The Digit’all’ 20’s

Outbreak, Armageddon, 2012 and Hollywood’s list of “save the world” movies goes on! It seems that Hollywood has been preparing humanity for a disaster for years now (2020 is the 25th anniversary of Outbreak) and none of the plots seem as far-fetched now. As New Year 2020 approached, no one could have fathomed that the world in 2020 would essentially come to a complete halt! However, a silver lining in this story is the design of our electronic systems and the robust design of the Internet. This has been the backbone and the digital enabler of keeping the world moving during these times.

As the global economy shrinks into recession and world leaders explore ways of revival, enterprises are re-evaluating current spends and working on optimising these through digital transformations. The raison d’être for Digital Transformation can be summed up as optimising the per unit transaction cost . This is not difficult to comprehend for those with an economics background, where savings after meeting variable costs contributes to offsetting the fixed costs for the enterprise. In pure business terms, one can consider this as efforts to improve gross profit or gross margin.

Conceptually, the target areas for Digital Transformation are those which lie in the path of a transaction. Accelerating digital transformations across business flows in any transaction can potentially help optimise business, reduce spend and shorten the quote-to-cash cycle. These business flows typically are:

• Product Flow: This is the physical movement of good and services from producer to consumer, involving intermediaries
• Negotiation Flow: Comprises of the negotiation between producer, intermediaries and consumer to “strike the deal”
• Ownership Flow: This is the transfer of title, which can be as simple as making payment against an invoice or as complex as registering a vehicle or house
• Information Flow: Consists of information exchange between all parties pertinent to the transaction – product details, sales support, pricing etc.
• Promotion Flow: Persuasive communication targetted at the intermediaries or to the consumer
• Financial Flow: The payment to the producer, in cash or kind, for the product or services provided

These flows are generic and this analysis can be applied to enterprise, non-profit and government. However, not all flows can be digitally transformed for all businesses. For example, in certain services, like hair-dressers, masseurs, physio-therapists, unless robots take over the job, the product flow may not be ready for transformation.

So where and how does an organization digitally transform its transactions? The approach is to automate what is currently done through a manual process, shorten processes, reduce toil (repetitive work), and accelerate innovation. In simple terms, take what you have and find ways to make it “better, faster, cheaper”!!! While, there is no “one size fits all” blueprint, technology adaptation across these flows has the potential to disrupt and/or transform. The key enabling technologies for transformation in this decade are:

• Big Data and Advanced Analytics
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Mobile technologies
• Virtual / Augmented Reality
• 3D Printing
• Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
• Internet of Things
• Blockchain
• Robotics

A map view of these technologies in their applicable flows are depicted below.

Big Data and Advanced Analytics

With a large amount of data collected through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Contact centers and e-Commerce storefronts, Big Data and Advanced Analytics are being used to provide actionable insights into the consumer buying behaviour, product design and optimisations in delivery and retail. The models being built, tested and used by big businesses will eventually be productised for medium and small businesses to adopt.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

In conjunction with other technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models are being developed. These have the capability to power a variety of tools that can be used across the different flows. For example, a tool to help a salesperson determine the interest level of a prospect and provide the right incentive to help close a transaction faster (negotiation flow) or another using computer vision to evaluate proof of purchase (and ownership) to determine service entitlements (information flow).

Mobile Technologies

Mobile technologies has been at the forefront of all Digital Transformation stories. The global adoption of mobile is well understood. The transformation in this field has largely been through the deployment of Apps for individual brands and businesses. However, the next wave is also well in progress. The now forgotten BlackBerry mobile from Research In Motion (Blackberry Inc) was used in Indonesia for transacting a huge number of local services. A similar model is followed by WeChat in China and KakaoTalk in South Korea. The recent Facebook tie up with Reliance Jio for promoting Whatsapp in India is another example of this strategy being implemented. Incorporating such models and including a larger population will drive the benefits of the network effect, and trigger a virtuous cycle.

