Internet of Things Applications

It is pretty much a given that social, economic, and political forces shape the demand for new technologies. Demography is “destiny” in the sense that the demand for new products and services depends on the number of people and on their ages, genders, locations, and cultural heritages. Economics also matter because the arrangement of economic activities and the amount and distribution of wealth affords some people the opportunity to purchase new goods and services while constraining the ability of others. Politics plays a messier role by providing ways for incumbents to hinder the entry of competitive new technologies and at the same time allowing enthusiasts opportunities to direct subsidies to favored options.



Many frustrated technologists with Libertarian sympathies agree with Sir Ernest Benn (in a quote that is widely misattributed to Groucho Marx) who said that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” Others look skeptically at the evolving direction of technology and desire political interventions to protect security, safety, health, and human dignity.

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This brings the story back to politics. When technological innovations begin to diminish our lives, people react. They demand protections, regulations, and public oversight. Savvy technologists anticipate this dynamic and work hard to design the undesirable features out of the system, impose codes of conduct to discourage malfeasance, and avoid unsavory business models. Yet self-regulation has limits, especially in a global context lacking universal norms. Governments need to backstop self-regulation with strong legal liability laws and clear regulations that prohibit bad behavior. When governments themselves are the problem, their citizens need to step into the voting booth or onto the street to redirect society’s institutions.



Calls for governmental intervention and political action are rarely welcomed in tech circles, where more Libertarian views often prevail. However, politics is clearly part of the toolkit for ensuring that the IoT and other innovations improve the human condition. Good design, strict professional norms, and honorable business practices play key roles, but so do tort liability and governmental regulation, as well as social protests and political action. Creative leaders as diverse as architect Frank Gehry and writer Ernest Hemingway (who never had quotes misattributed to Groucho Marx) uniformly agree that constraints drive genius. This outcome has also been confirmed in technology development, so those creating the IoT should embrace its emerging political constraints.

See more at: iotevolutionworld.com

Finding a way to adequately serve firms in the internet of things (IoT) space is the next area customer relationship management (CRM) providers need to target, according to electronics giant Schneider Electric.



“We want to make the IT and IoT world converge with a lot of customer context. If you have a lot of data generated without context, you cannot sell to a customer in a great way. It’s about connecting the dots so you better know the usage of buildings and devices,” Christophe Blassiau, senior vice president for customer experience and CRM at Schneider told the Sunday Business Post.

Blassiau made the comments at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual gathering in San Francisco which is attended by 170,000 people.

Tony Wells, senior vice president for marketing in North America with Schneider, said he expected artificial intelligence (AI) to play a pivotal part in bridging the gap.

“Being able to take the velocity, variety, and volume of this data being generated and being able to make sense of it is crucial. AI is going to play a role to work out what data really matters. There’s a huge amount of value that can be extracted from data but it has to provide benefits to customers and to us as a brand,” said Wells.

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Wells said this increase in customer demand had also presented challenges and opportunities from a marketing perspective.

“Customers aren’t coming to the company they buy from first when they are making a purchasing decision, they are usually 70 per cent of the way down. For us it’s about finding the right salesperson who can call on that salesperson and respond to their inquiries as quickly as possible,” said Wells.

See more at: businesspost.ie

The term Internet of Things (IoT) brings to mind the stereotypical image of a working woman who triggers the cooker at home as she leaves office to drive back home or a refrigerator which sends a replenishment note to a grocer as soon as it senses some of the frequently required items such as milk or butter are exhausted. Given the numerous possibilities which IoT can inspire, many large product companies have already embarked on programs to build IoT compatibility into their existing or new products.



What is IoT?
The Smartphone as a device of communication is an IoT device and knowingly or unknowingly we have already been using it. IoT enables each device or thing to communicate with other devices or things and perhaps be directed or direct the actions of other such devices.

An IoT enabled device must have a built in microcomputer and suitable sensor devices which will sense /capture important parameters in real life. In addition, it must have access to and be identifiable with a unique IP address. Increasingly, there are standard electronic communications modules available which could be connected to any device which you wish to enable them for IoT. The costs of such modules and standardized interfaces may seem a bit high as of now but this situation will certainly improve with increased demand and availability.

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IoT makes the owner omnipresent
in most food cooking and retail businesses such as a cookie/bakery stores, the owner is required to formulate an hourly forecast and plan the production accordingly .This plan has to be adjusted based on the day of the week, time of the day , cultural and religious sensitivities , seasonal variations as well as actual walk-ins into the shop. When the owner is away, the ability of the team to replicate such expertise becomes a challenge. IoT can help the owner to encapsulate his expertise in the form of business rules into the bakery systems which allows his team to exercise their judgment but within bounds and send alerts to the owner in cases of deviations and exceptional situations. The owner’s expertise is thus at hand at all times irrespective of his location. MSME with multi-locational operations can thus benefit immensely from the owner’s expertise.

IoT and autonomous systems
The machines learn with every transaction, production or service experience. This means that the encapsulated business rules in the controller attached to the machine can be changed based on new experiences. The communication between the machine, sensors, business rules engines and the machine learning algorithms on a central server all interact thanks to IoT. Add to this the ability of the machine to initiate actions on its own and we have ‘autonomous machines’ and in a larger sense processes and systems which can run on their own like the autopilot of an aircraft.

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In Conclusion
MSMEs can now manage their resources efficiently and effectively, create smarter products and build smarter services using the power of the IoT and associated technologies. The challenge of scalability and replicability of the owner’s experience and personal skills which are perhaps the biggest concerns among MSMEs can be dealt with quite effectively by IoT. Finally, IoT itself is a great opportunity for innovation and new product/service/business models. A proactive move in this direction would ensure that MSMEs find the path to growing into a dominant component of the emerging ‘Smart’ economy.

