The Internet of Things is fermenting: are we seeing steam-powered cars or internal combustion engines emerging?
The Internet of Things is fermenting: are we seeing steam-powered cars or internal combustion engines emerging?
In 1900, electric cars and even steam-powered cars outnumbered those using internal combustion engines. This period of "ferment," before a dominant design emerges, is a time of massive uncertainty, with all kinds of variants competing. Once a dominant design emerges, the technology cycle moves on to incremental improvements before the next discontinuity.
A couple of weeks ago I went to Internet of Things Week and saw this ferment phase in action. Particularly around consumer devices and services, we're clearly in a time of competing models and rapid innovation. It's a tricky and an exciting time to launch products. In my talk I went through some examples of the competing ecosystems, each trying to create new layers of standardisation.
The main question is who (which company) has the power? And often this translates directly to: who has the data? Which layers will become commodities that are standardised or open, and which will become marketplaces or proprietary? For instance — look at the marketplace of WordPress plugins, built on WordPress, built on HTTP, built on IP, and all the many products that exist at the interfaces. This is a layered ecosystem that has built over a long period, partly due to the success of the HTTP and HTML protocols in opening up a new digital economy.
Slides available on Slideshare: Connected Products in the Internet of Things
Let's go through a few examples.
There are companies who make "things" — for instance fitness tracking devices like Fitbit, the Jawbone Up band, the Nike Fuelband. Connecting at short-range (e.g., Bluetooth) to their own app on a device, the data goes to their own cloud. They control the majority of the ecosystem including the data, building on top of iOS and Android as both communication hubs to the internet and screen/UI providers.
Another class of things, those typically rooted to a specific location, will supply their own communication hub and bypass the phone — like the Nest thermostat, Ninja Blocks or the Berg Cloud. It is still an ecosystem where one player controls the majority.
Of course you can go with an independent supplier of just the communication hub, who then wrests control of the cloud data away from the thing-makers: Staples Connect, Lowe's Iris, SmartThings, Revolv for instance.
Attempting to leapfrog all of these models are the protocols like Apple's HomeKit or Samsung's Smart Home. Here they own the interconnects but not the things or the hubs or any data in the cloud. There are independent attempts to create standard protocols such as HyperCat for exposing information about "things".
Apple's HealthKit is arguably one of the strongest plays here, with both a protocol and cloud data, a dedicated app but also an ecosystem of apps and devices that can share data. It is a very Apple-centric model but also an attempt to create a large, open marketplace like the App Store. Of course Apple has the best track record here with over 75 billion app downloads to date.
One of the large opportunities here (close to our hearts at the Digital Catapult) is that much of the valuable data being fought over is personal data. In the case of health and fitness tracking, it can be very personal data indeed. We're exploring principles such as minimisation (only the data needed for a specific operation is used) and control (consent must be given for any type of data use, with time limits for instance rather than always in perpetuity). You can take a look at the consultation document for the full story, but it is clear that in the consumer Internet of Things personal data landgrab that's happening now, finding the balance between respecting privacy and gaining economic value is a tricky proposition, and an opportunity for innovation.
Whether or not the Apple, Samsung and Google troika manage to exploit their existing presence to control the new marketplaces is impossible to predict. However the more interesting story will be whether there will emerge new more open systems to pull the personal data out of the corporate silos and back into individual control. I'm with Tim Berners-Lee on this one: it is time to re-decentralize the web.
Originally published at whizzyideas.wordpress.com on July 3, 2014.