Virtual / Augmented Reality

Video and computer games are familiar to all of us and with a world in lockdown, video conferencing has become a new normal. Here in Singapore, the phase 1 easing has allowed realtors to show tenants and buyers, property, through virtual means. As social distancing becomes the norm globally, Virtual / Augmented reality solutions will be used along with other technologies – mobile, video games (for example Second Life). Musical concerts have been performed in the past using holograms and perhaps a number of service industries –  entertainment, education, realty, heavy engineering (Product flow) will digitally transform using these technologies.

3D Printing

3D printing has come some way and today can print using different materials – plastics, metals and even wood. With the world changing its consumption habits to a do-it-yourself (DIY) model, manufacturing of products or their components may well be within the consumers’ own homes or in a larger scale neighbourhood “3D builder” farm. Ikea (Global), PepperFry (India), HarveyNorman (Asia) may offer 3D diagrams and the user construct the parts at or near home and DIY assemble it. This impacts product flow shifting the manufacturing away from a central location, removing the need for long distance transportation and changing the information flow.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

As more transactions move online, the opportunity for a salesperson to provide information reduces. Chatbots integrated with web-sites and with the mobile strategy provide an opportunity to integrate into the information flow and help provide  necessary details and incentives to convert the view. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants have been around for a few years now and they are getting smarter by leveraging other technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Analytics and Mobile.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is as vast, if not larger, than the Internet itself. It has the promise to encompass every device owned by every person and more. IoT can generate and consume much of the information within its own realm. A popular example is the refrigerator communicating to the owner about the lack of milk and building out a shopping list. I personally would like my coffee machine to order the grinds and capsules. Other aspects of IoT would be to monitor performance of home appliances and order replacements and repairs (Information flow). Yet other aspects of IoT would include the ability to determine the condition of products from farm to fridge and reduce  wastage.

Blockchain

Blockchain’s popularity soared with BitCoin and other digital coins. As it has matured,  Blockchain is expanding to provide immutable, secure and open transactions in the business world. It has been adopted in supply chains. Going forward, adoption of Blockchain in the consumer side of business can drive improvements in the product, negotiation, ownership and payment flows. Blockchain could hold every component of every product sold to a consumer and this information can be used effectively for speedier up-sell / upgrades, recalls and replacements. The negotiation and ownership flows can be transformed through the use of smart contracts which execute the terms of the trade. Payment flows can also rely on these smart contracts.

Robotics

Finally robotics is another large topic. Robots have many different shapes and forms. They can be wheeled, legged or flying (drone). Today this is an experimental field, and it is a matter of time before they become mainstream. Their purpose can range from warehouse robots, manufacturing robots, service robots and even last mile delivery robots. Our daily consumption of grocery, food, medicines come from supermarkets and restaurants near to our places of residence or work. If product manufacturing were to move to neighbourhood builder farms (see 3D Printing above), this would add to the list of delivery requirements for robots to fulfil.

These technologies are not the only ones, and enterprises across the world are at different stages of digitalisation. Some are in early stages of their journey and are adopting common-of-the-shelf (COTS) systems while moving away from in-house application for their basic systems of engagements and of record. Others are at advanced implementations and adapting these. The common disruptor in all of this is of Cloud Computing, which is providing the new entrants the ability to leapfrog into the next generation of solutions.

Digital transformation also implies a potential to change business models. Any conversation on the topic is this incomplete without at least a mention on new business models. Digitalisation of the business flows, are transformative. However, startups have always charted their own ways to define disruptive models favouring exponential growth. Some or all of these models could be applied at various stages of the flows and/or technology strategies presented. These models include (and are probably the topic of a later blog):

1. The Crowd Economy: Leverage crowd sourcing and crowd funding and receive “stuff” on demand
2. The free / data driven economy: Platform driven bait and hook or provide free access to a cool service (ie. Facebook), provide your personal details and receive goods and services
3. The Smartness economy: Add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to old world tools
4. Closed loop economies: Offer waste free systems covering cradle-to-cradle services
5. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs): Organisations with no employees or management and non-stop production
6. Multi-world models: Business model revolving around delivering services through Augmented reality or Virtual reality
7. Transformation Economy: Pay to have your life transformed by the experience. Starbucks provides you a “third place” which is not office and not home and facilitates creativity and productivity.

In this blog, I have attempted to provide a perspective on Digital Transformation. It is must also be stated that this transformation will not occur overnight. For the transformation to be successful, it will also need to be inclusive and connect those members of society, who are not current participants in the digital era. As enterprises adopt some or all of these, I expect it will take us through this decade of the “20’s”.

Building Versa – Lessons in AI & Robotics

With a locked up world in 2020, I recently picked up a book, to get me through the long Easter Weekend. Interestingly, the book titled “Rebooting AI – Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust” by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis [ISBN 978-1-5247-4825-8] describes what would make AI useful and also describes the state-of-the-art for it. The book triggered me to write this blog on my own experience with AI from back in 2015.

My friends Sudhee, Meera, Suku and I participated in a global IBM competition for uses of Cognitive and AI. We decided to build a technology demonstrator using the IBM Watson Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and integrate it with a Robotics chassis. We fondly called the robot  – Versa! We won the challenge and here’s the back story of how we built Versa and our experiences in this process. The challenge required us to not only create the system but also submit several video submissions. A video of Versa navigating the maze is reproduced below. Full disclaimer, the video is sped up since the on-board processing as well as the communication to and from the Cloud based APIs took “some” time!

Versa was designed as a demonstration of cognitive capabilities used from IBM Watson and integrated using software with off-the-shelf computing components like Raspberry PI, BeagleBone Black and Arduino. These components were integrated with hardware components like a robotic chassis mounted with a camera and microphones to be able to see directions and hear commands. The chassis was also connected with on-board ultrasonic detectors to avoid collisions.

Our objective was that Versa should be able to “read” signs and “hear” commands to navigate through a maze. The ability to read signs required us to work with the Opensource Computer Vision library – OpenCV. Hearing required us to work with the ALSA Linux Library and Pyaudio.

We worked on the computer vision and while Sudhee made it seem easier that it was, he did have to work through several challenges. Firstly, the orientation!!! Now, as humans, we can see thing from many different angles and our personal super-computer in our heads can straight away make sense of what we are seeing. For a robot, this was incredibly hard. In the test scenario, Versa would end up in different positions and the optical recognition just wouldn’t work. To compensate for this, code was written to physically direct the robot to move a “bit forward” or a “bit backwards” so as to be able to properly orient the camera.

Secondly, lighting!!! Our eyes can adapt to  varying lighting scenarios. You got it, doing it with a machine, incredibly hard!!! Depending on the lighting, the reliable detection of  image boundaries would throw the entire system off. We put a LED torch to improve this.

For anyone who’s spoken with Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Talk, you might understand some of the challenges I describe for the hearing. Firstly, microphones can pick up a lot of noise. They can pick up the lowest of sounds, which while you may not hear, it is definitely heard by the computer! Secondly, just like the light, unless the microphone is close or you have specialised electronics to really amplify many times over and filter out the noise, you’re going to basically have to keep the mic next to your mouth. Anyone remember instances of when the person at the other end of a telephone conversation says “I can’t hear you, speak loudly”?

On the cognitive / AI front, the behaviour of the speech to text engine depends on intonation, accent, speech speed and of course noise. We worked on this and quickly realised that we needed to buy (not build) better audio electronics. We changed the audio processing from cheap USB sound boards to a Creative SoundBlaster USB sound board. That changed the performance immensely from a noise point of view. But distance from mic, and other human speech qualities still impacted the system. Here are two snippets of my kids speaking to illustrate the difference.

Girl Speech

Boy Speech

Switching from the tech story! The fun part of doing this was going through the overall process, while we definitely enjoyed getting our hands dirty building it. We had to submit presentations and videos of our ideas. Our Macs and Apple’s iMovie and Keynote were used immensely. The video above was put together with these tools. I recall the shooting one of my  videos, which needed to be formal wear. The jacket, shirt and tie were put on over my shorts and the video was taken in a sit down pose. Talk about tricks of the trade, I personally would have gotten fully dressed!

