Realtime tech is changing the way we build online experiences

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Users don’t want to wait for updates anymore, they want information in realtime.

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App users were once content with static apps, single-user experiences where content changes only when a user requests a new page, clicks a button or refreshes the page. New information is presented only when a user requests it.

But times have changed. The average attention span of a human is 8 seconds, according to the National Center for Biotech Information. Users don’t want to wait for updates anymore; they want information in realtime. As a result, we’re seeing a major shift from static apps to realtime apps, web and mobile apps that mimic real life behaviors, pushing content and information “as it happens.”

The result is the birth of applications that have created industries that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible without this realtime functionality. Realtime technology is at the core of these apps and services; its lifeblood. And these apps are just a couple examples of the exponential growth of realtime web and mobile applications.

We’re seeing increased understanding of the benefits of realtime web tech so it’s not surprising that the number of apps using the technology is rapidly increasing. Common functionality includes simple data updates for notifications, dashboards (sports, finance, site analytics and anything that’s stat-heavy), realtime news and activity streams. Or more complex functionality for multi-user chat, collaborative applications, multiplayer games, interactive 2nd screen experiences, realtime mapping and GIS.”

– Phil Leggetter in 10 Realtime Web Technology Predictions for 2014

Taxi/Ridesharing Applications: A tight realtime loop

The days of standing out on the curb to hail a cab are dwindling. In fact, I’ve watched people let empty cabs drive right by them. Why would somebody do this? It’s the realtime user experience. Users prefer to hail, track, and pay for their fare seamlessly, all in one mobile app.

Realtime maps have become a staple feature of taxi and ridesharing applications. Users expect to be able to watch their car on a live updating map, giving them an ETA and assuring them that a car is really coming. But there are also other realtime features in these apps that are vital to the overall user experience. The apps are able to dispatch drivers in under a quarter of a second with the click of a button. They’re able to monitor and track fleets of vehicles, accurately dispatching vehicles without ever double booking or dropping rides. And most of all, they’re able to create one smooth ride experience, from hailing to payment, and everything in between.

This tight information loop, fast and efficient communication between themselves, the driver, and dispatch is the reason these ride sharing and taxi apps are so popular. And that tight information loop requires realtime technology to make it all possible.

Examples: Lyft, Sidecar, Uber, GetTaxi, Flywheel

Sports Score Applications: Updates as they happen

Static or slow sport applications can’t emulate the fast-paced action of actually viewing a live sporting event. To create this user experience, there’s needs to be information pushed to the user as quickly and often as possible. A simple clock and score board that updates every 10-20 seconds doesn’t have the real life feel and speed it needs to capture the attention of its users.

Realtime technology has changed that. Information is now pushed as it happens, to thousands of users simultaneously, anywhere in the world. These apps no longer just update the score and time, but rather are fully featured applications for out-of-stadium audience interaction. This includes collaborative features like polls and trivia, social feeds, live blogging, and live statistics. The app obviously won’t completely emulate the feeling of watching a live sporting event in the flesh, but it is changing the way that somebody out of stadium can experience a live sporting event entirely from their phone.

Examples: Manchester City FC Match Day Centre, ScoreCenter

Online marketplaces: Emulating a real life auction house

If you remember the early days of eBay, you probably pulled your hair out with the frustrations of the last 5 minutes of a heated bid war, repeatedly tapping ‘refresh’ to see if you were still the highest bidder. Then you refresh again, the auction is over, and you’ve been outbid. A static bidding application doesn’t mimic the excitement of a real life auction, and more importantly doesn’t enable users to bid rapidly with one another for an item.

“Behavioral emails are one of best ways to capitalize on in-app activity,” said Dane Lyons, Founder and CTO of Knowtify.io, the smart email engagement platform. “People really appreciate a brand that provides the information they really need when they need it.”

Today, online auction houses need to push high volumes of data as quickly as possible. They may have hundreds or even thousands of buyers watching and bidding on a single item. Data stream networks can power this, no matter where each bidder is located across the globe. This creates a reliable, low latency connection between all the bidders, the auctioneer, and auction application, ensuring a smooth and solid bidding platform.

Examples: TopHatter, Catawiki

Home Automation: Reliable and secure realtime signaling

When a user presses a button on their phone to turn on a light, they expect that light to turn on as if they’re flipping a switch. Or when you cross over a certain geographical location in your vehicle, you expect your garage door to open and your house’s heater to turn on.

It seems as though every home appliance these days has an IP address. Home automation solutions are becoming increasingly popular, and our houses are getting smarter and smarter. To provide and power a full home automation product, speed, reliability and especially security are paramount requirements.

This is where realtime device signaling comes into play, a key component of any home automation product. Device signaling requires a system that is bidirectional, where updates are sent through a dedicated channel that can trigger events (such as a light turning on). This signaling is needed on both the send side and the receive side. Though low latency is key for this signaling, security and reliability are just as important. When the security of your home rests in an home automation solution, encryption and additional security features need to be a core feature of the application. This ensures that unauthorized users can’t access the home automation application.

