The Internet of Things in 2018
11 November 2017
When thinking about the evolution of the Internet and how it will shape 2018, it's clear that we're poised to see significant growth from the umbrella of technology that comprises the Internet of Things. Adoption and converging standards are accelerating this process, but not all will yield large enough near term ROI to justify the spend and qualify them as industry viable. I'd argue that the most promising of these contenders is one that you're obliquely familiar with ... LTE CAT M1 & LTE CAT NB1. By leveraging the 3GPP and influential MNOs such as China Mobile, Vodafone and Verizon, there's a great opportunity to lean on their extensive infrastructure to support IoT projects. A proliferation of inexpensive and open source hardware from vendors like hologram.io will promote the security and spectrum of services required to ensure that both short and long term investments are supported by the world's largest telecoms. We've already seen evidence of success here with Google's Project Fi, and it's not much of a stretch to consider MVNOs for industrial devices and M2M are right around the corner. Such technologies have enabled developing countries to leapfrog physical infrastructure due to lack of capital, instead relying heavily on mobile devices for everything from banking to healthcare. This is key in a connected future. It's fun to watch, both from the inside and out. Grab some popcorn. Some approaches lean heavily on platforms and data as a service, but have no operational capacity to actually deliver the physical component and thus solution. Others provide killer hardware, but lack the vision for how to tie it back to the business problems a connected device is intended to solve. All I have seen in four years of observation is that truly enabling IoT projects requires minimizing the cost of entry (well thought out APIs and SDKs, low cost sensors and hardware) as well as strategic reliance on open standards. I'm reluctant to accept that a "too big to fail" proprietary approach like Thinfilm will make it to maturity, even with 100MM. Where are today's success stories? What about tomorrow's? Let me know on LinkedIn.