>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering LiveWorx '18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the LiveWorx show, hosted by PTC, and you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, covering IoT, Blockchain, AI, the Edge, the Cloud, all kinds of crazy stuff going on. Kevin Ashton is here. He's the inventor of the term, IoT, and the creator of the Wemo Home Automation platform. You may be familiar with that, the Smart Plugs. He's also the co-founder and CEO of Zensi, which is a clean tech startup. Kevin, thank you for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. So, impressions of LiveWorx so far? >> Oh wow! I've been to a few of these and this is the biggest one so far, I think. I mean, it's day one and the place is hopping. It's like, it's really good energy here. It's hard to believe it's a Monday. >> Well, it's interesting right? You mean, you bring a ton of stayed manufacturing world together with this, sort of, technology world and gives us this interesting cocktail. >> I think the manufacturing world was stayed in the 1900s but in the 21st century, it's kind of the thing to be doing. Yeah, and this... I guess this is, you're right. This is not what people think of when they think of manufacturing, but this is really what it looks like now. It's a digital, energetic, young, exciting, innovative space. >> Very hip. And a lot of virtual reality, augmented reality. Okay, so this term IoT, you're accredited, you're the Wikipedia. Look up Kevin, you'll see that you're accredited with inventing, creating that term. Where did it come from? >> Oh! So, IoT is the Internet of Things. And back in 1990s, I was a Junior Manager at Proctor & Gamble, consumer goods company. And we were having trouble keeping some products on the shelves, in the store, and I had this idea of putting this new technology called RFID tags. Little microchips, into all Proctor products. Gamble makes like two billion products a year or something and putting it into all of them and connecting it to this other new thing called the internet, so we'd know where our stuff was. And, yeah the challenge I faced as a young executive with a crazy idea was how to explain that to senior management. And these were guys who, in those days, they didn't even do email. You send them an email, they'd like have their secretary print it out and then hand write a reply. It would come back to you in the internal mail. I'm really not kidding. And I want to put chips in everything. Well the good news was, about 1998, they'd heard of the internet, and they'd heard that the internet was a thing you were supposed to be doing. They didn't know what it was. So I literally retitled my PowerPoint presentation, which was previously called Smart Packaging, to find a way to get the word Internet in. And the way I did it was I wrote, Internet of Things. And I got my money and I founded a research center with Proctor & Gamble's money at MIT, just up the road here. And basically took the PowerPoint presentation with me, all over the world, to convince other people to get on board. And somehow, the name stuck. So that's the story. >> Yeah, it's fascinating. I remember back. I mean, RFID was a big deal. We've been through, you know-- I studied Mechanical Engineering. So manufacturing, you saw the promise of it, but like the internet, back in the 90s, it was like, "This seems really cool. "What are you going to do with it?" >> Exactly, and it kind of worked. Now it's everywhere. But, yeah, you're exactly right. >> When you think back to those times and where we are in IoT, which I think, most of us still say, we're still relatively early in IoT, industrial internet. What you hear when people talk about it, does it still harken back to some of the things you thought? What's different, what's the same? >> So some of the big picture stuff is very much the same, I think. We had this, the fundamental idea behind the MIT research, behind the Internet of Things was, get computers to gather the relevant information. If we can do that, now we have this whole, powerful new paradigm in computing. Coz it's not about keyboards anymore, and in places like manufacturing, I mean Proctor & Gamble is a manufacturing company, they make things and they sell them. The problem in manufacturing is keyboards just don't scale as an information capture technology. You can't sit in a warehouse and type everything you have. And something goes out the door and type it again. And so, you know, in the 90s, barcodes came and then we realized that we could do much better. And that was the Internet of Things. So that big picture, wouldn't it be great if we knew wherever things was, automatically? That's come true and at times, a million, right? Some of the technologies that are doing it are very unexpected. Like in the 1990s, we were very excited about RFID, partly because vision technology, you know, cameras connected to computers, was not working at all. It looked very unpromising, with people been trying for decades to do machine vision. And it didn't work. And now it does, and so a lot of things, we thought we needed RFID for, we can now do with vision, as an example. Now, the reason vision works, by the way, is an interesting one, and I think is important for the future of Internet of Things, vision works because suddenly we had digital cameras connected to networks, mainly in smartphones, that we're enable to create this vast dataset, that could then be used to train their algorithms, right? So what is was, I've scanned in a 100 images in my lab at MIT and I'm trying to write an algorithm, machine vision was very hard to do. When you've got hundreds of, millions of images available to you easily because phones and digital cameras are uploading all the time, then