What’s happening in the world of IoT (notes from the IoT Solutions Congress)

October 21, 2015

Author: Into Tesler

In September 2015, Intetics attended the Internet of Things (IoT) Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The things we saw will transform the world as we know it – one day.

The IoT Solutions World Congress conference attracted 4,500 visitors and 90 companies from 53 countries. The program was packed with 120 top level executives from companies such as Microsoft, GE, Intel, IBM, Amazon and Vodafone, who shared their IoT insights and predictions.

WHAT WE LEARNED:

The whole new, revolutionary set of technologies is coming in the nearest future. Prepare for objects to “talk” to each other in the next 1-5 years.

Despite all the current R&D, the IoT industry does not yet exist. There are a lot of individual projects conducted by industry giants and myriads of startups but there are yet no main stream products, processes or standards. Everything is extremely chaotic at the moment.

When the industry does emerge, it is not going to be about B2C (despite the fact that everyone’s currently talking about smart cars, refrigerators, homes, cats, dogs…). IoT will be a completely industrial industry. B2B is 80% of the market. It’ll be most immediately realized with a network of sensors.

Majority of projects and applications are around data. The most popular scenario is to put various smart sensors on objects. “Smart” simply means that a sensor can not only measure something, but can transmit the measurements to a network. If the information transmitted is based on thresholds or internal logic, then it’s “double smart”. If it can process data “on-site” (see Intel Edison below) and transmit conclusions, then it would be “triple smart”. As a result, the network of sensors transmits “big data”. The data is processed and intended conclusions are derived – essentially the process of predictive and prescriptive analytics.

WHERE WILL IOT BE USED:

Predictive maintenance (cars, airplanes, machinery)

Urban management (aka smart cities)

Agriculture (every plant has a sensor, every cow has a dozen of sensors…)

Marketing and Sales (data from our smart phones and social media become “human sensors”, plus other wearables)

Manufacturing (a new wave of “smart” manufacturing technologies is coming)

FACTS, DETAILS AND EXAMPLES

By 2020, 90% of cars will be connected, human participation in driving will be reduced, and eventually eliminated. Tweet #IOTisComing

The father of IoT is Mark Weiser, who predicted an interconnected world in 1991 – before the Web was up!
Tweet #IOTdad

Intel open sourced its big data and hardware platform to help inventors along their journey towards the connected world. They call it Intel Edison.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

IoT will lead to new standards and platforms (APIs, data analysis) in the nearest future.

Practically all platforms are going to be open source as there is very little possibility to monopolize the IoT market by any, even the biggest, company.

Expect a new wave of productivity growth with overall improvement in quality of life (but, a lot of professions, like driver, are likely to die).

Images via IOT Solutions World Congress.