Written by William Zhou
THE INTERNET OF THINGS
Thermostats that automatically turn off when your car leaves the driveway. Controlling home appliances while sitting at an office desk. Pillshaped micro-cameras that can travel through the digestive tract.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in conversations within business circles. However, despite this fact, according to the Altimeter Group, 87% of consumers have no idea what the term means. So what exactly is the ‘Internet of Things’ and how can this technology fundamentally change our daily lives, businesses and the very way that our economy operates?
what is the internet of things The Internet of Things centres around establishing networks between physical devices through embedded sensors and actuators that collect or transmit information. This allows these devices to communicate directly with each other. The data amassed from these devices is subsequently analysed and interpreted to facilitate the monitoring and managing of the health and actions of the connected objects and machines. Ultimately, this provides for a greater degree of automation, efficiency and optimisation of products, services and operations.
trillion GB of data every year and creating more than $300 billion in opportunities by 2020 for tech vendors, telcos and device makers. The substantial impact of the internet of things upon the economy is illuminated by the fact that, fundamentally, the technology cannot be represented within a single market, but instead covers a range of overlapping markets each with strong connections to data mining and analytics. In order to put this in context, consider the Internet and the fundamental impact it has had upon our world over the past few decades, not only from a technological and economic standpoint but also in the pivotal way it has shaped our social and cultural worlds. Glo-
Over recent years, IoT has stood as the centrepoint of futurism, lauded repeatedly as the ‘Next Big Thing’ from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. In 2015, McKinsey estimated that applications of IoT technology will generate $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion of economic value per year by 2024, accounting for approximately 11% of the world economy. Just two years prior in 2013, the estimate of IoT’s global impact had only stood at $6.2 trillion by 2025. This exponential growth in expectations is not unique, Bain projects 20 billion IoT devices to be manufactured within the next few years, generating 5
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