Internet of Things: Part III

INTERNET OF THINGS

PART III

This is the third installment in a potentially never ending series about the Internet of Things.The first two parts of the series located here and here represent a fairly broad perspective of this trend.

The intention of the post is to discuss several key areas including:

• Trends and Convergence - a Singularity?
• Communications Models
• Implications for Society
• How Things Fit Together
• Summary

Trends and Convergence - A Singularity?

As mentioned in the previous posts there are some trends that are firmly in place and creating a surge in momentum and driving innovation and development at a much more rapid pace. Obviously this is encouraging if your business is related to IoT but what isn't as obvious are the opportunities that will be unveiled to existing businesses, almost independent of the type of business.These trends and the full emergence of Web 3.0 will enable entire industries to reinvent themselves and in the process create opportunities for new services and business models to support or displace the existing establishment. Once capitalism becomes fully engaged the Internet of Things will move ahead even more rapidly.

Web Services: A critical component in terms of providing an approach for integrating devices into the cloud, Web Services are a fundamental component of the Web 2.0 revolution as documented here but they also provide the perfect mechanisms for content assimilation, processing and syndication. Leveraging web services creates the opportunity for any and all devices to participate in the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services provided by cloud computing.

Electronic Components: This is a fundamental enabler of IoT, from RFID to micro and nanoscale processors and components these are the innovations that are opening up the endless possibilities. Almost all of these technologies are advancing at an exponential rate, decreasing power and size while increasing features and functions every 6-18 months. The fundamental technologies required for IoT implementation already exist and are generally cheap and fairly ubiquitous.

Mobile Devices: In today's terms mobile devices represent the second most connected device behind the general category of PCs but their impact on IoT has been nothing short of amazing. It is estimated that there are roughly 1.5 billion cloud connected PCs and about 1 billion cloud enabled cell phones. The cloud enabled mobile devices represent the eyes and ears of the Internet by giving everything a location, distance, orientation, etc. The information shadow created by these devices is truly amazing.

Hacker Communities: The evolution of hacker communities all around the world may be the most influential trend in place because it is allowing millions of regular people to be involved and actually drive the innovations. An appropriate analogy to describe this phenomena is the birth of the telescope which had a similar impact on Astronomy as it allowed regular people to contribute to science. For the next ten or so years it will be these communities that produce the bulk of the innovations that drive consumption through usefulness. See Part II for a more detailed description as well as example links.

These four trends as well as others are clearly in place and all are conspiring to bring about a third revolution, the Internet of Things. This trend has us marching towards a singularity that will ultimately connect everyone and everything together forming a collective intelligence. Ray Kurzweil believes that we are only 35 years away from the singularity. He argues we will be able to buy a machine that is a billion times more powerful then a human brain for $1000. Kurzweil also suggests machines being on a runaway reaction of self improvement which forces humans into the singularity. Cybernetics is the only way humans can keep up and remain relevant, connected directly to the cloud and all the associated devices and resources it provides.

Communications Models

There are basically three types of discussions among the three primary constituents of IoT, in various combinations these conversations will provide the fundamental paradigm and basis for business and service models will be built, implemented and deployed. The diagram to the right represents the three primary constituents that make up the Internet of Things: Humans, devices and the Internet (or cloud).

From this diagram it is clear that all entities participate equally in the conversation but it is still made up of discrete connections between each of the constituents, these can be seen below:

Person <-> Device: Biometric sensors (person) talking to a cell phone (device) via bluetooth, the phone (device) setting an alarm (person) when a sensor hits a predetermined value. Represents a major impact on healthcare and wellness.

Device <-> Device: Motion and darkness sensors talking directly to lighting systems, controlling their status, brightness and with LEDs - color. This would have a huge impact on energy consumption as well as greenhouse emissions.

Device <-> Cloud: This will be the most common scenario where devices like appliances and vehicles update the cloud on their status, software agents can act on these updates and make adjustments in real-time as required. Remote diagnostics will be greatly improved.

Basically, these three discrete lines of communication will drive the offerings, business models and related services that are extended out of this initiative. In many cases all three methods will be used to fully implement a set of services related to a given business model, this approach is the most likely since it represents the greatest value and flexibility.

The second mode (device <-> device) will require new standards be developed and adopted by the device manufacturers in order for this type of communications to exist on any large scale. This is unlikely in the short term as vendors develop proprietary methods of communications in order to establish and substantiate their unique value proposition, this is a typical trend in early generations of products within new markets. While many standards already exist (RESTful, SOAP, XML, HTTP, WSDL, etc.) I would suggest that newer and more efficient standards need to be developed in order to support the unique paradigm that a fully connected world represents.

