Is IoT needed?

Being in the IoT business, one of the most basic question that anyone can ask themselves before investing intellectual energy would be that Is there a need for IoT?

You can always expand the perimeter of your ignorance by saying, "we just have to build something that people want, then it would fly off the shelf". Answering the above question in such a manner would rob you of the opportunity of logically reasoning and getting to a conclusion yourself.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find a single blog post on the internet that was willing to explain "why we need IoT?". Everyone was just happily quoting sources like Cisco, NASSCOM, IBM, Google etc. on how many devices we could potentially see in the future. That's a forecast based on certain assumptions, what are those assumptions? Are they gonna hold the test of time?

The willingness to gain a complete understanding pushed me on a journey to examine, evaluate and look for fundamental reasons to support or dismiss answer to this question. Our journey shall begin by analysing basic human behaviour and we shall reason up from there.

Behaviour

Our generation is dependent on mass-produced items more than ever before, clothes, plastic items, consumer electronics etc. Humans are driven to always get more by investing less. Be it getting more mileage out of your car, or building lower-cost rockets so that space becomes more accessible. This human nature is visible in every vertical more than ever before. We are even training machines to learn on data and optimise resource consumption to increase throughput by using the same amount of resources.

Humans have a peculiar itch to optimise their consumption. They find it satisfying if they can do the same amount of work by using lesser resources.

Optimized consumption triggers a whole host of benefits like availability of resources to other people, getting more bang for the buck, and ensuring a sustainable usage.

If we try to summarise this, we are currently in a Non-Optimum World, all our efforts are focused on getting more from less, drive towards greater efficiency. Hence, our intention is to get to an Optimum World, where just the right amount of everything is used. Note: This shift towards a more optimum world can never be realised completely, we can drive towards that direction but only to see it go farther and farther away, but in the process, we would make a lot of things, highly efficient.

Let's collect all these observations over time to build our case. The first one being,

Our drive towards an optimum world.

Not all problems are equally important, some problems plague entire humanity while others affect only a small group of people. Let's go ahead and list out some major problems that we are facing:

1. Climate Change
2. Clean Water
3. Health Monitoring
4. Energy Management
5. Infrastructure Management
6. Industrial Applications / Automation
7. Agriculture
8. Safety - Miners, Factory Workers, etc.

An optimized world is inevitable. Optimizing existing machines is more cost-effective and sensible compared to ditching all the old machines for new ones. We would always want to reduce our energy consumption, greenhouse gas emission, eat healthily, be safe, beware about one's own health condition.

We are already driving towards an optimum world. Our intent at Podnet is to just accelerate that shift towards an optimum world.

If the shift is inevitable. What would take us there?

There are multiple vehicles participating in varying capacity to get us there. Some are small and others are big. Everyone has a role to play. The most important role would be played by:

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Cloud Computing
3. Software Analytics
4. IoT

Why is IoT on that list?

Just mentioning IoT in the list of vehicles won't cut it, we need concrete evidence for its need.

Let's re-evaluate the list again:

1. Artificial Intelligence - A software technology
2. Cloud Computing - A Software technology
3. Software Analytics - A software technology

Until now everything is virtual, everything is software. But aren't we supposed to talk to things? How can these bunch of software talk to vehicles? your power socket? your bicycle? your air conditioner? So we need a provision that would allow us to sense and actuate the environment.

If you want to sense the real world, you need tangible technology, that exists in the real world, we need hardware. Hardware in collaboration with different sensors would give us an answer to "Need to sense the real world". So our fourth vehicle,

4. IoT - Hardware + Sensor + Actuator

Even though we now have the ability to sense and get information out of the world, what will you do with it? especially on that small power-constrained device? We need a way to send this information to its software peers. We need a way to communicate with other devices and computers where we can send this information.

Humans have solved communication problems very effectively and have several ways with communication can happen. Our need to communicate can easily be solved using Communication network technologies.

Wonderful, we now have the ability to sense our environment, communicate to remote computer or machine with what is it that we sensed. This is the right moment, to connect the software world to the hardware world.

The whole point of creating a hardware device was to sense values from the real world and send it to the cloud, why the cloud you may ask? Because it has the ability to store, process and analyze data coming in from thousands of other devices without a hiccup.

But how can such power and compute constrained hardware device could possibly communicate with the cloud? We need to bridge the gap in protocols, a firmware would implement all necessary security checks, give us a variety of communication protocols to work with like MQTT, CoAP, HTTPS, WebSockets etc.

