In April 1999, I created
a PowerPoint presentation, and it was the first time I wrote about “the
internet of things”. I was working for Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of
everything from shampoo and soap to toilet paper, and I was pitching a new
idea: how to improve efficiency by building wireless, internet-connected
sensors into our products and supply chain. That seems obvious today, but back
then it was crazy. The late 1990s was the time of AOL, internet cafés and the
dotcom boom. Almost every internet-connected device was a computer and almost
every internet connection was wired.
“The rise of mobile phones is simply the most important
technological transformation of the 21st century”
No one knew about Wi-Fi,
the name wasn’t created until later that year. At that time wireless sensors
cost pounds – and we needed them for pennies. It was difficult to purchase
mobile phones since they were expensive, and they were only connected to other
phones and were used for talking, and annually there were fewer than five text
messages were sent by an average person.
That world is hard to
remember now, when the internet is wireless and everywhere, sensors cost a
penny or two, and phones are internet-connected mobile devices carried by
almost everyone.
That last point is
especially significant. The rise of mobile phones is the most important
technological transformation of the early 21st century. In 1999, less than 30pc
of the world’s population had a phone. Today there are more phones than people
on the planet and many phones are smartphones, even in developing nations. This
matters for the internet of things. Phones are not phones any more: “phone”
comes from the Greek for “voice”, and today only 1pc of mobile phone traffic
comes from voice calls. A surprising amount of the rest comes from sensors. The
average smartphone has 10 sensors, including a camera, microphone, barometer,
thermometer and locator, and all of them are connected to the internet. A
smartphone puts the internet of things in your pocket.
Smartphones can be
counted as an example of how, in 20 years, the internet of things significant
gains its popularity. The question now is what to do about it, and there is a
straightforward way for businesses to find out.
Create a three-column
list: in column one, write some things you don’t know about your operations.
Don’t worry about whether the things seem knowable; imagine you have the chance
to become omniscient. This can be hard because we don’t always notice what we
don’t know.
“Smartphones are just one example of how, in 20 years, the
internet of things has gone from nowhere to everywhere”
In column two, estimate
how valuable knowing these things would be – not just for you but also for your
customers.
Column three will take
some research. Evaluate how easy it would be for internet-connected sensors to
help you get that information. You may not need to sense the information
directly. Most internet-of-things systems use proxy data: for example, inferring
fruit ripeness from colour images, or room occupancy by sensing if lights are
on.
When the list is
complete, pick the thing that seems most valuable to know and easy to discover,
and begin a project to see if you can discover it. Start small and cheap. Try
to sense the thing once, in a controlled location, in the simplest way
possible. Use off-the-shelf components. Assemble them with duct tape, either
literally or figuratively. Do not leap straight into the ocean. Splash in a
puddle first.
Then expand gradually. Go
to a larger environment, or sense all the time instead of some of the time.
Make the data valuable, by sending it to people who can use it, or by
triggering an automated response. Keep expanding. Soon, your solution will have
grown from a crazy idea into something ubiquitous, just like the internet of
things itself did between 1999 and today.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/future-technologies/make-the-iot-work-for-your-business/
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