Last week, I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Randall Cronk of the MIT Enterprise Forum on the practicalities and challenges of using the Internet of Things (a.k.a. IoT) to solve real-world problems.
Here in an excerpt of some of the things (no pun intended) we discussed:
IoT is not just about talking toasters (or creepy monitoring), it can be use to solve many high-cost, real-world problems. We already have some clear analogies for this:
- Commercialization of the World Wide Web (Internet 1.0) radically changed how we get information. Instead of waiting to get it physically (via mail or newspapers) we could get it instantly from our desktops
- The mobile Internet, smartphones, mobile web and app stores (Web 2.0 or Internet 2.0). Let us take the convenience of this instantaneous access virtually anywhere. We no longer had to go back to our desks and could now look up info on street corner at a restaurant, etc.
- The Internet of Things (Internet 3.0) takes this convenience to the next level. We no longer have to go look at things to see where they are, what state they are in, etc. We can find out without manual effort. This lets us focus on things we really care about (instead of the drudgery of getting information)
Of course, this is not a simple prospect. We have many challenges to solve. The most obvious are the ones around data connectivity and protocols (these challenges, however, are pretty straightforward). The next is privacy and security (we have models for these from regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and medicine). The next is how to handle all that information. If we do not solve this problem, connected things will swarm us with so much useless data that it will make our email inboxes look simple.
Listen to the podcast to hear more of the details
You can find it at the MIT Enterprise Forum:
or on iTunes:
