A new market research study available from a British firm, Companies and Markets, predicts that by 2017 the global Internet of Things market will reach sales of $290 billion.
First, wow.
Second, I'm forced to ask again: If the "IoT" has such short-term promise (not to mention its long-term transformational impact on every aspect of our society and economy), why does the very term, let alone the examples that are already making it a reality, remain such a mystery in the U.S? I have yet to find an intelligent layman who's already familiar with the IoT before I explain it.
Just in case you're part of this vast majority of Americans, the Internet of Things refers to linking "things," such as smartphones, automotive computers and industrial sensors, primarily through the same Internet that we humans are linked through. Among other things, the IoT will allow Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication without the necessity of humans linking the machines. Experts predict that it will allow transformations such as making health care a true partnership between patient and doctor, radically reducing traffic congestion, and streamlining manufacturing and distribution.
As for why there's so little consciousness of the Internet of Things, I suspect a major factor is the absence of any sort of trade association or lobbying group to build awareness through a coordinated effort (there is a trade association called the IPSO Alliance, but its mission appears to be limited to advocating for devices that each have a distinctive Internet Protocol address, rather than, for example, lobbying for federal support). A lot of companies that are building IoT devices don't bother to label them that way -- they just do their own thing in isolation.
At any rate, whether there's widespread awareness of the IoT or not, it is coming: that report from Companies and Markets says that last year the market was worth $44 billion, and that it will have a compound annual growth rate of 30.1 percent from this year to 2017. The lion's share of the growth will come from the Asia Pacific region, largely because of massive support by the Chinese government.
The Internet of Things -- ready or not, it's going to transform our lives (and will have major privacy and security implications that deserve discussion now rather than later). Don't be surprised!
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We see the dog you are walking. Talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) is a lot like talking about light or air.
Smartphones? IoT. Hand held GPS device? IoT. Personal electronic medical device with built in wireless comms? IoT. Next-generation digital thermometer? IoT? Drones? IoT.
This piece shines a light on one of the primary challenges to people and organizations that have been trying to create value, careers, companies out of this thing called the Internet of Things. It is kind of like talking about light or air.
Meaningless without context. But, still, a fundamental concept to help understand human life.
Going forward, tens or hundreds of billions of unattended devices -- not smartphones -- but just about any object, environment or process that one cares about, could support a device with an internet connection and just the right amount of local processing, security and storage to send and receive data. Data about the object, its ambient environment or proximate process.
The possibilities are limitless. And that might be the problem.
With an Internet of Things, the canvas will be broader, the palette richer, and the tools of the trade
exponentially more powerful than anything we have done with smartphones.
The question is not, can we invent and deploy the new infrastructure and tools to build that internet of things, but rather, can we define the priorities, policies, and practices shaping its deployment that inspire the creation of more authentic value for more people.
What you are talking about are, in other words, networked devices. That's pretty dandy... if not for a trivial observation. 25 years ago, putting networking functionality into something came at a cost in the range of $100 for hardware, IP and R&D cost. Today, the same functionality, can be had for virtually free in products that won't sell without it (like a cell phone) and for no more than a couple of dollars in devices which just might (like a tv). So while having a networked printer back then was both special AND expensive, having a networked device today is neither.
And if you multiply the $280 billion from above with the real fractional cost of network access, you will find that back then it was big business, but today it is, at best, a big pain in the R&D department, because this stuff has to go into everything and work like a charm, but nobody wants to pay a premium for it. Not even a cent if they can avoid it.
And that's why nobody in the tech industry gets excited about these things... they don't represent opportunity but the price of being in business these days.
I nominate ZeroMQ. This is a brokerless (peer-to-peer) message queue that rides on TCP and supports all of the basic messaging patterns: request-reply, publish-subscribe, push-pull, and exclusive pair. I started using it at work because management wouldn't let us set up a RabbitMQ broker, and it was surprisingly easy to implement. Clean, simple, and fast. No centralized infrastructure.
They have been trying to do this right in the television industry for more than half a century. Insiders seem to agree that we still don't have a way to correctly assess viewership, despite all the effort. And then... if we did this "right"... what would be the upside over doing it wrong? An advertiser will pay pretty much the same (aka "their budget"), anyway, if they think they can get to you, even if the number of how many "you" there are, is wrong by a factor of five either way.