 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering LiveWorks 18, brought to you by PTC. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the LiveWorks show hosted by PTC, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Minerman, covering IoT, blockchain, AI, the edge, the cloud, the core, 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, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. So impressions of LiveWorks 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? I mean, you bring the sort of stayed manufacturing world together with this sort of technology world and gives you this interesting cocktail. What do you mean by that? The manufacturing world was stayed in the 1900s, but in the 21st century, it's kind of the thing to be doing. So 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 go to Wikipedia, look up Kevin, you'll see that you're accredited with inventing, creating that term. Where'd it come from? Oh, so IOT is the Internet of Things and back in the 1990s, I was a junior manager at Troctron Gamble, consumer goods company. And we were having trouble keeping some products on the shelves in the stores and I had this idea of putting this new technology called RFID tax, little microchips into all products. Product 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 would know where our stuff was. And the challenge I faced as a young executive with the crazy idea was how to explain that to senior management. These were guys who in those days, like they didn't even do email. You sent them an email, they'd like have their secretary printed out and they'd hand write their reply. It would come back to you in the internal mail. I'm really not kidding. And so, I would have 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 found it at a research center with Procter & 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 went through, you know, my background, I studied mechanical engineering, some 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. So I've just, you know, wanting to, you know, 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, the industrial Internet. What you hear when people talks about it, does it still hearken back to some of the things that you thought? What's different? What's the same? I mean, 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 their own information. If we can do that, we have this whole powerful new paradigm in computing. Because it's not about keyboards anymore. And in places like manufacturing, I mean, Prochran 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 where everything was automatically? That's come true 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 have 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 recent vision works, by the way, is an interesting one. And I think it's important for the future of the Internet of Things. Vision works because suddenly we had digital cameras connected to networks, mainly in smartphones, that were unable to create this vast data set that could then be used to train the algorithms, right? So when it was, I've scanned in 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 chains, for example, as the data accumulates. Did, 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 a company? 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? Or were you not thinking that way? So it's interesting because I was the craziest guy in the room when it came to internet bandwidth and storage ability and how, I mean, I was thinking in, maybe I was thinking in gigabytes when everyone else was thinking in kilobytes, right? That was kind of, but I was wrong, I wasn't too crazy, I was not crazy enough. So sort of, I would quite go so far as to call it a regret, but my lesson for 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 as the answer to your question, even though I was envisioning stuff that seemed crazy to a lot of other people. And 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 innovations that we've seen in the last 25 years. I don't know, Stu, you're a technologist, I'm not, but based on what you see today, you feel like the technology infrastructure is there to support these great visions, or do we have to completely out, quantum computing and blockchain, are we at the doorstep or are we decades away? Oh, we're at the doorstep. I mean, I think the interesting thing is, a lot of internet of things stuff in particular is invisible for a number of reasons, right? It's invisible because 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, right? You see the smartphones, everyone's always looking at the smartphone. So you don't realize that's there. So that's one reason. But the other reason is, the internet of things is happening in 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. It's companies that have no reason to talk about what they're doing because it's a trade secret or it's 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 called 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 every day. So the hundreds of sensors they have in their hundreds of printing presses are completely invisible to most of us, right? So it's definitely here now. 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. It's just curious, the use case for that offset printing is predictive maintenance or it's optimization. It was initially like, it was in the 1990s, like when the customer calls it says my printing process isn't working health, instead of sending the guy to look at the diagnostics, have the diagnostics get sent to the guy. That was the first thing. But then gradually that evolves to real-time monitoring predictive maintenance. Your machine seems to be less efficient than the average of all the machines. Maybe we can help you optimize. And 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're never meant to be. But that's how it goes. It's a little bit like viral or addictive. Well, it's interesting to see the re-emergence, the new ascendancy of PTC. Yeah. I mean, there's a company in 2003 was bouncing along the ocean's floor and then the confluence of all these trends, some acquisitions and all of a sudden they're like, the new kid in the hot, new kid in the hot. Some of that smart management, by the way. No doubt. And I don't work for PTC, but navigating the change is important. And I want to say one of the other things I just talked about in my talk, but is 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 to be, you imagined a thing on your screen and you made a blueprint of it and somebody made it in a 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 and what will happen more is that design on the screen will be plugged right into the production line and you'll push a button and you make a million. Or your customer will go to a website and tweak it a little bit, make it a different color or a 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 the Internet of Things is about and is 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 tray, it hits him in the head and he does things, but we know that, first of all, almost everybody is building on the shoulders of those before us. Talk a little bit about creativity, innovation, your thoughts on that. So, I mean, I was just like, I have an undergraduate degree in Scandinavian studies. I studied Ibsen in 19th century Norwegian at university. And then I went to Procter & Gamble and I made, 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 really 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 thousandth 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 like 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 are those of us who would like believe this story about geniuses and magic. And there are 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, but 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 like, 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 because 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, 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 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 that succeed just keep going. And the title, How to Fly a Horse, is because of the Wright brothers. Because that's how they characterized the problem they were trying to solve. They're a classic example of, I mean literally everybody else was jumping off mountains with wings on their back and dying. And the Wright brothers took this gradual step-by-step approach and they were the ones to solve the problem of how to fly. With no money and no resources and Samuel Piermont 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. And we're surrounded by people who know how to do that. But that's the story of How to Fly a Horse. So what do we make of Steve Jobs? Is he an anomaly? Or is he just surrounded by people who, was he just surrounded by people who know how to create? I talk about Steve Jobs in the book actually. And I think the interesting thing about Jobs is defining characteristic as I see it. And I follow the story of Apple since I was a kid. One of the first computers I ever saw was an Apple. Jobs was never satisfied. He always believed things have been made better. And he was laser focused on trying to make them better. Sometimes 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, the interesting about Apple now is Apple are sadly becoming kind of just another computer company now without somebody there who is not. He'd 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, the next one I'm going to fix this problem, right? And so the minute you get satisfied with always making billions of dollars, everything's great, that's when your innovation starts to plummet, right? So that was, to me Jobs was a classic example of an innovator because he just kept going. He kept wanting to make things better. Persistence. All right, we got to go. Thank you so much. Thank you guys, great to meet you Kevin. All right, keep it right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from LiveWorks in Boston. We'll be right back.