This project went through several stages of evaluations over several months. We worked through our family obligations, business trips and work projects to get this done. And looking at today when the world is leveraging technology to keep business going, what we managed for this project five years back was truly pioneering. During the middle of the final evaluation, Sudhee and I had to travel urgently and Versa was left in Gurgaon, and my kids were left to care for their new Tech pet. The scenario as it played out, was that the evaluation had to be done by two judges based in US for Versa, with the team distributed in Shanghai, Singapore and other parts of India. We used technology to our advantage to ensure that everyone could connect to Versa, test it, update the software and demo it. It did seem a bit like managing Curiosity on Mars.

Finally as the project drew to a close in the summer of 2015, our efforts paid off and while on a vacation to Ireland, I received the news that we had won. Talk about the Luck of the Irish! Some of it seemed to have rubbed off! Our intentions were and still are to develop this into something more. The force is strong within us all, the call is awaited!

The Techie Gardener – An IoT experience

The summer of 2016, just before my move to Singapore, we decided to travel back in time! To Bhutan, a country where I spent a few of my wonder years. Planning for the shift to Singapore, we decided to let our domestic staff go on leave and shutdown our home for a couple of weeks. This was to be a test on how well the house would survive in a prolonged lack of occupancy. Easier said than done, since we had 83 potted plants that needed to be tended to in the Delhi heat!

My son (Arjun) and I came up with our summer project that year. He had been attending a robotics workshop, and for those of you who know me, tinkering is my first nature. My wife wanted to give the plants to the condominium gardener, but father and son had different ideas. We decided to built an automated plant watering system, which would ensure that the plants would get watered on a periodic basis. One of the design points we had was that no matter where, we should know the status of the system as well as be able to shut it down should there be a problem. Anticipating the lack of wireless connectivity in Bhutan, we needed some fail-safes as well!

We collected our components in right earnest and went to the market to buy stuff we didn’t have. Here’s what we ended up with – Arduino, Raspberry Pi, USB WiFi dongle, relay board for Arduino,  several meters of Reverse Osmosis (RO) water pipes, solenoid valve, power supply, manual valve for water supply connection. We also needed to use several solutions on the Cloud and Internet – an IBM Cloud and a Dynamic DNS account.

The solution was simple – the plants were lined up in two of our balconies in rows and the RO water pipes were stretched across them. At each plant, a tiny hole was drilled into the water pipe, adjusting the size of the hole to ensure adequate pressure was available till the last plant in the row. The pipes were connected to the apartment plumbing through an electrically operated (solenoid) valve. The valve was connected to the control equipment built using Arduino and Raspberry PI. 

The controller’s task was to turn on the water supply on a twelve (12) hour cycle for a maximum of five (5) minutes. It also maintained a log of when the plants were watered and had an web interface to enable us to check in or operate the system remotely. For the technically inclined, I’ll write up the configuration details for setting up the controller in another blog shortly – stay tuned!

So where did we get to with this in our two weeks of vacation? Day 1: We took a train from Delhi for Kolkata at the start of our vacation and at 5am, the next morning, (while in the train), I received a call from our friends. A whole lot of water was over-flowing from our apartment on the 7th floor (they lived right below on the 3rd floor). Immediate action – turn on phone, check status and reset the system – the failsafe we had designed was to keep the water turned off during power outages and system resets – PASSED! Water stopped and system was back to normal.

Day 5: We flew from Kolkata to Bhutan and explored across the country. There was intermittent Wifi for a week and we checked the logs, when we could, Found the system had been consistently running it’s 12 hour cycle. No urgent calls from anyone regarding water overflows – PASSED!

Day 12: Returned to Kolkata before returning to Delhi and our neighbours called again. This time, matter was more serious since the building maintenance had been called. Our neighbour had opened our apartment (we had left the keys behind) and was trying to figure out the contraption. They were asking if they should shut off the water mains to our apartment! Voila, out comes the phone, shutdown the water supply on the controller and the building maintenance reports back that the water is no longer over flowing. Apartment locked up and all is well – PASSED!

