I’m now involved in a new project in the M2M arena, or the Internet of things, the newly coined name by Cisco’s Chief Futurist Dave Evans. I constantly come across the projections of 50 billion connected devices by 2020 in everything from all your appliances being accessed through a facebook-like application where you can get your refrigerator to order your groceries while you’re driving home and your roomba having vacuumed your floor at the same time, to smart meters ensuring energy efficiency, and health monitors allowing your mother to age with dignity in her own home just to name a few.
But I am also finding that there are still many hurdles that need to be overcome to make this future a reality. For now, I can’t even really figure out how to get my mom to be able to use one of the new tablets seamlessly. She doesn’t have Wifi at home, and I don’t really want to spend additional $50/month on a 3G or LTE data plan! My last Verizon bill was already $500 because I went to Europe with my Global Droid and had to pay $2.95 per minute of voice time and $.50 per text! Whatever happened to that free Wifi everywhere idea that I remember hearing about several years ago?
But I digress. The real problem is how to make all the disparate devices communicate and transmit data in standardized fashion and how to make real sense of the data into information that will help enterprises with their processes and show them that there is real ROI in implementing these costly integrations of sensors, gateways, networks and finally software applications. Oh and yes, having a billing system for it all that somehow makes sense would probably help too!
Magda Remillard 