Consumer and Business: How IoT is Transforming Life and Commerce
The Internet Revolution has transformed the way humans search, consume and share information by connecting computers all around the world. Similarly, the Internet of Things (IoT) connects physical devices to the digital world using sensors and data to augment the way people live, work, entertain travel, and even how government organizations and businesses interact.How?
One would agree that a smart way of going about one’s life or business would be one in which there is greater awareness about the multitudes of processes and events that occur in our physical world. Greater awareness is quite often the result of gathering smarter, real time data about these processes and events that result in smarter decisions and better administration. IoT devices are poised precisely to provide us with this crucial awareness of our physical world.
Ok, what is IoT?
At its core, the IoT is a technology to integrate the digital and physical worlds via a communication medium such as the Internet. Every object has a state that is expressed with different attributes like time, heart rate, temperature, speed, location, and others. IoT devices have sensors to capture these states, or changes in states over a period of time and record them as comprehensive data sets accessible remotely, via the internet. This data can be analyzed to provide factual information. By further processing this information through smart analytics, actionable insights can be delivered. IoT’s revolutionary potential lies in this capability to capture data from everyday sources to provide actionable intelligence; a transformational power that previously existed only in the realm of human imagination.
What is fueling this innovation?
Driven by the growing efforts to bring all
electronic devices into the digital fold and the ever-increasing network bandwidth availability per person, the IoT ecosystem is growing significantly and in tandem with industry predictions. Even rapid developments in hardware technology creating faster, smaller yet cheaper sensor and processor chips have enabled IoT to capture, communicate and control a myriad of connected physical devices from digital interfaces. More over, with Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence scouring the sensor data collected for deeper correlations, IoT is here to facilitate data-led decision making for not just businesses, but also consumers.
Consumer Vs Businesses:
Consumer IoT is hot right now with a plethora of startups offering a host of new devices on the market, ranging from smart watches for activity and fitness level tracking, picture sharing, emails, status alerts and text messages - to consumer drones like the Dji Mavick that might just be small enough to fit right into your pocket. For those things that might just be small enough to lose - like keys and wallets, there are Bluetooth enabled item trackers to help find such items. IoT has enabled the 'Connected Home' to become a reality, and as a consequence minimized human effort with inventions such as smart refrigerators that can pre-order groceries through eCommerce. Gadgets such as Amazon Echo Dot and Google Nest represent just the first generation of IoT products, with the best of IoT devices yet to come.
Businesses have been invested in IoT, long before the consumer understanding matured. Most of the innovations here have happened as modern iterations of the traditional SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. Companies like John Deere, Maersk, FedEx and AT&T have end-to-end IoT integrations for industries such as agriculture, global logistics, security, asset tracking and more. The value proposition here is typically a result of reducing costs or increasing revenue. Internal cost reduction can then be turned into a service or product offering. Revenue generation can be increased by enhancing current products or services or by offering completely new products or services through innovative new business models that are often empowered by the unique data and actionable insights that IoT devices can provide in enterprise settings.
India too, is at the forefront of leveraging as much value from this technological revolution as the rest of the world with as many as 800 startups working on delivering the next big innovation in this arena. Although the majority of these startups are mostly working on wearable and connected home solutions, there is a sizeable minority focused on offering enterprise IoT solutions. India has witnessed a major digital push in the last couple of years under transformational projects like Digital India, Smart Cities and Startup India. IoT will also play a vital role in helping the Government’s vision of turning India into a digital empowered society and knowledge economy, for which the Government of India will fund research and development for specific applications in IoT. However, in spite of the gaining popularity of IoT among Indian enterprises, government and consumers, security concerns and the lack of trust is limiting its adoption in the short run.
Consumer Vs Businesses:
Consumer IoT is hot right now with a plethora of startups offering a host of new devices on the market, ranging from smart watches for activity and fitness level tracking, picture sharing, emails, status alerts and text messages - to consumer drones like the Dji Mavick that might just be small enough to fit right into your pocket. For those things that might just be small enough to lose - like keys and wallets, there are Bluetooth enabled item trackers to help find such items. IoT has enabled the 'Connected Home' to become a reality, and as a consequence minimized human effort with inventions such as smart refrigerators that can pre-order groceries through eCommerce. Gadgets such as Amazon Echo Dot and Google Nest represent just the first generation of IoT products, with the best of IoT devices yet to come.
Businesses have been invested in IoT, long before the consumer understanding matured. Most of the innovations here have happened as modern iterations of the traditional SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies. Companies like John Deere, Maersk, FedEx and AT&T have end-to-end IoT integrations for industries such as agriculture, global logistics, security, asset tracking and more. The value proposition here is typically a result of reducing costs or increasing revenue. Internal cost reduction can then be turned into a service or product offering. Revenue generation can be increased by enhancing current products or services or by offering completely new products or services through innovative new business models that are often empowered by the unique data and actionable insights that IoT devices can provide in enterprise settings.
India too, is at the forefront of leveraging as much value from this technological revolution as the rest of the world with as many as 800 startups working on delivering the next big innovation in this arena. Although the majority of these startups are mostly working on wearable and connected home solutions, there is a sizeable minority focused on offering enterprise IoT solutions. India has witnessed a major digital push in the last couple of years under transformational projects like Digital India, Smart Cities and Startup India. IoT will also play a vital role in helping the Government’s vision of turning India into a digital empowered society and knowledge economy, for which the Government of India will fund research and development for specific applications in IoT. However, in spite of the gaining popularity of IoT among Indian enterprises, government and consumers, security concerns and the lack of trust is limiting its adoption in the short run.