Day 14: We get back to Gurgaon and the proof of the pudding is in,  YES – 82 out of 83 plants survived the 2 weeks! – PASSED!!! Next steps – to measure the soil humidity, enhance the controller for nutrient supply and improve the failsafes. Hats off for Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Human Ingenuity! A memory to be cherished by father and son.

Growth, Prosperity and Well-Being

This post has been on my mind for several years now and at the outset let me clarify that any suggestion for a new mechanism for assessing human well-being or prosperity yet eludes me. However, a few week’s back, The Economist’s main story was on The 21st Century Economy – How to Measure Prosperity  and this perhaps served as a provocative start for this post. Since then, Brexit has happened along with several terrorist attacks and   this blog perhaps may find more meaning now.

The Economist article states that GDP is perhaps not the right measure of economic growth and though GDP is increasing on its own, living standards are stuck for people across the world. The very fact that GDP is now referred to, in the article, as the lodestar for setting taxation policies, fix unemployment and manage inflation also suggests that GDP is perhaps not the measure of peoples’ well-being. However, the article does conclude that in the absence of anything to replace this yardstick, better methods of collecting and analysing economic data will perhaps provide a better picture of well-being and prosperity and help make policies more meaningful.

The following video by Dambisa Moyo talks about how economic growth has stagnated and needs stimulus, but with an ideological change. What then is this ideological change?

And, the following video by the Prime Minister of Bhutan shows that Bhutan has more to offer to the world by focusing its policies on Gross National Happiness over economic growth. Is this a viable ideological change?

In the recent weeks gone by, I have visited Bhutan, 30 years since I lived there as a child. People are happy and money didn’t seem to be an objective anywhere. Though the individual gratuities were taken with a smile and twinkle in the eye, there was none of the pain that sometimes goes with not receiving tips as expected!

So a bit on human motivation. Can the pursuit of monetary gains give way to the pursuit of happiness? Even if happiness is elusive and there is no single yardstick against which it can be measured? Money, serves in today’s world as a barometer for achievement, and an aspiration for people to strive towards. In a world without money, where basic needs as described by Maslow and in  Dambisa Moyo’s Ted talk (above) are met by the state, is akin to socialism. Not all humans ascribe to altruism, and without aspirations or the fear of not surviving, would probably fall into misdeeds – alcoholism, drugs et al, because as we all know an idle mind is a devil’s workshop. For those without [money], in many cases not having, simply means taking, as is the case of rampant electricity thefts in many parts of the developing world. This comes as a cost to the economy as a whole rather than just taxpayers as a subset, as the fallout of actions such as these have multiple impacts.

Further more, from a well-being perspective, at no time have people probably been so divided as now, when digitisation has been a great leveller and a great divider. The digital economy has driven down the costs of many transactions, thereby conserving wealth for most of its participants. But one cannot ignore those who do not yet participate in this. For them, access to the basics – clean water, sanitation, healthcare, shelter, livelihood, insurance and cheaper access to money itself is a daily struggle. Digital adoption rates across the world therefore is no longer a matter or luxury but a matter of urgency. Only, through an increased uptake of digital services, can the under-privileged gain the benefits of the digitised economy. And only, through this can the underlying data collection be reasonable to assess and assure of well-being and prosperity. Digitisation in many ways provides identity, history [credit] and connection. Even the most marginalised section of society, by being digital, gains access to technological advances, be it in the use of digital wallets, which allow them to receive intervention payments directly, or access to cheaper goods and services.

A case in point was the business driver for deploying broadband to rural homes in India. The individual driver for making a payment of nearly 110USD per annum was that discounted air tickets available at 6am for a limited period for a family of 6 to 8 would result in a saving greater than the cost of the broadband. It is also not surprising to see mobile users with multiple prepaid SIMs / numbers where depending on the offer of the day, a number is used for making out going calls, but a single number is maintained for receiving all incoming calls.