suddenly you can make the software sing and dance. So, a lot of the analytical stuff we've already seen in machine vision, we'll start to see in manufacturing, supply chain, for example, as the data accumulates. >> If you go back to that time, when you were doing that PowerPoint, which was probably less than a megabyte, when you saved it, did you have any inkling of the data explosion and were you even able to envision how data models would change to accommodate, did you realize at the time that the data model, the data pipeline, the ability to store all this distributed data would have to change? Were you not thinking that way? >> It's interesting because I was the craziest guy in the room. When I came to internet bandwidth and storage ability, I was thinking in, maybe I was thinking in gigabytes, when everyone else was thinking in kilobytes, right? But I was wrong. I wasn't too crazy, I was not crazy enough. I wouldn't, quick to quote, quite go so far as to call it a regret, but my lesson for life, the next generation of innovators coming up, is you actually can't let, kind of, the average opinion in the room limit how extreme your views are. Because if it seems to make sense to you, that's all that matters, right? So, I didn't envision it, is the answer to your question, even though, I was envisioning stuff, that seemed crazy to a lot of other people. I wasn't the only crazy one, but I was one of the few. And so, we underestimated, even in our wildest dreams, we underestimated the bandwidth and memory innovation, and so we've seen in the last 25 years. >> And, I don't know. Stu, you're a technologist, I'm not, but based on what you see today, do you feel like, the technology infrastructure is there to support these great visions, or do we have to completely add quantum computing or blockchain? Are we at the doorstep, or are we decades away? >> Oh, were at the doorstep. I mean, I think the interesting thing is, a lot of Internet of Things stuff, in particular, is invisible for number of reasons, right? It's invisible because, you know, the sensors and chips are embedded in things and you don't see them, that's one. I mean, there is a billion more RFID tags made in the world, than smartphones every year. But you don't see them. You see the smartphone, someone's always looking at their smartphone. So you don't realize that's there. So that's one reason, but, I mean, the other reason is, the Internet of Things is happening places and in companies that don't have open doors and windows, they're not on the high street, right? They are, it's warehouses, it's factories, it's behind the scenes. These companies, they have no reason to talk about what they are doing because it's a trade secret or it's you know, just not something people want to write about or read about, right? So, I just gave a talk here, and one of the examples I gave was a company who'd, Heidelberger. Heidelberger makes 60% of the offset printing presses in the world. They're one of the first Internet of Things pioneers. Most people haven't heard of them, most people don't see offset printers everyday. So the hundreds of sensors they have in their hundreds of printing presses, completely invisible to most of us, right? So, it's definitely here, now. You know, will the infrastructure continue to improve? Yes. Will we see things that are unimaginable today, 20 years from today? Yes. But I don't see any massive limitations now in what the Internet of Things can become. >> We just have a quick question, your use case for that offset printing, is it predictive maintenance, or is it optimization (crosstalk). >> It is initially like, it was in 1990s, when the customer calls and says, "My printing press isn't working, help", instead of sending the guide and look at the diagnostics, have the diagnostics get sent to the guide, that was the first thing, but then gradually, that evolves to realtime monitoring, predictive maintenance, your machine seems to be less efficient than the average of all the machines. May be we can help you optimize. Now that's the other thing about all Internet of Things applications. You start with one sensor telling you one thing for one reason, and it works, you add two, and you find four things you can do and you add three, and you find nine things you can do, and the next thing you know, you're an Internet of Things company. You never meant to be. But yeah, that's how it goes. It's a little bit like viral or addictive. >> Well, it's interesting to see the reemergence, new ascendancy of PTC. I mean, heres a company in 2003, who was, you know, bouncing along the ocean's floor, and then the confluence of all this trends, some acquisitions and all of a sudden, they're like, the hot new kid on the block. >> Some of that's smart management, by the way. >> Yeah, no doubt. >> And, I don't work for PTC but navigating the change is important and I want to say, all of the other things I just talked about in my talk, but, you know, we think about these tools that companies like PTC make as design tools. But they're very quickly transitioning to mass production tools, right? So it used be, you imagined a thing on your screen and you made a blueprint of it. Somebody made it in the shop. And then it was, you didn't make it in a shop, you had a 3D printer. And you could make a little model of it and show management. Everyone was very excited about that. Well, you know, what's happening now, what will happen more is that design on the screen will be plugged right in to the production line and you push a button and you make a million. Or your customer will go to a website, tweak it a little bit, make it a different color or different shape or something, and you'll make one, on your production line that makes a million. So, there's this