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CT: For those outside Silicon Valley, the “Internet of Things” is a buzzword often associated with seemingly superfluous toys for early-adopting consumers: the expensive Apple watch, the oft-ridiculed Google Glass, or a “smart” refrigerator that senses when the milk jug is empty. So when Sarnoff professor of business administration Marco Iansiti began looking at how businesses have been transformed by the growing number of everyday objects connected to the Web, the first questioned he asked was: Is the hype real?
For Iansiti and associate professor of business administration Karim R. Lakhani, the answer is an unequivocal yes. We have entered an age of “Digital Ubiquity,” they wrote in Harvard Business Review (HBR) last fall. Sensors in gadgets, appliances, and machines generate an unprecedented and growing volume of data that is increasingly easy to share wirelessly. The ability to aggregate and analyze these data at a massive scale, the authors argue, has begun to change the very nature of how businesses create value and make money in nearly every industry.
The researchers point to recent efforts at General Electric that have turned the century-old company into an unexpected digital-transition success story. In the last few years, GE and other electronics companies have seen exponential growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of data that they collect, Lakhani explains, forcing “companies that did not think that they were in the software business to become good at software development.”
S: HarvardMag – http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/07/why-the-internet-of-things-is-big-business (last access: 24 April 2016)
N: 1. The concept of adding sensors and intelligence to physical objects was first discussed in the 1980s, when some university students decided to modify a Coca-Cola vending machine to track its contents remotely. But the technology was bulky and progress was limited.
The term ‘Internet of Things’ was coined in 1999 by the computer scientist Kevin Ashton. While working at Procter & Gamble, Ashton proposed putting radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on products to track them through a supply chain.
He reportedly worked the then-buzzword ‘internet’ into his proposal to get the executives’ attention. And the phrase stuck.
Over the next decade, public interest in IoT technology began to take off, as more and more connected devices came to market.
In 2000, LG announced the first smart refrigerator, in 2007 the first iPhone was launched and by 2008, the number of connected devices exceeded the number of people on the planet.
In 2009, Google started testing driverless cars and in 2011, Google’s Nest smart thermostat hit the market, which allowed remote control of central heating.
2. So What Is The Internet Of Things?
Simply put, this is the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This includes everything from cellphones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. This also applies to components of machines, for example a jet engine of an airplane or the drill of an oil rig. As I mentioned, if it has an on and off switch then chances are it can be a part of the IoT. The analyst firm Gartner says that by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected devices… That’s a lot of connections (some even estimate this number to be much higher, over 100 billion). The IoT is a giant network of connected “things” (which also includes people). The relationship will be between people-people, people-things, and things-things.
3. Humans in modern times live in a highly connected world, and in 2015 more individuals were becoming aware of the Internet of Things (IoT)—a vast network of physical objects with embedded microchips, sensors, and communications capabilities that link people, machines, and entire systems through the Internet. Networking firm Cisco Systems, which is credited with having coined the term Internet of Things, estimated in 2011 that 50 billion connected devices will exist by 2020 but that more than 99% of physical objects have yet to be connected.
S: 1. VoH – https://www.visionofhumanity.org/what-is-the-internet-of-things/ (last access: 31 January 2024). 2. Forbes – http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/05/13/simple-explanation-internet-things-that-anyone-can-understand/#43c71dbb6828 (last access: 24 April 2016). 3. EncBrit – http://global.britannica.com/topic/Internet-of-Things-The-2032782 (last access: 24 April 2016).
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CR: bitcoin , blockchain, computer science, internet user, Internet , technological singularity.
