IoT Market Projected to Grow 12x by 2023
thetechladder.com
thetechladder.com
The "S" in IoT stands for Security.
So security, or rather the usual lack thereof, will be a thing to keep an eye on.
Seem this could be valuable for the industrial IOT, at least.
Still, in many serious industrial "IoT" deployments, operational data is never sent to a cloud or 3rd party server, and stays in on-premise data centers, or is simply discarded after a quick sanity check. This is slowly changing (see GE Predix, Siemens MindSphere, Bosch IoT Suite), but there are still a lot of issues around architecting safety-critical systems that can support bi-directional communication with the internet and 3rd party data centers.
[1] http://embedded-computing.com/articles/aws-microchip-deliver...
I looked at Helium. Problem is that when you sell your own design and don't publish your designs and standards you become a single-source vendor.
As a manufacturer, I can't go with single-source vendors. I need backups and pricing competition and etc etc etc. So here we are, still writing code for WiFi radios and leveraging legacy OSS stacks to do the encryption and transport.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078560
I wonder what you, as a manufacturer think about it.
My first objection would be that I wouldn't put some black box module from a company like Amazon or Google on my design. Too many issues about what's inside and other things like Google's tendency to follow the shiny and discontinue products for no published reasons.
My idea was more along the lines of Amazon or Microsoft selling AWS and Azure-enabled hubs or concentrators that did all the backend lifting and presented a simple REST or MQTT interface on the local network for data ingestion. Then you could connect any 802.11 radio to it and send data over an encrypted channel without having to worry about the heavier layers about it (TLS, DNS, Certs, SAS tokens, endpoints, etc).
Btw, Amazon does some interesting stuff with AWS greengrass, including a router, it's quite similar to how you view it. And i'm sure they'll take of telling end users.
Devices need to offer at least 128 MB of memory and an x86 or ARM CPU that runs at 1 GHz or more
My devices run on Cortex-M0s. That's not going to work at all.
With cheaper and longer-range sensors we can create vast sets of data on a scale that we haven't seen before, and with machine learning we can extract useful information from this data. With that premise it's also not hard to see why IoT in the consumer market is not such a big success, but you see big industrial players pour billions into IoT projects [1].
There's some other concerns of course too, like the impact that all this data might have on society and that the state of IoT security reflects the state of web security around 1999. If you're interested in that, I did a talk about the subject last week at the AMSxTech conference (20 minutes) [2].
[1] http://tech.newstatesman.com/iot/general-electric-billion-do... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwWmgbRxwU&t=7s
The major benefit of IoT is for the people able to harvest the data, there is generally little added value for the end consumer.
I see the first major growth area in industry, and I see this happening now. Major manufacturers are adding data acquisition to all their processes.
The second major growth area might be the public sector. Smart Cities are building up hype and I'll think we'll hear a lot more about these kinds of initiatives in the near future.
As for the consumer sector, I don't see major benefits for the consumers, but from a producer's viewpoint, adding telemetry to their devices might give them valuable information. So I think we'll see everything becoming 'smart', but not for our own benefit (and hopefully not on our bill).
But the real breakthroughs would be in sharing this data openly. Maybe people can make connections between coffee consumption and say...obesity, car accidents, productivity, family spending habits, etc, etc, etc. Like we might be able to put massive data to a lot of the experiments we hear about all the time that use a tiny case study of maybe 20 students at some university. And not only that but people could begin to act on the data and develop new products, solutions and services to our benefit and continue to get more data about them in real time. That's the advantage I see to IoT, but I don't see it doing much for us in its current stage as companies have no real incentive to share all that data.
Maybe some sort of open IoT is what we need to get things moving the right direction. But then we all know security is still a major pitfall of IoT to begin with.
So it will be interesting if Smart devices as one area of IoT keep staying in the current phase or will evolve in 1) more LAN centric, more open industry standard or 2) sending even more things home and analyse the data in a datacenter.
Anyone else done that? Any IoT Consultants out there?
Btw, I should have been more clear (and it's past the edit period). These people are specialists in IoT. "Branding" was just a response to the parent's question of if anybody is highlighting that aspect of what they do.
(The word "branding" feels odd to me. Probably not the word I would have chosen.)
Yes it does have that generic feel to it.
In case of IoT they're in charge of the whole device, and the security of those things aren't looked into a lot. Sounds stupid, but it does need it's own specialists. Otherwise you're going to end up with a lot more insecure devices.
Just an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/controllablewebcams/
Has someone made the equivalent of ruby on rails for these devices? It doesn't work for everything, but for most it works well enough and gets it the job done in a fraction of the time that a complete custom job would require?
I happen to like Elixir the language a lot, but it does have legitimate advantages.