Implications for Society

This section is focused on what I would call the practical implications and not the philosophical, I could care less about having those discussions but for those that do I've included relevant document links at the top of the post. The best place to start is with the big picture, in this case the ecosystem. Below is a diagram that represents a mashup of my recent reads on this subject, I wasn't able to find exactly what I wanted so this represents my attempt to put it all together.

I'll describe each section of the diagram which is broken into two major components, the ecosystem (right) and the concentric circles (left) that make up IoT. Keep in mind that this diagram means to separate out the technological components from the broader socioeconomic ones, this separation also doubles as a barrier between what tends to be predictable from what typically is not. I expect that just like the Internet, entities like governments, agencies and legal systems will lag behind in terms of policy and regulation. It is just as likely that these entities will be unable to act efficiently once capitalism takes hold and the really big dollars kick in. For the Internet this has led a whole host of issues with intellectual property rights, copyright laws and entire industries being slowly displaced (printing, media, news, etc). This scenario is just as likely with IoT but will likely produce more issues in terms of privacy and security, these areas need to be a focal point from the beginning or society will face a series of new problems to address.

The blocks to the left represent the three major areas of interaction that make up and define this industry, in fact these are representative drivers in any industry. As the technologies and associated business models mature and are substantiated each of the entities will become increasingly active, but for some it may be too little too late. These new technologies will render many existing applications to legacy status and this will happen much faster then many established businesses will be able to cope with. Displacement will continue to be painful and difficult.

Business and Entrepreneurs

The top block represents my area of interest and for the first decade or so these entities represent the ecosystem almost entirely on their own. This is exciting because unlike genetics or nanotechnology, at least for now, the IoT initiatives are being driven be hackers, electronics DIYers and a plethora of other regular people. These are almost exactly the same conditions that existed for personal computers in 1975 and for the software industry in the 1980s. When users and consumers drive the innovation amazing things can happen, fast.

Entrepreneurial heaven might be one way to describe this approaching wave of opportunity, its easy to find people working diligently on ideas right now that will likely impact our lives in the near future, the groundwork is being laid. There are innovative technologies and business models just starting to emerge from the garage or basement that represent just some of the benefits promised by IoT.

The Establishment and Society

The government and other similar agencies are so far downstream that by the time they understand the implications of IoT the industry will be moving at an exponential pace, easily representing nearly 10 billion connected devices where most of them are Things as opposed to computers or cell phones. Imagine that. Initially, this won't present any problem because most of the communications will be benign representing pure information (data) and analysis. During the second phase more serious concerns will arise as new paradigms of automation and control are introduced by IoT, this is when the troops will arrive and start implementing policy and regulations, its inevitable. After these actions the industry will go through a consolidation phase when the true giants begin to emerge. Policy and regulation will then be rewritten by them, for them.

A whole host of socioeconomic issues and complexities will come out of this connectivity revolution but many will parallel other, more mature industries like genetics, nanotechnology and the Internet. While many issues will be new at least an infrastructure will be in place (one would hope) to address them in a cohesive and coherent way, this is still being sorted out however. Every aspect of society is still trying to cope with the genetic, nanotech and Internet revolutions, let's hope these are addressed before IoT really takes off. Nuff said on that.

How Things Fit Together

The ideas represented by IoT will likely impact every aspect of our lives just as the Internet did in both of its previous iterations: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. To describe IoT as just another version in an endless cycle of upgrades would be understating the significance and impact projected by this quantum leap in connectedness. In fact, all previous iterations of the Internet will shrivel to insignificance once IoT delivers on the promise it holds. The label that has been applied to this evolution is Web 3.0 which is consistent, logical but totally misleading, instead it should be called Web³ (web cubed).

Circles of Connectivity

Concentric circles can be used in a diagram when there is an obvious path for information flow between the constituents, that is definitely the case here with a clear line directly from a human being to the cloud and beyond.The idea here is  simply tying together, through examples, the various layers of the IoT relationships.

Communications: A key common denominator among all types of devices is their ability to communicate, broadly speaking this will be accomplished either via a wireless or a wired connection. Depending on the application, the volume of data and various other factors the communications requirements will vary dramatically between devices allowing everything from low-speed serial to hi-speed broadband communications to be used. For a summary of wireless options available see here, for wired see here.

