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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

The commercial excitement over IoT is all about offering 'services' you couldn't offer before. When your house is full of these devices, some people will pay extra for the 'enhanced tier' of service (even if the basic tier is offered for free). In cases where the business model isn't subscription-based, it's either made up by the high retail price of the device, or indirectly monetizing the data collected for 'market research' and the like.

IoT isn't about people hooking up jailbroken Kindles to one-way mirrors to show the weather. It's not about Ardunios and Raspberry Pis being used to collect some data, move some servos, and make a blog post about it. It's about big money to be made by introducing new monetization channels in places there were none before.

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I've been saying that there are three "scammy" markets which tend to have a higher ratio of overpriced, scammy products, and they're the following:

* Health

* Education

* Office productivity

And now,

* Home security (New!)

The reason that I think these markets tend to be scammy is because their quality is mostly based on perception. And there's no easy way to drastically improve these, people tend to look for a magic pill. And you're right, security is certainly going to be one of them.

If we really take security seriously then we should be talking about LAN of things. Anything that requires a connection to the internet and that takes firmware upgrades from the manufacturer and hides data from the user/owner is a security threat not a security agent.

We are still living in a corporation centric paradigm and until we start talking about user centric systems any talk about security and privacy is a joke.

I'd be interested if you could break these issues out a bit more :

- connection to the internet; seems to me that this is a trade off, without some sort of network access it's hard to see how many devices can be useful in many applications. But that connection can be constrained. - firmware upgrades - is this about trust? - hides data - ok, I get this, but many users are not able to spend time working out what is going on.

I agree that corporations tend to privilege themselves, but of course the world is not just made of users. There are government actors and rogue actors as well, most users can't defend themselves - how should the playing field be organised in your opinion?

The point is that we're all playing the user role much more then the company owner/employee role.

Products and services are developed by companies and if they don't design things thinking about how they as users of those products and services would like to be treated, then everybody would have a worse overall experience.

There are simply some business models that produce far more negative experiences for more people then the actual gains for the owners. Advertising is the first example here..

We're all experiencig life as users and I'm saying that the systems we deign should be user centric so that from one's perspective everything falls into place seamleslly, without fragmentations..

Currently when interracting with technology I'm feeling that it's not designed for me but for the one that built it..

The first two bullet points on your list are very specific to an american perspective. As a dutchman I do not consider these scammy markets whatsoever.

$0.02:

As an Australian, I do agree with you, but only looking at them from what government services are provided. In terms of the industry, I think health/fitness is possibly the largest in terms of misinformation because no one wants to do simple exercise and eat well, everyone is looking for a shortcut to get bigger or smaller.

So I don't think that they're specific to the American perspective in a larger sense, but I do also see where you are coming from. Then again, neither of us are American!

As a Swede, I beg to differ. Both the two bullet points apply to other countries as well, such as Sweden. It's just that it hits you indirectly through taxes, instead of directly by you having to fork out bills from your wallet.

It's also scammy in the way that the current Regional Healthcare drives out fair competition to a large part.

I'd add banking/financial services to that list..

The greatest of all cons.

Not that I disagree with you but what does this really have to do with the article?

Is your point that the IoT "killer app" is subscription services? That's more of a way that manufacturers will make money than a "killer app", which is usually defined as a use case so great that it will induce people to buy the product.

Yes, thanks for prompting me to clarify my point. I believe the 'killer app' of IoT isn't a particular kind of product, but rather the fact that the products establish an ongoing relationship between the consumer and the manufacturer where previously one didn't exist.

Today, I buy a fridge or a thermostat or a deadbolt lock and I'm done; I keep the warranty flyer in a box and forget about it until the product breaks. With IoT, everything becomes an ongoing venture; this sounds like an opportunity for the vendor -- but potentially for the customer also.

For example, this trend could counter the race to the bottom that tends to occur with established consumer goods, because a particular brand's ecosystem will have a particular character, and will likely work better with products within the same brand. This is the game that Samsung and LG are playing, and they have the marketshare among a disparate lines of products to get it done. If I'm invested in 'Samsung Home' as opposed to 'LG Home', I'm more likely to buy Samsung instead of LG or Whirlpool or Maytag or Electrolux or any other brand; and maybe all because my phone was a Samsung.

I wondered why Samsung seems to be going hard into not just IoT, but also into cloud (by buying Joyent).

IoT is going to be the new "convergence", isn't it? Technical and business people get really excited, lots of effort is invested, and then average people just shrug, because it turns out that the tech doesn't solve an actual problem they they have.

I'm not so convinced IoT will fizzle with average people. Security and cloud-dependence aside, I can see the value in certain things being connected and remote-manageable: baby monitors, lights, pet feeders, washing machines, coffeemakers, ovens, thermostats; anything where controlling or seeing data from it from a outside the room or outside the house would be genuinely useful to solve particular needs. Some others will be complete gimmicks solving no real need.

And all of this doesn't account for any evolution of appliances along non-IoT spectrums or the introduction of entirely new ones:

- a combined washer/dryer blackbox where dirty clothes go in and clean, dry clothes come out

- an affordable at-home deboning/meatcarving apparatus

- an at-home vegetable-growing planter

- a 'smart' pan that controls the cooking temperature and done-ness

Some of these concepts are being trialed right now, or exist at industrial scales and have yet to be scaled down. A lot of what's being talked about assumes that were it not for them being 'smart', appliances will look exactly the same in 10-20 years. I don't believe this to be true. Nothing too futuristic, but new gizmos will exist, solving real (if niche) needs, some of which benefit more from data sharing than others.

Good points, particularly about industrial uses (I've seen impressive things for agriculture, and can see the use cases in institutions and other large buildings like hotels).

I guess that I look at the current consumer products, and they seem like isolated gimmicks. Aside from the quality of the code on the devices, there needs to be at least some kind of secure message broker and associated apps, otherwise every individual device is going want separate control apps and be spamming you.

I'm currently using a personal Slack account to manage all the notifications from cloud services etc. but it feels like a hack - a smart home with a bunch of devices probably needs a super user-friendly common interface.

> I can see the value in certain things being connected and remote-manageable: ... pet feeders ... coffeemakers ...

For what possible use cases could these items benefit from connectivity? This sounds like all the IoT hype I have been hearing for the past couple years. Let's connect everything! Even if the marginal benefit is less than the costs!

> - a combined washer/dryer blackbox where dirty clothes go in and clean, dry clothes come out

These exist and seem to be the standard laundry device in Japan from my (limited) experience. Any time I've used them my clothes come out quite damp, and an air drying step is required.

regarding the smart pan, if you haven't heard about it yet, check out sous vide cooking technique (there are home level devices on the market right now for it), it's essentially what you want, just it's not done in a pan (you need a dumb pan to do the finishing, but it's a quick step, not very error prone)

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