Internet of Philosophy: Municipal

Intro to a Three Parter

Today, I'm going to start a three piece run on three different areas/levels/implementation spaces for the Internet of Things: Municipal, Commercial/Industrial, and Consumer.  For each, I plan on discussing the basics, pros and cons, and a potential guiding philosophy (hence the title) that may help those that build systems within each of these spaces.

I'm doing this because the Internet of Things is too all-encompassing a term.  Too often I read articles that appear to be about smart homes but are really about enterprise implementations.  As I filter my IoT reading for smart homes, it got me wondering how many articles with enterprise or government sounding titles were really about consumer level IoT.  There are no clear cut boundaries and, in the long term, there should not be as everything gets integrated.  But for the nonce (TIL of brit-slang nonce), these systems aren't connected or really working together in any way.

This separation is due mostly to funding.  Is the taxpayer, the stock holders or the private citizen paying for it?  Occasionally, it's all three as is the case with the slow, grinding move towards a smart power grid.  Usually, though, we pay for IoT systems as a member of only one of those groups.

The Internet of Retail

What You Think It Will Look Like

When people talk about the Internet of Things, there are two examples that come to most peoples' minds: big corporate logistics and smart homes.  Those seem obvious.  The first is all about how large corporations keep track of their inventory, automate their supply chain, and cut costs around their energy use (and keep track of their employees via key cards and GPS).  There are easy benefits for all of us to understand: if these large corporations can cut costs, then the products or services that they provide will also be cheaper.  The smart home is similar: easy benefits in convenience, energy savings and security.

However, there is another place where the IoT is taking off: retail.  Here's an example of where they will want to go:

(Minority Report, courtesy of DreamworksSKG and 20th Century Fox)

Minority Report was released in 2002 and we're still a long way off from having that level of (intrusive) personalized, targeted advertising.  But we're getting closer.

Rant: There Shall Be Only One

(Image courtesy of Logitech via Mashable)

Windmill Tilting Badge, Level 1

I am working on my Curmudgeon Merit badges and yelling at a multi-national corporation for stupidity is one that I have not completed until last week.  Then Logitech pissed me off.

The Data of Things

"What do you write about?"

I've been trying to explain this blog to a few people and have been having trouble coming up with a decent elevator pitch.  "The Internet of Things is..." and that's where I get stuck.  In my second post of all time, I tried defining it and ended up with "whatever I say it is."  Which is fine, but maybe not that helpful, even for me.  Today, I want to take another crack at it.

The formal definition if you type "What is the Internet of Things?" into Google is:

"...a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data..."

Grocery Disruption

Last week, the most interesting development in the Internet of Things and the automation of our lives was not how Microsoft plans to let you control your home through their HoloLens or the coming alliance between The Thread Group and The Open Connectivity Foundation.  It's not even the fear of Russians hacking voting booths.  Instead, it is that FarmBot opened for Pre-orders.

(Source: www.Farmbot.io)