New words: The "Application-specific IOT" and "Industry-specific IOT"

As I try to learn more about IOT for my own edumacation, I sometimes stumble upon online articles that impart critical knowledge that I cant help but share. This, below, is one of them.

I am linking to an interesting article about the difference between The "Application-specific IOT"  e.g. wearables, the type of IOT that the majority of Americans know and are excited about and "Industry-specific IOT", which is something else that companies within the same industry will pursue.

Quoting the article:

How will IoT fans, pundits and especially company CEOs betting their company business on IoT explain the disparity between the vision and the reality? We are already witnessing the introduction of new “classes” of IoT such as the “industrial IoT”. I expect that we will witness the emergence of “application-specific IoT” and “industry-specific IoT”, which, in so many ways, will not be that different from the many M2M technology implementations that address narrowly defined yet no less valuable business opportunities such as the solutions implemented, for example, by Axeda at Diebold, EMC, GE Healthcare, and Philips Healthcare.

To read more about the Wisdom of Devices and the evolution of the IoT go to Joe Barkai's discussion on General IoT vs. Application-Specific IoT

is Apple Watch making the Swiss nervous?

Italicized excerpt below from Switzerland vs. Apple Watch  Read more by clicking the link

Crowd source vs specialization

Apple has a secret weapon that Swiss watch manufacturers don’t: An incredibly talented community of developers who will take the platform that Apple gives them and design applications for it that will give the Apple Watch capabilities that Apple never even thought of. We saw this with the iPhone, we saw this with the iPad: Apps matter and Apple is smart enough to know that its developer community is one of its most valuable players.

Mass appeal vs elitism for the same price

Apple has another big weapon at its disposal: Millions of diehard fans who will gladly shell out cash to get the Apple Watch and who will evangelize it to others. Apple fanboys are easy to make fun of but their devotion to the brand is something that has been invaluable to Apple during its transformation from a has-been into the most valuable tech company in the world.

A city saved $95m a year in utilities cost through use of IOT

According to this article "The Internet of Everything", aka Internet of Things, IOT, is the next biggest awesomest thing that will save the world because even though it is only in its infancy and is barely better than a bunch of interconnected sensors it generated a city $37 million in light and $58 million savings in water expenses.

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To learn more about this city and read more about how IOT will save the world, read John Chamber's LinkedIn Blog

How is IOT going to grow?

How is IOT going to grow? at first I thought that it would grow just like the internet did and monetize just like ecommerce did. It's perfect for my own simplified understanding of the synergies among science, engineering and business.

However, there is an alternative view. Its not going to grow the same way because there is no standards body to guide its development.

Equally surprising is the quick quip that IOT is not about the thing or the enterprise, its about content. This line of thought still needs to be developed but its intriguing to me.



Quoting the article of Joe Barkai

We often think of the evolution of the World Wide Web as a model that the IoT will follow. In fact, there is an assumption that with the proliferation of instrumented devices and pervasive commutation, the adoption rate of the IoT will be much faster than that of the Internet. However, the WWW model fostered a culture of collaboration and open standards such as hypertext, HTML and common page browsers; the W3C consortium develops and maintains standards and connects developers and users.

The IOT industry does not seem to converge in this direction; almost the opposite. The space is inundated by numerous of communication standards and data protocols that aren’t interoperable, and companies offering as many one-off solutions to attempt to connect devices using incompatible communications methods and interfaces.

The business potential is not in the conduit, or the “plumbing” of the IoT; it is in the content. (bold emphasis mine)

Jahangir Mohammed, CEO of Jasper says that the Internet Of Things (IOT) is about service

According to Jasper's CEO the internet of things (IOT) is about service, not things. Satya Nadella, Microsoft's  CEO expressed a similar sentiment - that IOT is about things such as the OS and security systems.

He also implied that IOT will be as ubiquitous as ecommerce is now.

The Internet of Things (IoT) transforms the potential of a wide range of products by making them part of a wider service ecosystem, Jahangir Mohammed, CEO of Jasper said, noting: “the internet of things, it’s about service”

“Just about every business is going to become an Internet of Things business, it’s an inevitability. Because not only is the way people use things transformed, businesses are transformed. For the first time, businesses are continually connected to their customers, they know how customers are experiencing their products,” Mohammed said..


See more at Steve Costello's Blog

Microsoft's IOT strategy according to CEO Satya Nadella

Nadella echoed the argument mentioned earlier this month by Jasper's CEO that the internet of things is not just about the things themselves but rather it is more about the systems that make those things function. From this point of view, Microsoft has a big stake in how IOT develops. My initial thought on this news is in order for MS to have a say in IOT it has to put Windows head to head against other operating systems (iOS, Android) and other security and login systems (G+, facebook, Oracle, Cisco, etc)

It is not just about tablets, phones and PCs, but is also a platform that can "in fact run across a lot of places where general purpose compute is going to be important."

The attributes of Windows, its management and security, "are going to be more of a premium going forward," Nadella said

See more at Computer World

"The smart watch wars are still in their early days. Only time will tell how this story unfolds."

Chicago Booth professor comments on the below tweetmaps of Apple and Samsung smart watches:

"The Apple Watch tweets are focused largely on the attributes of the product– design, functionality, technology– and some negatives: accidents, warnings, etc. <snip> On the other hand, Samsung’s messages appear to dwell less on attributes. <snip> There is a lot of attention paid to its competitor, Apple, and its products. This asymmetry between Apple and Samsung might have implications for how much each product needs to compete for consumer mindshare."

Apple Watch Tweets

Samsung Watch Tweets

- See more at Blog of Kilts Center at Chicago Booth

What exactly is IOT - Internet of Things?

It's hard to define something that is new and is changing very fast but this article from BizCatalyst360 by one of my LinkedIn contacts, Chuck Brooks, makes for a good primer on what this new industry is all about. I find its description of IOT captures both the essence and the potential of this nascent tech sector. The article is titled, IoT – The New Frontier of Technology Convergence, which inspired the name of this blog.

"the Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting any device to the internet, from home appliances to wearable technology such as watches, to cars. These days, if a device can be turned on, it most likely can be connected to the internet. Because of the IoT, objects to objects, people to people and objects to people can communicate quickly and efficiently."

The potential of IOT is huge 
Its not just about fitbits and losing a few pounds anymore. Its bigger than that.

All of a sudden, it feels like the 90s and in the early days of ecommerce again, when B2B, B2C, B2Etc are all just potential ways of connecting one entity to another. Mayhaps the terms O2O (objects to objects), P2P (people to people), and O2P (objects to people) would become mainstream as well?

The rest of the article deals with IOT's potential in the public sector, such as smart parking, HOV lanes, sensors on public transportation, real-time auto-notification of delays and all that good stuff, which I think further underlies the potential of this sector - the government WILL support its growth. It will support it just because it has the potential to make public services better for everyone.

According to Gartner, via Chuck's article, the market is huge: 26 billion networked IOT devices by 2020. Think about it. That is like when Steve Jobs unveiled iPhone. If this comes true, our lives will change. Ergo, businesses will change too - tons of real-time data will make social networking, cloud computing, big data and fiber networks even more important than they are now.