The real benefits of the Internet of Things seen through the eyes of 3 major players

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a trend that promises to shake up our existence quite dramatically. At least, that's what many tech providers want us to believe.

One might get skeptical about the real need for our fridge to tell us whether the milk inside it is running empty. You might as well open the door and check. Our what about our jogging shoes that keep track of our route and post it real time on our Facebook-page? Surely this would make a fascinating read for all my friends?


All jokes aside, the Internet of Things does much more than that. It could make our energy usage more efficient, monitor the physical environment much closer in order to make smarter use of it, and it could make living in (ever growing) cities more sustainable.


To obtain a better understanding of the potential of the IoT, it's worthwhile to examine the positions of its 3 major players: Cisco, IBM and HP.

Let's start with Cisco. In this clip (if you manage to watch it fully without being distracted by the nerving background music) Cisco focuses on the monitoring function of the IoT (for water usage and health, for instance). Interestingly, it starts with saying the IoT could help to bridge the gap between rich and poor, but does not explain why (well, you'd have to deduce it from what follows).




To IBM the IoT is more something inherent to our lives, and benefiting from it is more a question of getting the wisdom out of all the data collected. In this clip IBM stresses the benefits for personal use of the IoT, although this is part of their generic 'Smarter Planet' project so ultimately would benefit society as a whole. No thorough explanation here neither.



HP communicates on the IoT through a series of interviews with people in HP Labs. Unsurprisingly it stresses the fact that HP has the end-to-end solution for the IoT. To be fair, this is only one of the many interviews one can find on Youtube, and the overarching vision of HP is put in its CeNSE program (Central Nervous System for the Earth) which has already a flagship project with Shell.



So, the IoT has some promises and, as stated in the Cisco video, it has some bottlenecks before it can realize its full potential.

However, there's one aspect that none of these video's reflect. No doubt the trillions of datapoints gathered are of enestimable worth (if analyzed efficiently). But where will it be stored? Who will own this data? Will we have to pay  for using it? If so, we might end with 3 different wireless tags on each product, each of them for different data collectors... this just doesn't make sense...If not, this would mean that all providers should open their database to anyone else. The latter make sense. As stated in the clips above, the real value is not the data itself, but the wisdom we can get from it!