The Internet of Stuff
** The problems with attending conferences you don’t quite fit into…is that you don’t quite fit in :) and organisers have a hard time being able to put a value on what you’re talking about because it might appear a little too far away from what people want to hear about. eComm was definitely like that and I got cut off 2 slides from the end of my talk which prevented me from making a point properly, so I thought I’d write about it here instead. **
If “The Internet of Things” is the answer, what is the question?
I’ve been thinking around this subject for a number of years now and I thought I’d try out another meme: The Internet of Stuff. I think the first expression is starting to sound dated and things have changed since I first encountered the phrase circa 2007 that are making me want a new terminology:
- Things is a term we mostly associate with an inanimate object, something we might have at home, in our kitchen or bedroom, something that’s part of our domestic life more often than not. I saw the reaction to the term in a class at Domus Academy when I was teaching there last month. Domesticity has somehow shaped our idea of what a “thing” is supposed to be and maybe that’s too restrictive. I would like to have intelligence, or sentient capability outside the home. I think the term “stuff” can be a little more of a grey area and include the clothes we wear, the park benches we sit on, the services we use.
- We don’t often include our selves and our devices in the “internet of things” and we think about a system that is in isolation to the current technologies that we use. Something for the future. I think that, as Tom and Matt pointed out, we have developed the ability to track ourselves and use our devices to do so, so why shouldn’t that be part of the equation as well. We can be stuff too in other words. Our devices, things and ourselves should be in direct or indirect communication through the Cloud and those things can be Arduino-enabled, RFID enabled, sensors or actuator enabled or passively recognised with semacodes or other low-tech tools.
Moving forward in this space there is tremendous opportunity for flexible systems where we talk to each other directly, through our things, or our devices talk to us through other devices, etc… Flexible systems mean flexible infrastructures on top of large networks, whether they are radio, cell phone, wifi, 3G, wimax, xbee… and that’s why the large tecos should pay attention. Innovation that happens at an initial small scale of a few Arduinos in a space can then start flooding the network with tiny whispers and conversations between myself, my watch, my bathtub, my mom’s cell phone, her chair and everything else in the middle. The tiny chatter of these systems will have to be funneled and managed somehow so that we can expect the same “stability” as the rest of the basic services. Building a business model around that will be another matter entirely and something that the providers will have to figure out hand in hand with the designers of the services.