Our ability to connect with a network to send and receive information has lots of benefits. Growth in the cloud computing space has allowed us to store, process, visualize and draw insights upon this data.

You see, none of this would be possible if we don't have the ability to collect information from the real world. Hence, IoT is a basic necessity for a data-driven optimum world.

It's now the right time to connect to the cloud. Let's drop our Cloud lego block on top of our firmware.

Isn't this stack of reasons getting big? Let's compress it a bit and then we shall move forward. If you observe closely,

1. Need to sense the real world
2. Hardware + Sensor + Actuator
3. Need to communicate
4. Communication Network
5. Firmware

All of this can be condensed in one single block, you guessed it, IoT

Hardware + Sensors + Connectivity = IoT

Essentially this is what IoT is, hardware that has the ability to sense its surroundings and connect with a remote computer to periodically send all the collected data.

One thing is clear, the greater our intent to optimise, the more hardware we would require to sense and actuate the environment. Hence the advent of IoT becomes inevitable if the underlying hypothesis for the requirement of an optimum world exists.

We are now gonna use IoT as an umbrella term to represent the collection of hardware, sensors and network connectivity.

A lot of IoT companies struggle to pinpoint exactly where the value of IoT lies for them. Vice and Wired and many other media companies have written about "The Internet of Useless things". People in the IoT domain are creating devices that have a very small utility and are more or less useless. A fork that tells you how fast are you eating, a ring that tweets when your heart stops beating etc. Devices like this MAY have some value to a small set of users, but for most of us, it's useless.

We need solutions that are truly novel and bring value to customers, that is what we require now. Solutions like these do exist, devices that can help you save on your electricity bill by installing hardware devices on-premise, getting to know about the health of your vehicle etc.

How can we deliver value?

If our goal is to get closer to a more optimum world, the closer we get to our goal, the greater the value delivered. To get to our goal we need to take actions, execute. The moment you start taking actions, you change your environment for an outcome that you expect.

But how will we know what actions to take? We need insights, things that you weren't aware of before, ideas that you haven't thought of before, for example, changing the product colour to red attracts more people to buy it, turning off the air conditioner in the afternoon for 2 hours reduces 10% of electricity bill month over month. When you have information like this available to you, you can now decide what actions to take. Having these insights is the key, without it, you would just be hitting in the dark.

Now the question arises, where can we generate these insights from? The answer is simple, analytics. We already have an amazing tool that can do the hard stuff for us. But there's a catch here, for analytics to provide any value to a business it needs data to operate on. Where can we get this data from?

If you remember, we have already stacked a wonderful set of technologies to source data from the environment. These set of technologies would allow us to monitor and then help us generate insights on the data.

If we can build something, that can monitor the real world, generate insights and take relevant actions automatically, we'll maximise the value created.

The screenful (i wonder if that's even a word :P) image below shows what technologies would be required to have proper monitoring in place, and the kind of technologies required to generate insights.

Even customers want to use solutions that take care of monitoring, insight generation and actions automatically. Nobody wants to fiddle around with 10 different technologies, stick them together only to find out that it does not work as expected.

IoT in itself is a very vast field. At Podnet, we intend to operate in a niche i.e. a communication network for IoT devices. A network designed especially for low power hardware devices that have to operate for several years in the field.

It's just a matter of time before serious use cases for IoT are implemented and brought to market, which would clear the way for other serious use cases as well.

Cheap hardware, free firmware, connectivity options already exist, but when combined in a correct way for the use case at hand, it can deliver immense value!

Intention

Our intention is to create real value for people who would use our product. We intend to make IoT a necessity rather than a luxury, by focusing on things that really matter.

Our focus is to innovate and improve our technology by multiple orders of magnitude to accelerate the shift towards an optimum world. We don't want to build fancy looking switchboards that you can control with a mobile app, we intend to replace switchboards altogether with your hand gestures. That's what we are talking about, multiple orders of improvement.

Podnet’s mission is to accelerate the shift towards a more optimum world, a world that consumes less energy wastes fewer resources, and increases yield with existing infrastructure. This can only happen when we can sense as well as actuate our environment efficiently. The road to an optimum world requires us to rethink and optimize our existing infrastructure and services and make way for new, better and cheaper hardware, software, and connectivity solutions. Humans tend to crave for higher efficiency which leads to their insatiable drive for an optimum world.

This fundamental way of thinking has enabled us to position ourselves correctly to fuel the shift towards an optimum world. We are not waiting for the trend to start, we intend to fuel it ourselves!

Did I miss anything?