It covers broad topics that a beginner to IoT will find interesting. It's a 45 minute talk so it only covers what can be covered in that timeframe.
Please forgive the lack of polish. I am not a natural public speaker.
Thank you for your very kind feedback.
Hit me up at pryelluw@gmail.com to catch up.
> In 1997 Intel was the king of the hill; in that year it first announced the Itanium or IA-64 processor. That same year, research company IDC predicted that the Itanium would take over the world, racking up $38 billion in sales in 2001. Wow! Everybody paid attention.
Six years is an awfully long time in this industry.
The article references this:
http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/944711-internet-of-th...
Which is this:
http://wintergreenresearch.com/internet-of-things
Here's a handy PDF summary:
http://wintergreenresearch.com/reports/Internet%20of%20Thing...
I don't think that report is worth 4.2 cents.
Take all the electric equipment you use in your household, office, and so on. Lights, fixtures, fans, kitchen appliances, security systems, on, and on. What the size of that industry you think is at the moment? Just know that about 2/3rd of that industry would "die" and be replaced by exact equivalent devices that communicate wirelessly/remotely with your smart-phones and tablets.
Here's the slightly depressing news: likely majority of that market size would be retaken by giants like GE, Philips, etc, that are already the pre-IoT monopolies. But not too depressing because that still leaves quite a room for new players and acquisitions/aquihires.
But again, this is just one aspect of IoT. I haven't even mentioned new devices, appliances, because it's a little harder to quantify, much less the coming robotic revolution.
Not sure I see the value in this as a consumer. My dumb, unconnected appliances work just fine.
Who's pushing this stuff? Is everyone trying to hitch a ride on some buzz, or are there relatively few companies hiring PR firms to trick gullible investors into giving them money?
It's hard to tell, but it looks like Proctor and Gamble introduced the term. Their stock price shot up within a year of Google Trends showing increasing interest in the term. I wonder if they're the ones hiring PR firms, or if it's all organic at this point.
Actually I think that's kind of the root. It's not that the number of coffee makers will change much, Mr. Coffee will just start adding "smart"s to more down range machines. And why not? Its another feature to add to the list to sound fancy which in commodity market has a lot of value, the cost to do such is pretty negligible and there are no rules for support.
Well for one thing, anyone watching that will miss any hidden growth in dumb devices, they'll appear to be losing market share.
Eventually ∂q/∂t will reach near equilibrium, but even then, a smart device for most things a smart device that is never connected to anything is pretty much equivalent to a dumb device.
I'm not saying this article is right. I'm simply saying that IoT is less of a market and more a "feature".
> a smart device that is never connected to anything is pretty much equivalent to a dumb device.
From the consumers perspective, but the still bring risk: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/smart-tv-hack-embed...
I'm stating why I think IoT stuff will take off. I think its terrible, unavoidable future. I'm not against the principle of smart devices, but we are making them just smart enough to be dangerous to our networks, and to sloppy to be safe.
For enterprise its about using technology to cut cost, or to provide new services.
When you think about it. Iot is cheap compared to humans. Why have a human go read some gage for compliance, instead install a sensor.
I think that would make companies happy, and cynically I'd say it give them a new tool for obsoleting hardware as standards change. But most people I know are more scared IoT then excited by it's potential. Most the people I know with IoT stuff installed are more often copy writers or repairs.
It saddens me to think that even if people don't need an Ethernet connector on their random device, it could be the only available option.
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Btw while your toaster does not need to connect to your wifi many people forget what is the true value proposition here and why these devices need internet access - software - dumb devices that use the hardware only as operating shell but uses software to provide the smarts. In other words a toaster with WiFi connection will not provide you with a better toast but a toaster on your wifi might be able to serve toasted bread with broken hardware that is mitigated through a software upgrade.
The toaster example is extreme. I know! However if you look at Tesla you can apply the same principle at micro and macro level, i.e. the tesla already has the hardware for self-driving but it lacks the smarts yet - i.e. the software. Tesla converted the business of selling cars to a business of selling software - and that is way more valuable than just the car itself.
Remotely pushing updates and configuration doesn't necessarily imply loss of privacy in practice. I think that's a red herring. I work for Resin.io - we do automated deployments and updates and configuration management for fleets of IoT devices, but that's totally independent of how the device's data is stored and shared (or not).
Remote updatability does open up the _possibility_ that somebody could remote connect in to read that data out, or push an update to get to it, but that's quite a different gambit to devices that automatically scoop all your data, analyse everything you do and resell that to marketers. It's also essentially unavoidable if you want to have IoT that can accept remote updates, which given the IoT security situation to date is sadly clearly necessary.
