Two page blog post illustrating the advent, state of play and future of Internet of Things (IoT) and the value drivers that make it a disruption.

1. COPYRIGHT 2015 PUBLISHED @ChandanRajah
Rise of the Machines
By Chandan Rajah
Advent
The work conducted at the Auto-ID Centre in Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) on network Radio Frequency Identification (n-RFID) and
distributed sensing inconceivably gave rise to a flurry of activity around
distributed connected devices with primary sensing and communication
capabilities. The community and industry alike eagerly adopted the
technology and soon the term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined.
Parallel to this development, closer to 2005, the open source community
began releasing templates for Single Computer Boards (SCBs) like Arduino
and Raspberry Pi making the technology needed to implement IoT more
accessible to the wider community. Excited by this innovation, hobbyists and
professionals began adopting building prototypes and promoting IoT to the
wider world. The growth of homebrew and start-up IoT devices saw a
significant and steady rise from 10 million in 2003 to about 500 million in
2007.
Smartphones played their part in the evolution of IoT. Connected to the
Internet over a ubiquitous mobile network, smartphones played a vital role in
bringing connectivity to the forefront. Even though smartphones were around
since the 90s (or even early 70s considering the broader definition), the
release of the Apple iPhone in 2007 was the crucial in popularising this
product category. By 2010, the number of devices connected to the Internet,
including smartphones and tablets, rose to 12.5 billion. It was the first time
that there were more devices connected to the Internet than the population of
human beings.
State of Play
Started as solitary devices connected to the Internet, IoT is starting to form
clusters of devices in lightly interconnected singular contexts: a network of

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network of things. Within the esoteric network devices seamlessly connect to
each other while across networks communication is restricted and limited. The
top three context-specific networks are Transport, Energy and Health Care.
They are the early adopters and the creators of large-scale deployments.
Military applications are close behind.
Governments have started to appreciate the importance of IoT and have
begun investing heavily in demonstrators and accelerators for connected
technology. Estimating a surge in IoT market from the current $80 billion in
2015 to a potential $166 billion in 2020, China announced an $800 million
investment programme into the industry thereby setting the price for other
world economies to play. India and Singapore are not far behind actively
investing large sums of money and building the industry rapidly.
The UK and its counterparts in Europe have allocated €80 million to IoT
technology in 2015 accessible through funding competitions like the Horizon
2020 call by Innovate UK.
After Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion, the largest in the IoT
market, Venture Capitalists (VCs) and Angel Investors have started investing in
early stage IoT ventures. Sequoia, closely followed by Intel, has made the
largest non-corporate VC funding deals with Lifx, Simplisafe and Airstrip.
Predictions
The Internet of People (the World Wide Web) evolved in phases. It stared with
research conducted at ARPANET and CERN evolving into to a ‘gold rush’ to
adopt the technology with a large number of services becoming available over
a short span. As it’s service delivery capability matured in the ‘dot-com’
era, companies like Amazon and eBay delivering reliable services became
ubiquitous. The Internet of People has now reached a point where it is woven
into the social fabric and become a platform for non-conventional Internet
services like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.
IoT has just crossed the research phase. It is entering the “gold rush” phase
peaking on the Gartner Emerging Technology Hype Cycle. Customary to its
predecessor, the Internet of People, IoT is poised to enter a phase of mature

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services delivery where value can be realised from an aggregate critical mass
of connected devices.
Predictions suggest that the IoT market would see 50 billion connected
devices by 2020. This is surely a conservative number considering that the
market is growing at 40-50% annually. It is not inconceivable to expect closer
to 100 billion devices by 2020.
The ascension of wearable technology as the face of IoT suggests that
personal connected devices will dominate the world. Yet this may not be the
case, as adoption inertia usually faced by Business to Customer (B2C)
propositions will hamper immediate widespread presence. It is more realistic
to consider institutions and enterprises adopting IoT in large- scale in the near
to medium term.
Predicting which of these institutions and enterprises will be early adopters is
quite impossible. Yet identifying the industries that might derive most value is
feasible. The health care industry, with $800 billion value to be unlocked,
springs to pole position closely followed by military and then traditional
industry sectors like energy, manufacturing and transport. The top value
drivers seem to be clustered around asset (and personnel) tracking, situational
awareness, decision assistance, process optimisation, resource monitoring and
in some cases autonomous systems.
The wider IoT problem is larger than any single enterprise, institution or
consortium purely due to the variety of technologies needed to make the
system and proposition valuable. It is likely that each sub-segment will adopt
IoT independently forming and growing the esoteric network. These networks
will slowly connect with each other forming the network of network of things.
Industry review suggests that the first of many widely used network of
network will appear in the next 3 to 5 years.