Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise
Things You Find on a Beach
Hey everybody. Thanks again for reading my blog. This investigation about the technology we use in our everyday lives is starting to get interesting. I know you’re as curious as I am to see where we go with this.
Saturday morning I rolled out of bed a little early. I grabbed a cup of coffee and a folding chair and took a long walk to Oak Street Beach. There was no use trying to grab the bus; it would surely be packed with other people headed for the Chicago Air and Water Show. Imagine an entire busload of people carrying folding chairs, each whacking two or three other people in the head every time they turned. There had to be like 25 concussions by the time the bus reached Oak Street.
Yep, better to walk.
When I reached my destination, my friends Kay and Russo were already there. Russo brought the cooler and Kay, the most sensible among us, brought the sunscreen. Our friend Charlotte hadn’t arrived yet. Russo said she’d also invited this strange guy we’d met at the Art Institute the other night, who claims to be a time-traveler from the 16th century. Russo has him pegged for a con man, I think he’s some kind of weird performance artist, and Kay, ever the sensible one, regarded him as irrelevant. Charlotte, however, was intrigued by the guy and featured him on her podcast. Regardless, I was mostly hoping the guy wouldn’t be too weird or annoying because I was looking forward to a relaxing day in the sun. But there we were at Oak Street Beach with every other kind of Chicago character imaginable, so clearly “weird and annoying” would be the order of the day.
Right on cue two guys wearing zebra-striped swim trunks set up camp right next to us. They immediately popped open their zebra-striped beach umbrella, whipped off their t-shirts, and cranked up the boom box. The “z-bros” then started their beach workout routine beginning with push-ups and sit-ups.
Then Kay astutely repositioned her chair to watch the show, and I’m not talking about the one over the water. “Hey,” I said, “What do those guys have that I don’t have?”
“Six-pack abs.”
“You’ve never seen my abs,” I protested. She merely dropped her sunglasses to the bridge of her nose and looked at me. Then with both of us at a loss for words the moment passed, and she returned her focus to the z-bros.
Impressed with their boom box, Russo went over to look at it. “Is this an internet boom box?”
“Yeah, Dude, check out the sound,” one of them said, dialing up the volume to what must have been eleven.
“That’s fabulous,” I shouted, “I’m thinking you’ll be able to hear it over the sonic booms of the jets.”
“Don’t sweat it,” his friend chimed in, “We’ll tune into the show announcer when the time comes.”
“No problem,” I replied, “I won’t be able to hear by that point anyway.”
Russo, still looking at the radio, turned it down a bit to ask a question. “So, you can get internet radio on here, as well as broadcast and satellite and podcasts and just about anything, right?”
“Yeah, Dude. I’m Brian by the way, and this is Todd.”
“I’m Tony,” I said, “This is Russo, and the one salivating over your abs is Kay.” Kay merely stuck her tongue out at me and went to retrieve a drink from the cooler.
“You got beer in there?” Brian asked.
“Nah,” Russo replied.
“That’s cool,” Todd said. “There’s a crap-load of extra cops on the beach today and they all have ZQ520’s now.”
“What’s a ZQ520?” I asked.
“Dude, a ZQ520 is an awesome mobile printer. If the cops catch you with beer, they’ll make you dump it out. Then they take your ID and check it against a database to see if you have warrants, and with the ZQ520, they can print out a ticket in seconds,” Brian said. “We programed the ZQ520. We work for Zebra Technologies.”
“Ah, that explains the swim trunks,” I said.
“We have company pride,” Brian replied.
“Well, they do grab your attention,” I said. “In fact, Kay’s been transfixed by them from the moment you showed up.”
“I hate you so much,” she said shaking her head.
Just then Charlotte showed up. “Sorry I’m late! Jack here?”
“Nope,” Russo said.
“He didn’t know to look for you guys. He’s probably trying to find me.”
“The show doesn’t start for another half hour. He’ll show up.” I said.
“Hey, I’m Todd.”
“And I’m Brian,” the z-bros said, introducing themselves.
“I’m Charlotte Warburton.”
“Water anyone?” Kay offered. “Brian? Todd?”
“Thanks, we have some,” Todd responded. “Have to stay hydrated.”