This move to cloud-focused IoT architecture isn't about upgradability at all. It's a separate decision, with sometimes (often?) dubious motives, and that's where the privacy concerns come in for me. We shouldn't let the necessity of keeping devices up to date lead us to sacrificing the privacy of all our data, they're not that closely related. Windows automatic update is not really a privacy concern, Windows 10's ad tracking and cloud integration is.
But what I have issues with (and I think everyone else) is that I do not know if the upgrade is either not compromised or if it adheres to the same contact that I signed for - i.e. not to sniff my data and do other things I did not buy into.
Hence why, it will be a huge innovation if somebody can come up with a way of proving that software work as intended. Then the contact is the software and not the the TOS and I can use other software to verify that the software adheres to the contact I bought into.
I am sure we will reach to that level of sophistication one day.
There is something else that I would like to add as well. The idea of having your camera hooked on a cloud solution only works today because frankly we have a technology problem. Most people will not run their own data caters and the only convenient way of hook up your iPhone to have a continuous data stream is by signing up for a cloud service.
However, I think that will change soon as well. The first company (probably Amazon) which makes cloud technology seamless, i.e. consumers do not think about it, will revolutionise the market for IoT because you no longer have to rely on someone else's infrastructure that you would not trust - obviously you need to trust your cloud provider :) but cloud could be much as ISP - something that most people will sign up for.
If something as simple as a toaster needs software to work around broken hardware, it means the device is defective and should not be used.
esp2866 coast as little as $10 and that is at retail price. From China you can purchase the same device for as little as $3 at retail and bulk orders are probably going to be way less expensive per a single unit.
AWS Lambda will charge you fractions of the cent per million requests and you do not have the operational cost. App Engine is mostly free if you don't have high volume.
Hence in the upcoming years, you will see the adoption of this technology at mass because it is cheep and easy to integrate!
But the IoT in our homes are much more subtle. People don't just buy standalone temperature sensors.
If you see carefully, the IoT wave we're expecting is coming in slowly, bundled with other things. These days most of the appliances which were dumb before, like fridges, coffee makers, security cameras, smoke detectors, washing machines, cleaners (roomba, etc.) and others are now connecting to the internet. I mean, a washing machine connecting to the internet might seem preposterous so some now, but I don't think that'll be the case when they get better.
Along with Alexa, Google Home, the digital assistants that are yet to come have a chance to really change the way people use their devices at home. If they get it right, and not close off communication to their own servers (Which, I sadly see is happening now and doesn't seem like it'll go away) I think there's a real chance they might have a big market.
As another commenter suggested, I expect the incumbent giants will add the IoT functionality to most mid-range consumer products anyway, whether anyone wants them to or not, and then it will be proclaimed a great success, while the consumer will be left utterly in the dark about why their fridge has a wifi symbol on it or what it can be used for. Perhaps it'll be less like 3D printers and more like 3D TV, which has apparently now quietly died a death (I tried it once on my TV, because I work in tech and felt some sort of weird obligation to - I'm sure many people never even tried those stupid 3D glasses that came with their TV).
1. Your oven can cook the pizza in the oven, which will be ready by the time you are home.
2. Your coffee maker can check your location to see if you're in town or not and decide to make coffee.
3. Security cameras can upload video to cloud directly so you can see them from anywhere live. They can be motion activated to alert you so that you can check if it is a dog or a burglar.
4. A fridge which recently came out with a camera which you can check to see what you need to buy[1]. Can be triggered when your location is close to a grocery store.
5. Your smoke detector can send you a notification, turn off the internet connected thermostat and any other appliances. Can turn on the security camera inside so you can check if it's your family burning cookies or house burning down.
6. You washing machine can remind you when your load is done. Can send you reminders that you didn't do laundry for a while.
7. Roomba already does neat stuff that I don't need to explain here.
As I said, the real benefit comes when they all work together. There are custom solutions, but if one can set up everything so that it can track your location/schedule to automate things, that would make for a great increase in quality of life. You won't keep forgetting food in the oven, let the heat bill run up too high, forget your clothes in the washer, and a nice coffee as soon as you wake up.
This might seem insignificant, but I think it's similar to having a very smart housekeeper (although not as capable). Combined with all the data about you, like weight, heart rate, schedule, etc. intelligent systems can work pretty well.
[1]: http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/
2. Lot's of issues, my presence does not determine my need for coffee.
4. Sounds great but in reality you won't be able to see things hidden behind other things or if a sauce bottle is full or empty.
7. What does roomba do that I need apart from a timer?
From your list is seems like we'll have an internet of half working things that everyone turns off after a week because they're more trouble than they're worth.