When you lock the door from your smartphone, you want that door to lock every time, and you definitely don’t want somebody else to be able to unlock it.

Examples: Revolv, Insteon

These are just a couple different types of web and mobile apps that reflect the exponential growth and reliance of realtime technology. We want information as it happens. And realtime technology delivers that.

Interested in learning more? Be sure to browse through a number of PubNub’s latest blog posts, as well as surf through our archive on the company’s realtime network here.

Securing the Internet of Streams

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The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion.

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The relentless flow of new product introductions keeps fueling the gargantuan estimates of billions of connected communicating computing devices which is projected to imminently make the Internet of Things ubiquitous within every facet of our lives. The IoT has been portrayed as the key enabler of a smarter world with compelling use cases that cut across a wide array of both personal and industrial ecosystems.

A great description is that the IoT is the global nervous system. This could be a pun, as IoT is increasingly producing troubling headlines. Stories abound, detailing security breaches that sound as if they were taken from a sci-fi movie, from hacked security cameras to a spamming refrigerator.

Figure 1 (Source: re-workblog.tumblr.com)

The explosive growth of the IoT coincides with an alarming increase in reported rates of identity theft and hacker attacks on everyday gadgets and appliances. Security researchers have easily established the feasibility of attacks against TVs, cars, security cameras, and medical equipment. There is much more than stolen money on the line if these types of attacks are carried out. The evidence demonstrates that existing security mechanisms are insufficient or ill-suited to address the risks inherent with the ubiquitous deployment of the IoT.

The need for a new original approach

The traditional approach to security, applied to both consumer and business domains, is one of separation – preventing those who are considered bad actors from accessing devices and networks. However, the dynamic topology of the network environments in which IoT applications are deployed largely invalidates the separation approach, making it both impractical and overly rigid. For example, with BYOD (bring-your-own-device), enterprises struggle to apply traditional security schemes to devices that may have been compromised while outside the perimeter firewall.

Many IoT devices self-configure and run autonomously. User interaction is limited to the devices’ operations, and there are no means to change security parameters. These devices rely on the manufacturer to implement security, both in the hardware and the software.

Moreover, manufacturers have to consider the broader ecosystem, not just their own products. For example, recent research has revealed inherent security flaws in USB memory stick controller hardware and firmware. Users must be concerned not only about the safety of the data on the memory stick, but if the memory stick controller itself has somehow been compromised.

To thwart similar issues, IoT device vendors are rushing to upgrade their product portfolios to low-power, high-performance microcontrollers that include firmware upgrade and data encryption mechanisms.

Figure 2 (Source: Atmel’s White Paper: Integrating the Internet of Things)

In the hyper-connected world of IoT, security breaches will gravitate towards the weakest link in the chain. It will become very hard to maintain the confidence that any particular device, user, application or service maintains its integrity; instead, the assumption will be that things will occasionally break for a variety of reasons, over which there is little control and no method for fixing. As a result, IoT will force the adoption of new concepts for the establishment of trust.

A smarter network combined

In the loosely coupled world of IoT, security issues are driving a need for greater collaboration among the vendors participating in the ecosystem, recognizing their respective core competencies. Hardware vendors make devices smarter. Software developers make applications and services smarter. The connective tissue, the global Internet with its myriad of communication transports and protocols, is tasked with carrying the data that powers IoT. This begs the question – can the network be made an enabler of IoT security by becoming smarter in its own right?

Context is essential for identifying and handling security threats and is best understood at the application level, where the intent of information is processed. This points towards a higher-level communication framework for IoT – the Internet of Data Streams. This framework enables apps and services to view things as consumers and producers of data. It allows for descriptive representations of devices’ operational status and real-time detection of their presence or absence.

Elevating the functional value of the Internet, from a medium of communication to a network of data streams for IoT, would be highly beneficial to ease collaboration among the IoT ecosystem participants. The smarter network can provide apps and services with the ability to implement logic that detects things that break or misbehave, flagging them as suspect while ensuring graceful and consistent operation using the redundant resources.

For example, a smarter network can detect that a connected sensor stopped functioning (e.g. due to a denial of power attack, possibly triggered through some obscure security loophole) and allow the apps that depend on the sensor to provide uninterrupted service to users. Additionally, a network of data streams can foster a global industry of security-as-a-service solutions, which can, as an example, send real-time security alerts to app administrators and device manufacturers.

The evolution of IoT is now at a point that it will require a comprehensively redesigned approach to security threats in order to ensure its continuous growth and expansion. Addressing the surfaced issues from an ecosystem standpoint calls for apps, services and “things” to explicitly handle communication via a smarter data network, which has the promise of placing IoT in safer hands, courtesy of the Internet of Streams.