*It's quite interesting for a good many reasons. BERG is like some roundabout cross-station between William Gibson and P. G. Wodehouse.
(...)
Q. "So you were saying that you think this Summer is a breakthrough moment in London for connected devices?
A. "I think so. From the consultancy and Little Printer being so public, we get to speak to a lot of companies. There are three areas that people need to figure out for connected devices: 1) tech, 2) design and 3) business. The technology is being figured out and it feels like there’s no massive innovation that needs to be done there. For the business model, people seem to have a clear idea of that.
"The thing that is really missing is the user experience. The thing that people can’t really guarantee is what should the products be? They’re sure there’s something there but they don’t know what it should be and they have no belief that they can make it. So I find this to be an interesting time.
"From the London startup perspective there’s more and more hardware development going on. So I would liken London’s hardware scene at the moment to what it was like four years ago with Silicon Roundabout then, which became Tech City when the government supported it. The government support ignited the city, whereas before it was a bunch of people who happened to be in the same area. The hardware scene is a bit like that: there’s people going around doing roughly the same thing, we’re all chatting on an adhoc basis, and people are making investments, but it hasn’t been ignited yet. There’s a few exceptions like the London Internet of Things meetup. But it feels like something’s tipping this Summer."
Q. "By the way, what do you think of the term "Internet of Things"?
"I don't like that term. That's why I say connected devices. I sort of regard the network as being like the next generation of electricity: it will end up hitting all products sooner or later. But we wont really think about them as being "networked products," in the way we don't think about things as "electrical products." Take a sewing machine: in the old days you had to stamp or pedal it, and then sewing machines became electrified and you just plugged them in. So now people don’t buy an electric sewing machine as a part of their collection of electrical goods — they just know they don’t need to pump their foot anymore. The product is slightly better. There will be a bunch of that with connected devices...."
