IoT: The Journey into the Future, One Week at a Time! (Part III)
Bharat Kapoor
Partner @ Kearney | Global Managing Director PERLabs | Product Strategist | Technology Investor
A lot has happened in the IoT world since the last post. Without further ado lets dive directly into what you care about!
1. Elephant will dance
In late March, IBM announced that it will invest $3 billion in IoT, which led to an interesting article by Janakiram (“Can The Elephant Dance To The IoT Tune?”). I was actually surprised that it took so long for IBM to make this announcement and why the tech world is so intrigued by IBM’s investments in IoT. In my opinion, apart from the volcanic hot activity in the IoT start-up space, there are several tech giants that are very well positioned to own the IoT space, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco to name a few among other. Technologies they have been developing for many years are finally expected to bear fruit.
2. IoT in action
I left GE out of the mix from the above list of firms because I wanted to share my experience - which as the saying goes “blew my socks away.” I had the privilege of touring a GE subsidiary called FirstBuild. (I will write about FirstBuild sometime in the future - it deserves its own post.) I saw, touched, and felt the IoT world with my own hands, which did not include a watch or a bulb. They have built an IoT refrigerator with two USB hubs, so any of you entrepreneurs who want to make the next Dash for the fridge to track your milk or meat, go ahead and let your creativity flow. If that was not enough, they also have what they call a Green Bean. This cute little interface allows you to IoT-ize your home appliances. They ran a hackthon last weekend with over 250 participants and 27 entries; there were some very interesting ideas, some of which will be in your home very soon. Interestingly, you don’t have to wait for some product to launch commercially—if you see something you like, contact the entrepreneurs and innovators; I'm sure they would be happy to build one for you whether it is the voice-activated fridge or proximity-driven night lights.
3. IoT goes green - literally
All us of feel the pain of leaving behind potted plants when we need to go away for a while. If we have nice neighbors, we pile on them to take care of the plants. Graduates of the National Institute of Design (NID) have developed an intelligent flower pot and an app that will help the plants water themselves. Greenopia, an IoT smart-gardening kit, consists of smart pots that can be monitored and, when needed, will release appropriate amounts of water. Sensors in the pot enable tracking of water and sunlight levels and soil conditions. This sounds like great toy, but consider the possibilities these devices open. With India and California suffering from extreme weather conditions, and water becoming a scarce resource, IoT could provide the ability to optimally manage resources needed for crops and fruits beyond the four walls of our homes.
4. And then there was a DASH toward Smart Dust
Amazon finally put IoT on the path toward Smart Dust. We expected the next stage of IoT and its adoption to be driven by Smart Dust—a bunch of very small connected devices that you could fire and forget. The beauty of these devices is that they don’t need to be charged - I doubt Amazon will ask you to ship it back once the internal battery discharges. Dash button seems to be a step in that direction. Jonathan Brill of Forbes states the button is just a dumb device with the smartphone becoming the receptacle for connecting these Smart Dust devices. Read an interesting commentary on smart vs. dumb IoT by Reuben Chaudhury.
Feel free to read my prior posts in this series at A.T. Keraney's Digital Business Forum
About the Author
I am a management consultant at A.T. Kearney, focusing on Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things. I am extremely passionate about the Industrial Internet and I believe it has the potential to usher in the next industrial revolution. I conduct "Predicting the Future through the Industrial Internet Lens" workshops at University of Chicago, Booth School of Business to help encourage the dialog on how Industrial Internet will impact our world—commerce, business models, social and cultural interactions. Be a part of the discussions on IIoT—join the LinkedIn group“Industrial Internet / Internet of Things - A Lens to Predicting the Future.”
Acknowledgement:
A big thank you to Siobhan Komnick for editorial support.
Staff Solution Architect at VMware by Broadcom - Edge Compute Stack (ECS) and private 5G network solutions
9 年Elephant would indeed dance, but that would be the last show of the IoT event. We are observing multiple T1s, and large number of T3/Starups investing into IoT. Considering the size of the market, life span of the technology, as well as landscape of varied players, it would be actions would be entirely greater than what we have seen during early cellular, VoIP, LTE, and SDN. But who is winning, the guy who has announced $3B, or the guy who has already built semi solutions, and created a potential of earning $3B in 2016-17....interesting battle ahead
Co-head AI & Data Monetization | Digital Transformation expert | C-Suite advisor
9 年While IoT is attracting a lot of investment from tech giants, I'm skeptical if Elephants can indeed dance
Global Product Leader in Retail Tech @ Walmart | Focus on international markets | ex-Amazon | Berkeley MBA
9 年Thanks for this exciting series, Bharat! When I read about Dash earlier in the news, I was thinking about it as a "Dumb Dust" approach to retrofit devices; Amazon has essentially reduced all the website/smartphone clicks on amazon.com down to a single-click order, which in my opinion is operations-smart, but not IoT-smart. Amazon can certainly be a key player though - it has 1) the marketplace to sell smart devices and complimentary products, 2) the cloud power to analyze big data, and 3) a wealth of knowledge about consumer behavior which can be shared with manufacturers to create solid use cases. Not to mention their investment in smartphones and tablets. The fridge innovation at FirstBuild - that seems to be the way to go for the first wave of creating IoT-ready devices. If all suitable devices come with a USB port hooked to the embedded software, anyone can come up with an IoT protocol-ready programmable (smart) "dongle" packed with standard sensors (gyroscope, light, heat, etc.) and/or just a WiFi transmitter. Device manufacturers can provide software for this dongle to turn it into an interface between the device and the IoT space. Essentially, this "dongle" becomes the cheap smart dust, keeping the devices IoT-ready for the next 3-5 years, or as long as they last. While IoT applications for consumer market is still an experiment, I believe IIoT is much closer to reality, with known challenges in manufacturing, and standards such as MTConnect already in use. IIoT could also be a bridge in major industries such as automotive, where this technology will not only be used at the industry level in making the car (smart factories), but also at consumer level to keep track of the car's health (OnStar++), or talk to the fridge and remind the driver about picking up milk on the way back from work.