people live in urban slums.
The same skills that you already have — designing and building technology and online communities — could solve problems like these for billions of people. So as important as your day job may be, think about how to use what you already know to make a bigger difference. When you are part of something bigger than yourself, you’ll find it giving you a fresh sense of purpose and making you feel more alive as well.
That is what we are going to be doing as well. Going forward, please go to opentaps.com to follow the development of our business application software. Meanwhile, here we will be focusing on how technology — specifically open source software — and open communities could help solve some of the world’s bigger challenges, such as energy, water, and housing.