Capitalism by definition moves capital to where returns are higher. However, in the world today, capital needs to move to newer avenues of creating value. Components of Gross National Happiness – free education, free healthcare, perhaps or even conservation of natural resources are ideal goals for capital allocation. However, how does one assess the returns on this capital allocation? This too requires an ideological change. A change where value is ascribed to not only material goods and services, but perhaps the cost of poor education, ill-health, poor weather etc are also included as direct costs within each transaction or in a more positive light, the benefits of improved health, education and environment are factored in.

The state’s participation, whether left or right leaning, today is in terms of taxation and socially beneficial programs through subsidies or pay-backs. A policy framework consisting of a planned improvement of health, education and environment, will therefore provide inputs to costs for each transaction with the money being so collected channeled directly to programmes which improve these aspects of well-being. These programmes themselves can provide for livelihood at the grassroots level and improvements over time should reduce  the cost burden on transactions. India’s education and swacch bharat cess on all transactions are example of the collection side of the story.

The disbursal side of the story must be equally strong. Programmes for greening and for accountability should also be included within the purview of these disbursals, which may be state run programs or public private partnerships. And these programs should by design have a digital presence to ensure accountability and transparency. This will have the positive effect of reinforcing the virtuous cycle of providing livelihood, education and improving health and environment. After-all it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish to eat! And put simply, this is called productivity.

However, much of this is easier said than done, when more than 70% of the world’s population are in developing nations and striving to improve their quality of life. Governments’ and nations have their own priorities for spending and collections are made to satisfy these. Ms. Moyo and Mr. Tobgay are both right in their statements regarding “Ideological change” and “Development with values” as the guiding light for economic growth and well-being, for without these, change is likely to be forced upon everyone at very high costs.

Keeping Kids Safe Online

Last year, for our daughter’s 11^th birthday, I bought her an iPod Touch as she loves her music. Much to my wife’s chagrin, the Touch also allowed her to freely access the Internet, see videos on YouTube and pretty much leave everything uncensored. Now, I as a person believe in teaching a man to fish rather than dishing it out. So, the obvious discussion – RULES!!! Yes, we discussed RULES and then it was up to me to also enable the tech to enforce some of those. In this blog I reproduce these pointers to help other parents improve their kids’ online security.

Rule #1 – Lay down the Rules

So let’s start with the obvious, what is acceptable and what is not. My daughter who was 11 had an e-mail ID and my son (then 9) didn’t. Facebook is a complete no-no. Screen time includes all screens – TV, IPad, Laptop and IPod and is highly restricted on a daily basis with absolutely no carry-overs. Weekends have longer viewing times. Sites like YouTube are only allowed when an adult is around and preferably on the TV through AppleTV or ChromeCast.

Of course, it is extremely important that this be clear to everyone in the family. Adults need to know what the rules are so that these are not inadvertently skipped and children need to know them so that there are few or no arguments.

Rule #2 – Monitor usage

The first rule can hardly be implemented, if one doesn’t regularly monitor the usage. It doesn’t mean that you keep a diary, but yes, it certainly means, that you know when to say No or Enough! If 5 minutes of an edutainment program is left, it is probably ok to let the child finish viewing it. Elders use your judgment!

Rule #3 – Control Access

Most mail sites will not let you create an ID till the child is at least 13 years of age. However, the need to have one at an earlier age is sometimes genuine. The mechanism to enable this on popular mail sites – provide an incorrect birth year and hey presto, the ID is created. The important thing here is however, to ensure that the control over the passwords is entirely with you and any optional sign-ups are disabled or not chosen. Tip: use your mobile phone and e-mail ID for recovery. This will ensure you can retrieve the passwords if you ever need to.

Rule #4 – No talking to strangers

Why should this be so alien. We enforce it in our daily lives so why not online. And nothing enforces this better than having a direct talk. Schools also contribute a lot these days and talk about cyber-security and as parents, we need to reinforce these.

Bottomline – rules matter and are sacrosanct!!! Switching off the wi-fi is not necessarily the best thing. Teaching, guiding and monitoring gives them life skills.

So, how do you enforce these on the kids’ toys? Recently as I sat with the kids and started them out on programming, I started to discuss the computing world as they use it and hey, there’s a lot of providers for them – Google for mail, Microsoft for Office and logins on their Windows machines, Apple for iTunes and iCloud / iMessenger (no Facebook should not feature here). An exploration of these providers showed how to enable certain features which helps improve the security posture.

