rise of the machines

COPYRIGHT 2015 PUBLISHED @ChandanRajah

Rise of the Machines

By Chandan Rajah

Advent The work conducted at the Auto-ID Centre in Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) on network Radio Frequency Identification (n-RFID) and

distributed sensing inconceivably gave rise to a flurry of activity around

distributed connected devices with primary sensing and communication

capabilities. The community and industry alike eagerly adopted the

technology and soon the term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined.

Parallel to this development, closer to 2005, the open source community

began releasing templates for Single Computer Boards (SCBs) like Arduino

and Raspberry Pi making the technology needed to implement IoT more

accessible to the wider community. Excited by this innovation, hobbyists and

professionals began adopting building prototypes and promoting IoT to the

wider world. The growth of homebrew and start-up IoT devices saw a

significant and steady rise from 10 million in 2003 to about 500 million in

2007.

Smartphones played their part in the evolution of IoT. Connected to the

Internet over a ubiquitous mobile network, smartphones played a vital role in

bringing connectivity to the forefront. Even though smartphones were around

since the 90s (or even early 70s considering the broader definition), the

release of the Apple iPhone in 2007 was the crucial in popularising this

product category. By 2010, the number of devices connected to the Internet,

including smartphones and tablets, rose to 12.5 billion. It was the first time

that there were more devices connected to the Internet than the population of

human beings.

State of Play Started as solitary devices connected to the Internet, IoT is starting to form

clusters of devices in lightly interconnected singular contexts: a network of


network of things. Within the esoteric network devices seamlessly connect to

each other while across networks communication is restricted and limited. The

top three context-specific networks are Transport, Energy and Health Care.

They are the early adopters and the creators of large-scale deployments.

Military applications are close behind.

Governments have started to appreciate the importance of IoT and have

begun investing heavily in demonstrators and accelerators for connected

technology. Estimating a surge in IoT market from the current $80 billion in

2015 to a potential $166 billion in 2020, China announced an $800 million

investment programme into the industry thereby setting the price for other

world economies to play. India and Singapore are not far behind actively

investing large sums of money and building the industry rapidly.

The UK and its counterparts in Europe have allocated €80 million to IoT

technology in 2015 accessible through funding competitions like the Horizon

2020 call by Innovate UK.

After Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion, the largest in the IoT

market, Venture Capitalists (VCs) and Angel Investors have started investing in

early stage IoT ventures. Sequoia, closely followed by Intel, has made the

largest non-corporate VC funding deals with Lifx, Simplisafe and Airstrip.

Predictions The Internet of People (the World Wide Web) evolved in phases. It stared with

research conducted at ARPANET and CERN evolving into to a ‘gold rush’ to

adopt the technology with a large number of services becoming available over

a short span. As it’s service delivery capability matured in the ‘dot-com’

era, companies like Amazon and eBay delivering reliable services became

ubiquitous. The Internet of People has now reached a point where it is woven

into the social fabric and become a platform for non-conventional Internet

services like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.

IoT has just crossed the research phase. It is entering the “gold rush” phase

peaking on the Gartner Emerging Technology Hype Cycle. Customary to its

predecessor, the Internet of People, IoT is poised to enter a phase of mature


services delivery where value can be realised from an aggregate critical mass

of connected devices.

Predictions suggest that the IoT market would see 50 billion connected

devices by 2020. This is surely a conservative number considering that the

market is growing at 40-50% annually. It is not inconceivable to expect closer

to 100 billion devices by 2020.

The ascension of wearable technology as the face of IoT suggests that

personal connected devices will dominate the world. Yet this may not be the

case, as adoption inertia usually faced by Business to Customer (B2C)

propositions will hamper immediate widespread presence. It is more realistic

to consider institutions and enterprises adopting IoT in large- scale in the near

to medium term.

Predicting which of these institutions and enterprises will be early adopters is

quite impossible. Yet identifying the industries that might derive most value is

feasible. The health care industry, with $800 billion value to be unlocked,

springs to pole position closely followed by military and then traditional

industry sectors like energy, manufacturing and transport. The top value

drivers seem to be clustered around asset (and personnel) tracking, situational

awareness, decision assistance, process optimisation, resource monitoring and

in some cases autonomous systems.

The wider IoT problem is larger than any single enterprise, institution or

consortium purely due to the variety of technologies needed to make the

system and proposition valuable. It is likely that each sub-segment will adopt

IoT independently forming and growing the esoteric network. These networks

will slowly connect with each other forming the network of network of things.

Industry review suggests that the first of many widely used network of

network will appear in the next 3 to 5 years.