Internet of Things

The growing topic of The Internet of Things reinforces how time flies by quickly (and how quickly technology evolves). This reminds me of when I watched a Disney movie called “Smart House”, which was released in 1999. The movie is about a family who won a fully computerized house, called “Pat”, who eventually took on a life of its own as an overbearing, controlling mother. I loved that movie because everything about the house, at that time it was released, seemed too good to ever be a reality –it felt like it will be “forever” until such a world exists. Yet, a lot of tech in that movie is now the available today: for instance, Pat the computer house, responded to people with weather updates and much more, and today, such actions are now do-able with devices such as Alexa from the Amazon Echo.

Companies that take advantage of the opportunities developed from the IoT stand to gain against competitors that don’t – and this competition continues to evolve as companies are challenged with new ways of creating value for the customer. Companies that are not up to speed with the growing converged and interlinked world will fall because these companies would fail to meet buyers’ expectations (that may also drive their “need” for purchases/services). These companies need to fundamentally shift their mindset about value creation and value capture with the IoT (and essentially, create innovative business models): for instance, in the traditional product mindset: companies solve for existing needs and lifestyle in a reactive manner, single point data is used for future product requirements, and control points potentially include commodity advantages and brand. However, with the IoT, customer needs, the role of data, and control points differ: IoT addresses real-time and emergent needs in a predictive manner, information convergence creates the experience for current products and enables services, and personalization and context are added (network effects between products).

Companies that want to build their IoT strategy can gain valuable insights from studying IoT solutions that are already in play. For instance, companies can track for on-web behavior of their customers to enrich marketing analyses and forecasts. Companies can also simply monitor and/or adjust the temperature of building thermostats remotely as part of an energy conservation and facility maintenance procedure. Shipment containers bearing perishable goods can be environmentally monitored and controlled, with sensors issuing alerts if temperature or humidity ranges are exceeded. GPS data aggregation is also widely used IoT data collection method – companies can pull in demographic data, weather data, infrastructure data, pictorial data, and another other type of data that can be pinned to a specific geographic location. Film industries can use drones to shoot aerial scenes without the need for human-operated cameras and use other