The Internet of Things

I have mixed success as a futurist, but I’m fairly convinced that the Internet of Things and Machine to Machine technologies will be one of the next waves of major technology advances.

My experience at being a futurist is limited and based on personal experience. In the mid ’90s when Web 1.0 became the next platform for Media, I joined a SaaS startup that helped newspapers develop new digital revenue streams with their editorial and classified ad content. When Web 2.0 and social media technologies made it easier for users to share information, my partner and I developed TripConnect, a travel site for sharing travel reviews and questions with your connections and groups believing the more personal experience would gain followers and establish better leads for travel agencies. Social is not just for personal relationships, so I joined BusinessWeek to develop Business Exchange, a website for sharing articles under business topics all prioritized by user activity.

At McGraw Hill Financial, I continue to bring a startup culture, innovation, and entrepreneur mindset to its businesses by transforming IT using a structured Agile Planning and Development practice. So at McGraw Hill Construction, we’ve developed a new set of Big Data Analytics capabilities and products that lets customers – largely building product manufacturers, general contractors, and subcontractors, size their market, target relationships, and prioritize prospects.

I also have some misses. I thought cloud computing was just glorified hosting. My initial impression of the iPad was that it was an iPhone with a larger screen.

IOT Predictions

But when I was asked recently by SearchCIO-Midmarket about my prediction about the next big technology, I responded with the Internet of Things. There are several advancements making this happen, including

• The cost of off the shelf smart, network enabled chips and starter boards has dropped and engineers have options. Examples include Broadcom’s BCM4390 chip to Ayla Network’s IOT starter kit.
• There are many options to connect devices to cloud based, data collection services such as ThingWorx, OpenIOT, Osiot, and ThingSpeak.
• The Machine to Machine standards and development tools are improving including Konetki, OMA-DM
• The availability of Big Data platforms to process the data, and the growing expertise in how to develop algorithms and analytics from the data collected.
• IOT applications span multiple industries and domains, everything from wearable computing, to health care, to smarter cities.

This is my intro post to this topic. So while I’ve covered areas including Agile, CIO Advice, Innovation, Change management, Future of Work, and BigData, today I add IOT to the list.