The Internet of Things

Red Herring Blog: "Disruptive innovations" via Roland Tanglao:

Every few decades a brew of technologies creates the possibility for not just a single disruptive innovation, or a few in an industry, but a wave spread across business, work, and daily life.

The next brew is simmering.

What are the ingredients? Some are familiar: wireless, XML, GPS, mobile devices. Others are less well known, or still struggling to get out of the lab. Smart dust, cubic-centimeter sized computers. MEMS, which gives computers the ability to sense and react to their surroundings. IPv6, which will allow everything to have an IP address. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which attach data to objects. Flexible LEDs, printed onto plastic sheets and foldable into origami shapes.

Taken individually, these are novelties. Taken together, they promise to create a profound yet extremely simple phenomenon: the collapse of the boundary between the digital and the physical. In the foreseeable future, cyberspace and real space, the worlds of data and things, will merge. Understand the implications of this merger, and you can better understand how individual technologies – and products that use them – will fare in the future.

We're already seeing the beginnings of that breakdown.

Mobile phones show how addictive constant connectivity can be: there's a reason the Finnish call cell phones kanny, an extension of the hand. Wi-fi hot spots and laptops let us enjoy a still-fractured ubiquity, giving a glimpse of an always-on, always-available Web. (As William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Right now, it has an effective range of about 150 feet.)

RFID, sensors, and smart dust are building intelligence into every manufactured object. GPS has moved from the yachting set to weekend hikers and soccer moms (those little bubbles on the roofs of new cars contain GPS locators).

IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, will let stationary objects describe their locations. IPv6-enabled street lamps or traffic signals, for example, could warn utilities when they're about to malfunction; if their Internet addresses were associated with physical locations, they could function as a physical address, letting repairmen pinpoint their locations.

Add it all together, and you get what computer scientists call "the Internet of things." It's a world in which data is part of the world; physical and virtual addresses are associated; things have senses, the ability to communicate, and the capacity to cooperate; and we can create and access information almost anywhere. What happens when computers leave the world, and cyberspace becomes part of it? When we have billions of tiny computers capable of working together? When the Web is experienced not as a separate universe, but an overlay on the world?

We're going to find out.

Connecting all things to all things. And making them smart.

Posted by Flemming at May 6, 2004 06:37 AM | TrackBack