What is IoT?From the Home to Industrial IoT

Maarten Ectors@mectors

What is IoT?

“The internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.” - Wikipedia

“The internet of things (IoT) is the new hype word of the year. IoT is about putting sensors into all devices around us. Connecting those devices to one another, the Internet and specifically the Cloud. Collecting the data from the sensors to take automatic and useful actions. What are these actions? Which devices are involved? How are they secured? What problems does IoT solve? And many more questions are still work in progress!” - Maarten Ectors

The Hype Word of the Year.

@mectors

What are the advantages of IoT?

• IoT for the home promises integrated solutions that save you energy, adapt your home to you, automate annoying tasks, entertain you better,...

• IoT for business will lower costs, provide new value added services, bring solutions faster, generate extra revenue, among many other things.

• IoT in your city will reduce congestion, waste, and all other types of costs. It will make cities more pleasant and sustainable for its inhabitants.

• IoT in the industry will be the fourth revolution, i.e. Industry 4.0. Due to complete automation, costs will be substantially reduced and new solutions can generate substantial new revenues in existing industries and even new industries.

For your home, business, city or industry?

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Why IoT now?

• Mobile phones have up to 14 sensors. They are produced in the billions. Result: Sensors have become cheap.

• Amazon has converted compute and storage into a commodity. We can now store and analyse lots of sensor data almost for free.

• Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have open sourced big data and artificial intelligence solutions so we can search all the data we want and find the needle in an IoT data tsunami haystack.

• Arduino has converted everybody in a hardware designer. Raspberry Pi has given us supercomputers the size of a credit card or smaller and ranging from $35 to as cheap as $5.

These and several more disruptive technologies now are interconnected and that is what is provoking the Internet of Things. It is a technology revolution trying to solve everybody’s home, business, city and industrial problems.

Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, AI, Open Hardware, etc. Revolutions Coming Together

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Can I wait?

• Kodak waited until its customers asked for digital cameras.• Nokia waited until its customers asked for touchscreen smartphones.• Intel did not think it was important to make their chips work on the iPhone.• Microsoft came late to the mobile operating system game.• Oracle’s CEO thought Cloud Computing was silly in 2008.• HP’s business is still focused mainly on printers, PCs and servers.

Digital disruption is able to disrupt the top innovators of Yesteryear. If you don’t want to be on this list, you need to understand IoT now!

Why waste time now on IoT?

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How does IoT work?

• Sensors collect data from the environment and from the devices they are embedded in, e.g. temperature, vibration, etc.

• Sensors generate too much data to all send to the Cloud. You want local systems to keep on working even if communication is interrupted. For this you need smart devices that talk to the sensors and can take local decisions, e.g. if the temperature is too low, switch on the heating.

• Sensors and smart devices can be in rural places or inside buildings. New IoT specific communication solutions have been developed specifically for those use cases. In other cases WiFi and mobile networks can be used. IoT devices are “very chatty”, i.e. they can tell you ten times a second the temperature, hence telecom operators and others are working on IoT optimised networks.

• The cloud is where all IoT data goes to be analysed and acted upon.

Sensors, smart devices, communication and cloud

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What are the top challenges for IoT?

• IoT offers a million solutions for few paying customer problems. Many customers have no idea why they would need a “Smart Fridge, Thermostat or Smoke Alarm”.

• Connecting billions of devices to one another and the Internet is a security risk. Any security flaw can mean devices can be controlled remotely by bad people or infected by viruses.

• Everybody thinks their IoT solution is better than the next. IoT currently has almost more standards than customers.

• The IoT trillion dollar question: Who is going to pay for what IoT solution and how is it going to be delivered?

Making money with IoT, security, standards, adoption, etc.

@mectors

What to do next?

• Learn about new technologies, new solutions, new business models, etc.• Start experimenting around new ways to solve existing or future

problems that are critical to lots of people.• Find a solution to a critical problem people want to pay for and scale up

your IoT business.

Need more help, advice, guidance, etc.? Follow me on LinkedIn and ask questions. This inspires me on what to blog about next. We are all still learning what IoT is. There are no stupid IoT questions...

Learn, experiment, scale up

@mectors