Human Being: The human being is both an endpoint and a device, meaning that we will both consume content as well as produce content. The consumption will happen via several different channels including audio and visual in the form of alerts, lights, messages, videos and so on. Other methods of consumption and interaction will occur though the existing cloud infrastructure using software agents and applications, effectively creating personalized device mashups.

Human Body: This is where humans become a device and create a distinctive information shadow based on their own biometrics and other physical conditions. This is already happening with most newer cell phones in the sense that the device represents a distinctive information pattern that is specific to that user, extending this paradigm to include biometric information is a logical progression and one that is actively being pursued.

Environment: We all know how important the environment is and with IoT the possibility exists that we will able to catalog in real-time current conditions everywhere on the planet. Granular understanding of micro-climates will provide substantial power to both meteorology and climatology, something that is desperately needed. Obviously there are more applications than could possibly be described here, everything from personal health alerts (allergens, smog, air quality, etc) to monitoring for pollutants, bio-hazards and even viruses.

Things: Clearly the broadest category representing everything else in the world almost without limitation, at least not in the longer term. When I say without limitation that is exactly what I mean, consider that anything that can be tagged and identified through some digital means becomes a thing in this context. Things don't have to do anything, just allow themselves to be uniquely identified, the cloud will do the rest.

Consider a scenario where every single object in the world had a barcode and your cell phone could read these barcodes and perform a look-up in the cloud to download all the relevant information. For those that remember Star Trek, your phone would be sort of a triquarter and communicator rolled into a single device - Spock, eat your heart out!

As crazy as that may sound, it isn't even the end of the story as the possibilities get better from there. While this may sound like science fiction, it isn't. There are already multiple methods of tagging objects and turning them into digital things that produce an information shadow, this has been happening for a couple year via methods like RFID, graphical, SMS, virtual, hardlink tagging and object hyperlinking. The picture to the left shows an ant playing with RFID chips, these can go almost everywhere. Ultimately, we'll create devices and algorithms that can automatically identify living things via some combination of remote biosensing and biometric signatures.

Cloud: The key catalyst, providing the matrix from which IoT has been given birth. The cloud plays a vital role for obvious reasons but a few key ones are highlighted below:

• Provides a common and ubquitous infrastructure for information processing,
• Connectivity, the cloud can connect everything,
• Exposes a common platform on which to build services via any of the now standard models like SaaS, IaaS or PaaS.

Software, as always, will be the key to extracting the real value out of this increased connectedness. The hardware will ultimately be reduced to a commodity that is inexpensive and easily acquired, the key will be the software agents taking advantage of the devices and extracting actionable intelligence from them. Personalization, privacy and security will be key differentiators in this space as the products fight with conventional weapons like features and functions.

Consider a set of software agents that share vital health information about you like your genome, current health status (biosensors in real-time), food intake, exercise patterns, and so on. How effective would those software agents be in helping you manage your health?

Now, extend the paradigm further to include software agents that could also incorporate the aggregate of an entire population into its algorithms. As you can see, once more and more things become tagged and connected it is the software in the cloud that will bring the most value and perpetuate the industry. This happens with every new generation of technology. It was the AppStore that made the iPhone great and not the sexy case or cool look and feel. Software still provides one of the biggest differentiators between the iPhone and Android.

Summary

Wow, this is a long post and once again I've had to reduce it and break into two parts (III, IV). The more I research what is happening in this space the more excited I get about the possibilities it represents, there is clearly a revolution underway and while we are still in the early stages all the required groundwork has been laid. The technology trends are firmly in place and business models are starting to emerge, things are definitely moving forward at an increasing rate.

Governments and agencies will in general be slow to the draw in terms of placing regulation and policy around the industry, IoT is likely to take a similar path as the Internet. Whatever happens in terms of the socioeconomic policies, it is likely that the foundations will be derived from other industries currently wrestling with similar issues like genetics, nanotechnology and even the Internet itself. Capitalism is likely to bulldoze any attempts to slow down the expansion once it gets fully underway and Wall Street dollars are involved, you can look at recent history for examples of that.

In the next post (Part IV) I'll be detailing some of the many examples of IoT that exist today, everything from for-profit business models to crowd-sourced initiatives to organizationally sponsored activities. There is a lot going on now that the tools are available and the ideas are flowing. Additionally, I'll be carving out a section dedicated to available online resources, books and other types of available knowledge, stay tuned.

Below is a Wordle representation of this post, I've decided to include in most posts as a footer.