You can read more about what Roomba can do here[1]. If it isn't for you that's fine. Not everyone needs to buy sauces all the time. Usually just a look suffices.
The problems you talk about aren't against IoT but just the use case I specify here. They're very solvable and there are many more uses than I can talk about.
I'm not a salesman for these products so I just said what came to mind.
When any new technology first comes to market and tries to blow everyone's minds away, it often fails to make the entrance it anticipates because, in your words, "they're more trouble than they're worth". But all they need is some rethinking and time.
When PDAs first came out, my dad scoffed at them and used a large notebook to write down notes. But today that's changed. I think that'll be the same with IoT. We're increasingly moving towards a more electronic home, and that's not stopping anytime soon.
It just needs some time to reach proper attention just like phones did, and we'll have standards (hopefully) which can harness the power of connected devices in your home. As the other commented to GPs reply said, a great factor is energy saving too. Intelligent devices can figure out by themselves when to turn on and off, and that can do a lot of power savings.
I'm not sure if I care about my fridge connecting to the internet, but I did care about the lights being off and not wasting energy, the thermostat being under our control when we were gone, controlling humidity and temp in different rooms, door locks, cameras, and so forth and so on. I suspect that as things like solar panels become more of a standard part of home heating & ac, people will become more concerned about regulating energy use, and so forth. And they won't want to micromanage, manually, they'll want it all networked, the components with each other, with whatever central sources are useful (e.g., the energy utility), and their phones and computers.
The concerns we ran into were really fourfold:
1. Idiosyncratic proprietary standards and lock-in. We wanted to buy lightbulb A from company X without being wedded to them forever, and without worrying about whether or not it would be compatible with thermostat C from company Y. Everyone instead seemed to be trying to lock you into something.
2. Security. Everyone here seems to get why that's important.
3. Autonomy. We ran into problems with the following scenario: what if company Z goes under? What if there's a power outage and we need to control device D without connecting to an outside server? A disturbing number of companies seemed to just suggest you're SOL in those situations, which wasn't acceptable.
4. Throughput/bandwidth/resource use. A lot of these things consumed a surprising amount of energy and/or bandwidth. Maybe not the one lightbulb itself, but all of them together with the routers, etc. to control them. It all seems reasonable until you realize what's involved in having your whole damn house reliably communicating with you 24/7 by first going through some router and possibly outside server.
Please elaborate on how this is possible i.e. what part of the tech would allow for this to happen.
Plus why this tracking would be interesting to retailers or brands.
The book "Why We Buy" gives examples of how manipulating sight lines and visitor flow through stores can increase sales. If you could track visitor paths continuously you could continually optimise your store layout, rather than doing a one-off with outside consultants. Think of it as the offline equivalent of continuous A/B testing.
Aside from its obligatory antagonists, the world presented in it seemed more or less like a utopia. What I really wanted to come true from it was how every device – from doghouses to alarm clocks to ovens – had a standard interface that you could "jack in" to with the "Navi" (AI avatar) in your smartphone-like PET (Personal Terminal)..
In current world terms, ideally that would be like:
• Every electronic appliance will have an standardized wireless interface, with no physical controls other than maybe hard reset/power buttons.
• Whenever you get a new device you'd physically tap it with your phone/wearable to register it on your Apple/Google/Microsoft/other cloud account.
• You'd get different tiers of controls for each appliance based on your physical distance and the level of authentication on your primary phone/wearable. e.g. to unlock your front door you have to be standing right there (like how unlocking a MacBook with Apple Watch works) but you can turn the lights on/off from across the world if you've unlocked your phone and entered your cloud password – and only from that phone.
• Personal Assistants (I hope they get to be called Navis at some point) would be interchangeable and customizable – like ringtones and wallpapers – each with its own visual avatar and personality. You could even have multiple Navis, each with its own duties; a butler-like personality for controlling your home, and a chirpy R2D2-like robot that handles everything else.
We can see some of that happening with Apple's HomeKit and its integration with Siri, and of course their competitors' offerings.
After all, most of you "smart sensors" are actually fairly general purpose computers, and there is no reason why you shouldn't be using all of them, all the time, for computing. Additionally, distributed OSses usually came with secure, low-overhead protocols built-in, which people in the IoT sector seem to be struggling with...
Or the ESP32, which is more money but has more RAM and a little more power, as well as adding Bluetooth. SparkFun has their ESP32 Thing for $20.
Which actually maps pretty well to the two main developers of IoT in my experience, Electronic focused people to Arduino and Sofware focused people to Raspberry Pi.
IoT is basically the convergence of EE, software, and a bit of mechanical engineering. Since there are so many pre-made hardware platforms out there (Arduino, Pi, etc), you can get by only knowing circuit basics.