Onward to the configurations settings!!!

The Apple devices

Clearly the most loved of them, the iPod, iPad, iPhone requires no introduction, but hey, most devices are left open for kids to use as they please. YouTube is simpler for the next generation than you’d think. Parents take heart, it’s not a completely impossible battle.

Let’s start! Apple has come a long way in the last few years in improving their protection for kids. You can create “Family Sharing” and “Add Family Members” and create kids accounts to ensure:

1. All purchases are authorized by an adult
2. There is only a single credit card that you provide and it is not accessible to the kids

On the devices, using the same Apple ID and enabling restrictions ensures compliance to your rules.

Creating the Apple ID

On your Apple device, go to iCloud and the “Family” options.

Click on “Add Family Member”, circled in the image above. It’ll give you to option of adding an existing Apple ID or creating a new one. For kids, please create a new one with the appropriate age settings. This will enable you to control their access and purchases. This ID needs to be updated in all the devices the child will use – iPad, iPhone, iPod, MacBook. If you create an Apple ID on the web-site, chances are you’ve set a false date for the birthdate and you cannot use this ID. If your kids are young, abandon that ID and create a new one through your Family sharing. The old ID can always be used once they are a little older.

Setting up the Devices

Well, you have your child’s Apple ID and have gone and updated that in their device(s). Here are the next steps to secure the devices.

Firstly, you will want to turn on restrictions. This ensures that you have control over a lot of features that are provided by default on any Apple Device. For example, in an earlier version of iOS, it allowed one to disable access to YouTube, but guess what? If you left Safari accessible, then you could go to YouTube by simply using Google in Safari and finding the video. It would simply play it and by-pass your YouTube setting.

The option to turn on Restrictions is under “Settings” and “General”. The screen shots show the options on an iPad and on an iPhone / iPod Touch.

 

Once you select “Restrictions”, to turn it on, it will ask for a passcode. Please use a passcode, which is not common for you and therefore likely to be difficult for your child to guess. Assuming you are like me, aging and getting a bit forgetful, you might want to write it down. But again, where you write it should not be easy for your child to access. Nope, I am not telling you where I wrote it!

 

Once, the Restrictions Passcodes are set, you have access to the Restrictions Settings themselves (as shown in the images). As you can see, “Safari” has been switched off. This should be done, because you want to install a more secure web browser for your kids. This is the K9 browser. It is free and available through the App Store. Please install this, after you’ve completed your Restrictions settings.

The “Camera” option is left on as this allows the children to use the camera on the device. Switch it off if you don’t want them to take pictures.

“Facetime” is something that I use with my children. However, feel free to switch it off if you have concerns on who they chat with.

“Siri & Dictation” on those devices that allow it have been left on.

“AirDrop” has been switched off so that sending files, images etc between friends who have Apple devices over BlueTooth is disabled. Prevents sending a lot of unwanted files if friends bring their devices over or your child takes her/his device across. 

“iTunes Store” has been left on as this enables them to download music, apps. “Apple Music Connect” has been left on for the same reason.

“Podcasts” are switched off as it is difficult to curate / monitor the stations they’d be tuning into.

“Installing Apps”, “Deleting Apps” have been left on since they need to anyway get permission before installing an App on their devices, even if it is for free.

“In-app Purchases” have been switched off as this is an easy way to bypass installation of unwanted apps or extensions to games etc.

The “Restrictions” settings also allow you to set the content that your children have access to as well has their privacy levels. 

The “Privacy” settings allow you to set up if they can share their location. With the new versions of iOS, it is a good idea to enable location services so that some of the apps they use can use these services and also if you use “Find Friends” (More on this in another Blog) or “Find my phone”, the device will share the location.

“BlueTooth”, “Twitter”, “Facebook” and “Advertising” are should be locked and the child should not have access to these. By default, these are unlocked and you will need to lock them.

To enable restrictions on the content they have access to, you’ll need to select “Ratings For” and select the geography (in this case India) for which you want to enable the settings.