seamless transition happening from imagining things using software, to actually manufacturing them using software, which is very much the core of what Internet of Things is about and it's a really exciting part of the current wave of the industrial revolution. >> Yeah, so Kevin, you wrote a book which follows some of those themes, I believe, it's How to Fly A Horse. I've read plenty of books where it talks about people think that innovation is, you know, some guy sitting under a tree, it hits him in the head and he does things. But we know that, first of all, almost everybody is building on you know, the shoulders of those before us. Talk a little bit about creativity, innovation. >> Okay. Sure. >> Your thoughts on that. >> So, I have an undergraduate degree in Scandinavian studies, okay? I studied Ibsen in 19th century Norwegian, at university. And then I went to Proctor & Gamble and I did marketing for color cosmetics. And then the next thing that happened to me was I'm at MIT, right? I'm an Executive Director of this prestigious lab at MIT. And I did this at the same time that the Harry Potter books were becoming popular, right? So I already felt like, oh my God! I've gone to wizard school but nobody realizes that I'm not a wizard. I was scared of getting found out, right? I didn't feel like a wizard because anything I managed to create was like the 1000th thing I did after 999 mistakes. You know, I was like banging my head against the wall. And I didn't know what I was doing. And occasionally, I got lucky, and I was like, oh they're going to figure out, that I'm not like them, right? I don't have the magic. And actually what happened to me at MIT over four years, I figured out nobody had the magic. There is no magic, right? There were those of us who believed this story about geniuses and magic, and there were other people who were just getting on with creating and the people at MIT were the second group. So, that was my revelation that I wasn't an imposter, I was doing things the way everybody I'd ever heard of, did them. And so, I did some startups and then I wanted to write a book, like kind of correcting the record, I guess. Because it's frustrating to me, like now, I'm called the inventor of the Internet of Things. I'm not the inventor of the Internet of Things. I wrote three words on a PowerPoint slide, I'm one of a hundred thousand people that all chipped away at this problem. And probably my chips were not as big as a lot of other people's, right? So, it was really important to me to talk about that, coz I meet so many people who want to create something, but if it doesn't happen instantly, or they don't have the brilliant idea in the shower, you know, they think they must be bad at it. And the reality is all creating is a series of steps. And as I was writing the book, I researched, you know, famous stories like Newton, and then less famous stories like the African slave kid who discovered how to farm vanilla, right? And found that everybody was doing it the same way, and in every discipline. It doesn't matter if it's Kandinsky painting a painting, or some scientist curing cancer. Everybody is struggling. They're struggling to be heard, they're struggling to be understood, they're struggling to figure out what to do next. But the ones who succeed, just keep going. I mean, and the title, How To Fly A Horse is because of the Wright brothers. Coz that's how they characterized the problem they were trying to solve and there are classic example of, I mean, literally, everybody else was jumping off mountains wit wings on their back, and dying, and the Wright brothers took this gradual, step by step approach, and they were the ones who solved the problem, how to fly. >> There was no money, and no resources, and Samuel Pierpont Langley gave up. >> Yeah, exactly. The Wright brothers were bicycle guys and they just figured out how to convert what they knew into something else. So that's how you create. I mean, we're surrounded by people who know how to do that. That's the story of How To Fly A Horse. >> So what do we make of, like a Steve Jobs. Is he an anomaly, or is he just surrounded by people who, was he just surrounded by people who knew how to create? >> I talk about Steve Jobs in the book, actually, and yeah, I think the interesting thing about Jobs is defining characteristic, as I see it. And yeah, I followed the story of Apple since I was a kid, one of the first news I ever saw was an Apple. Jobs was never satisfied. He always believed things could be made better. And he was laser focused on trying to make them better, sometimes to the detriment of the people around him, but that focus on making things better, enabled him, yes, to surround himself with people who were good at doing what they did, but also then driving them to achieve things. I mean, interesting about Apple now is, Apple are sadly becoming, kind of, just another computer company now, without somebody there, who is not-- I mean, he's stand up on stage and say I've made this great thing, but what was going on in his head often was, but I wish that curve was slightly different or I wish, on the next one, I'm going to fix this problem, right? And so the minute you get satisfied with, oh, we're making billions of dollars, everything's great, that's when your innovation starts to plummet, right? So that was, I think to me, Jobs was a classic example of an innovator, because he just kept going. He kept wanting to make things better. >> Persistence. Alright, we got to go. Thank you so much. >> Thank you guys. >> For coming on The Cube. >> Great to see you. >> Great to meet you, Kevin. Alright, keep it right there buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is The Cube. We're live from LiveWorx at Boston and we'll be right back.