“For sure,” Brian said, “We were down here one time and this guy wasn’t drinking anything and it was like hotter than hell. So the guy has like a heatstroke or something, but he was wearing this thing.”
“Yeah.” Todd said, “It was one of those Fitbits that checks your heartrate, so he knew it immediately.”
“Someone called 911, and the EMTs were here in no time,” Brian added. “When they looked at his phone, they knew immediately how much exercise he was getting, and what his heart was doing. They gave him fluids and hooked him up to those monitors, and as they took him to the hospital, they’re uploading all of his info.”
“By the time he got there, the hospital already had everything it needed,” Todd added. “Isn’t technology awesome?”
“Awesome,” Russo agreed, “The Internet of Things is everywhere. Even on the beach we’re connected to everything. The boom box, our phones, our watches, those police printers, the radio and television trucks, all that technology on the planes, the security cameras, and on and on. It’s awesome.”
“You seen those drone light shows?” Todd asked. “There’s too much wind to do them in Chicago, but they can put up like 500 drones with these really bright color-changing LEDs and have them dance around and do a show. How cool is that? I mean 6 Blue Angels flying in unison at supersonic speed is awesome, but 500 perfectly synchronized drones run by a single operator is awesomer.”
“Awesomer?” Brian said, “Don’t be an idiot.”
“Yeah but think about it. Instead of lights,” Todd added, “those same drones could carry sensors for sound, heat, chemicals, magnetics, lights, or images, and connected to the internet they could do all kinds of stuff. Imagine, for example, that an invasive pest is like taking over farms. Drones equipped with heat sensors could detect and map the presence of those pests and localize the treatment area.”
“Awesome,” Brian added. “That’s why we program. We make those interconnected devices that collect up that data and make the world a beautiful place.”
As the conversation went on, I knew we had made some new friends, and soon we all settled in for the show. While Russo multi-tasked playing sudoku, the z-bros — unable to sit still — continued their beach workout, and Kay and I talked about old times, Charlotte fretted about the missing Jack.
Then, sometime between the AeroShell Aerobatic Team and the P-51 Mustang, a slow-moving helicopter with a picture of the Vitruvian Man on the side came into view. Dangling from the bottom of the copter was a man suspended from a da Vinci-style parachute! It was a massive pyramid style chute framed in wood and covered with what appeared to be canvas. After a day filled with death-defying loop-de-loops and bone-rattling supersonic jets, who would have thought a man hanging from a Renaissance parachute would be the scariest thing? Surely no one would try to float to earth in such a contraption, but indeed he did. The descent was remarkably smooth but fast, and as the saying goes, it’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end. Surely the impact with the water or the heavy-framed parachute landing on top of the man would spell disaster. Fortunately, at the last possible moment the man was able to swing himself clear of the chute and land feet-first into the water.
It was at that moment that Charlotte, in total shock, jumped from her seat yelling, “Jack!” And as a coast guard ship raced to the stuntman, Charlotte raced through the crowd.
I have no idea if that was really Jack attached to that parachute, but it was pretty cool. Kay was thrilled to see da Vinci’s parachute in action, and Russo was working out the physics of the thing in his head. We didn’t see Charlotte again that day, so I don’t know what happened to her.
When the show was over, we were all pretty tired, so we just picked up our stuff and went our separate ways. As I took the long walk home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Internet of Things, and it made me even more determined to learn what happens to all of that captured data.
In my next blog, I finally catch up to that data scientist, Rita Davies, and I do my best not to talk about time travel and dead people. If, however, you want to hear more about dead people and time travel, listen to Charlotte’s show on Apple Podcast. It’s quite compelling.
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Tony
Blogger Extraordinaire
DISCLAIMER: The Searching for Salaì podcast and the “Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise” blog series are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
[DESCRIPTION]
Tony finds that billions of smart devices plugged into the Internet of Things are transforming everyday objects, changing how we work and live in myriad ways.
[KEYWORDS]
SAP Leonardo podcast, Innovation, Digital Transformation, Intelligent Enterprise, Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, The Cloud, Design Thinking, The Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Intelligence, Digital Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Searching for Salaì, Cool Technology
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