For “Films”, selecting the acceptable movie rating for your child, will automatically disable all other rating considered above that level.

For “Music”, switch off the “EXPLICIT” switch to ensure that your child doesn’t have access to music with profanity etc. Note: Profanity is subjective and enabled by Apple’s rating systems. This may not always pass your approval. Always listen to what your child is listening to decide on its appropriateness. However, as a filter, this is a good setting as it will remove a large range of content.

To set the appropriateness of Apps your children can see and download, please set the “Apps” age. In this case, I’ve set it at 9+ for my then 9, now 10 year old son. This will simply ensure that they cannot download and install Apps (including Games) which are not appropriate for their age group.

Finally, the Browser!!! If you notice, in “Allowed Content”, I have not set any restrictions on the web sites. This is because, iOS simply cannot process the billions of websites out there for appropriateness. However, K9 (www.k9webprotection.com) as a browser can. Once, you’re done setting you restrictions, simply exit from the restrictions menu.

Visit the App Store on the device and download K9 Web Browser. Once installed, give it a spin. Here’s a picture of how it looks

As you can see, the browser uses a safe search and also blocks web sites using its vast database of websites categorized across seventy (70) different categories. This browser is available for iOS, Android, Mac OS, Windows. So go give it a spin!!!

The Microsoft Way

Microsoft has certainly not been replaced in your home. If you’re reading this, chances are that your child uses a laptop (most likely) or perhaps a desktop running Microsoft Windows. Well, first and foremost, getting the IDs sorted is important. Unlike Apple, Microsoft IDs can be made with almost any mail ID. So, if you’ve created an AppleID (earlier), you could use this to create your child’s Microsoft ID. Once the ID is created, you need to add this to your own Microsoft ID, by sending an invitation. You need to log in to accounts.live.com and go to the “Family” view as shown in the picture.

Here you can add members to your family. Select “Add a Child” and use the Microsoft ID you created for the Child. This will send an invitation to the Child to join the family. It is important that you log into the Child account and accept this invitation.

Thereafter, you are master commander and can make several adjustments to the security settings

If you continue to use a Microsoft Web Browser on your Child’s machine, then if you set up “Activity reporting” a list of sites that your child visited etc will be reported to you. You can switch off “InPrivate browsing” to ensure that your child is not switching off the history settings on the browser and visiting inappropriate sites.

However, I strongly recommend that you use K9 as a web browser (www.k9webprotection.com) and remove any of the Microsoft Browsers at this point.

The Microsoft settings also allow you to set up controls on “Screen time” which ensures that your child is not able to log into the device if the screen time is exceeded.

Managing Gmail

Managing Gmail or any other online mail service requires that you have an honest discussion with your child, if they already have an account. In case, you are creating the account, please set up the recovery email ID and the recovery phone numbers as your details. In either case, you should have the password to this mail account.

An example from Gmail (in the picture). Please select “Sign-in & Security” to correct the recovery mail IDs and phone numbers.

The Home Router and Access to the Internet

There are thousands of ways that the devices can connect to the Internet. Some of these are:

1. The Home Router
2. The Mobile network on the iPad / iPhone (with cellular support)
3. Mobile hotspots at Hotels, Malls, Retail shops, temporarily provided by friends and neighbours

The Home router is usually provided by your Internet Service Provider and in many cases it is locked and managed by them. In the eventuality that you bought yours on retail, chances are you’d be able to configure this for some security settings.

Considering there are thousands of models from which you might have chosen one, I am reproducing the security options available on one of the more popular home routers. Feel free to write to me for help on how to configure yours.

Most routers will have options for Parental Control, Filtering and Scheduling. You can configure some amount of security using these options.

Parental Settings will usually allow you to block websites. In case you have concerns about a site, which is not being blocked by K9 described earlier, you can simply add it in here and the router will block it. Note: This will block the site for everyone and not just your child or a specific machine.

Simply add the site and assign a schedule to it, for the site to be blocked between certain times and/or days.

So Parents, here’s to us to bring up the next generation wisely!!!