See more at: forbesindia.com

This week, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced it has sold more than 10 million Raspberry Pi boards and celebrated the milestone by releasing a new Raspberry Pi Starter Kit. While many of these Linux-driven hacker boards were used for the foundation’s original purpose -- creating a low-cost computer for computer education -- a large percentage have been sold to hobbyists and commercial developers working on Internet of Things (IoT) projects ranging from home automation to industrial sensor networks.



Linux-driven open source and commercial single board computers and modules sit at the heart of the IoT phenomenon. They are usually found in the form of gateways or hubs that aggregate sensor data from typically wirelessly enabled, sensor-equipped endpoints. Sometimes these endpoints run Linux as well, but these are more often simpler, lower-power MCU-driven devices such as Arduino-based devices. Linux and Windows run the show in the newly IoT-savvy cloud platforms that are emerging to monitor systems and analyze data fed from the gateways in so-called fog ecosystems.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be analyzing the IoT universe, with a special focus on Linux and other open source technologies used in home and industrial automation. I’ll look at major open source products and projects, IoT-oriented hacker boards, security and privacy issues, and future trends.

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See more at: linux.com

Builders of the Internet of Things (IoT) have long promised consumers a more convenient future: We will all live in “smart homes” where surveillance cameras, thermostats and garage door openers will turn on and off automatically, our groceries will order and deliver themselves into our refrigerators, and our speakers will know our taste in music. In our “smart cities,” always-on surveillance systems will crack down on crime and sensor-driven roadways will put an end to traffic.



Yet this hyper-efficient, IoT-fueled future is years away and plenty of pundits and investors are talking about consumer IoT as a too-hyped trend that’s failing to take off. According to a 2016 Accenture survey, consumer demand for smartphones and IoT devices is stalling. So why aren’t consumers snapping up the new technology?

Industry insiders say the barrier is a lack of standards: connected devices can’t talk to each other, and each device comes with its own app, rather than being managed from a single point of control. Others think jargon-y marketing is to blame: Consumers still scratch their heads when they hear “Internet of Things.”

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The potential power of IoT is truly awe-inspiring, but in order to boost sales and drive demand beyond the early adopter set, we need to stop making toys no one cares about and instead work on building simple solutions to real, everyday problems for real people.

See more at: forbes.com

There is no hotter tech sector right now than the Internet of Things (IoT). Everybody and anybody who is offering an internet connected device has an IoT story. As with many hot technology markets, there comes a lot of noise and confusion. Just in the consumer IoT market alone, there are multiple competing platforms and not all of them enable devices to interconnect with each other. In the industrial IoT (IIoT) market, not only are there competing platform vendors, but there are many industry organizations trying to define IIoT interoperability. Confused yet? Just wait…

Now, when we start to talk about security, there is even more confusion on where to get started and how to implement a security strategy. There are no fully defined or adopted standards, or security architectures for either consumer IoT or IIoT today. Many consumer IoT device manufacturers are sacrificing strong security measures to get devices to market. This could create serious issues down the road if vulnerabilities are exploited and devices cannot be secured. In the IIoT market, industry groups such as the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and Trusted Computing Group (TCG) are actively working with security vendors on frameworks for IIoT security. But, these frameworks are still in the early stages and interoperability will need to be tested and addressed before they can be fully rolled out and implemented.

Before I discuss how you can get started with an IoT security strategy today, I just want to reiterate why we want to connect things. The benefits are simple – greater access, control, efficiency and optimization. When everything is connected and communicating, things work together, we can access these things from everywhere and anywhere and collect, share and analyze data to better manage our homes, our health, our cars, the environments where we work and operations of industry. All of this connectivity leads to higher performing systems, cost savings and new revenue streams.

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In order to go to market today, IoT device manufacturers need to begin implementing security in the early design phases of their products. Security can no longer be an afterthought as it has in the past with so many legacy connected device and products. Trying to retrofit security into devices already in use can be difficult, costly and a burden on the users.

Key benefits of building identity in from the start:
- Gain a Competitive Advantage – Build identity into your IoT devices and services to leverage secure functionality as a competitive advantage.
- Offer a Superior User Experience – Make security and identity easy to offer your customers provides a positive user experience.
- Brand Reputation and Integrity – Assure products and software code are legitimate. Don’t let counterfeit products and malware impact your brand.
- Privacy and Safety Ensured – Ensure sensitive data remains private and the safety of your customers and users is not jeopardized by a malicious attack.

See more at: globalsign.com

You hear a lot of people talking about how great life will be when cars drive themselves and the Internet of Things is fully deployed. But while many of us dismiss this chatter as background noise, one industry is paying close attention and champing at the bit to get started.

Yes, of course, it's the advertising industry. After all, when cars drive themselves, you'll have more time to look at the ads that will be popping up on strategically located screens. Your refrigerator will automatically order almond milk, egg whites, and fat-free butter while it tries to get you to try a new kind of genetically engineered hot dog.

Right at the moment, the advertising trades are obsessing over self-driving taxis and dreaming of the contextual ad possibilities they present.

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Or as Hewitt put it in his interview with the Daily:

“Not too far into the future the ads will be contextually presented and may also be served up as bite-sized services instead of just targeted display advertising.”

If everything works out as planned, it will be just like having a little person on your shoulder, constantly nagging you to do all the things your favorite brands want you to do.

See more at: consumeraffairs.com