‘The Internet of Things is a vision. It is being built today.’¹ This is the simple but bold claim of Council, a European think tank established to manage and consult about the Internet of Things (IoT).

Behind this single statement lie years of complex development and a multiplicity of activities, products and business models which currently pull understanding of the IoT in many different directions.

Depending on how you choose to chart its history, the IoT is at least 23 years old and arguably started with a webcam pointing at a coffee machine.² Enabling a series of streaming images from a camera that could be accessed through a web browser was revolutionary in 1991.

At the time, the coffee cam was generally presented in the popular media as a gimmick, and this first step in an IoT was almost dismissed because the majority of commentators could not imagine any wider application or a viable business model for webcams.

Today webcams are commonplace in the home and business environment as well as regularly being used on traditional television news broadcasts. Most users would not even consider their webcam as part of the IoT.

THE RETROSPECTIVE INTERNET OF THINGS

Perhaps more confusing for understanding the IoT are the two different directions of development that currently showcase the concept to a popular audience.

Currently, the most visible activities around the IoT come from the many projects, including hobbyist and private projects, that set out to create a form of retrospective IoT by adding a unique machine-readable tag of some type onto an existing physical item. Some of these projects, such as Tales of Things for example, take a low-tech approach by adding a QR code onto an item that has a meaning or a backstory. In these projects the IoT is reduced to a one-way communication channel for the broadcast of relatively static information.

Other projects promoting the retrospective IoT offer more dynamic data by incorporating a range of environment sensors into the tags (see for example Estimote) The many variants on these tags generally draw in some way on Apple’s iBeacon technology, which first and foremost focuses on sensing the proximity of other devices at a single – unique – location. The primary application of iBeacon so far has been to push out customised vouchering to suitably activated mobile phones.

What becomes clear when looking at the development of a retrospective IoT is that any unique thing by itself, even if it is online, is of little value. Only a network of sensors and the monitoring of changes in these sensors will produce an interesting and compelling use case for a retrospective IoT. However, a sufficiently large and successful retrospective IoT is yet to materialise.

THE PROSPECTIVE INTERNET OF THINGS

More speculative and still primarily the domain of R&D departments in larger technology companies is the prospective IoT. This is the riskier and more fraught route for development. Misterhouse, a very early home automation system written as a private project, has been in development since 2000 with some interest and installations, but is far from receiving any sort of general acceptance. South Korean electronics company LG also attracted significant headlines in 2000 with its Dios refrigerator.³

Nearly two decades later the world is still trying to understand the benefits of an internet-connected fridge while, silently in living rooms around the world, television sets have become increasingly smart. This quiet change has happened with less emphasis on the device being online and more attention on the increased range of options, content and close integration with things that we already take for granted as being online, such as phones, tablets and laptops.

By stealth and patience, a form of Misterhouse is developing with household devices that actually benefit from being able to ‘talk’ to each other. Over time the Philips Hue Lighting System and other more and more mundane devices will become part of this network of things as the benefits of their interconnectivity is recognised by everyday consumers.

The prospective IoT embeds connectivity into the core of a device. For these things to be offline is almost nonsensical, and when they are offline, they offer a very frustrating user experience.

NASA and Cisco’s Planetary Skin project is exactly the type of IoT that could not be realised even in part without the support of a large technology company. Its concept of creating a planetary network of interconnected sensors is part of the prospective IoT in its ambition, but it is too tied to the ethos of the retrospective IoT in its development to be truly viable.

Perhaps the most challenging and innovative project for the prospective IoT is IBM’s Adept project. The project makes use of the Bitcoin blockchain and BitTorrent as well as a secure communications protocol to enable a more sophisticated, fully communicative IoT.⁴ Embedding the use of a cryptocurrency technology into the system adds something genuinely new to digital things: recognisable exchange value. Integration of things with a currency and giving them a value adds new impetus to the development of a network where real exchange value is built directly into items and, in effect, things are integrated automatically into a familiar economy that can be managed by existing tools and platforms, including Amazon and eBay.

The IoT is being built today. It was being built 20 years ago, and it will still be under construction in 20 years’ time. The challenge right now is to create a small aspect of a prospective IoT that produces real value and benefit. The IoT is not a marketing device and will only be of use when consumers can see its value not just because it is ‘on the internet’, but because it adds genuine benefit to their lives.

REFERENCES

1. IoT Council (2013) ‘Cisco is banking on its expertise in networking to emerge as an integrated player in the Internet of Things’. Available from: http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/anindya-batabyal-cisco-banking-its-expertise-networking-emerge-integrated-player-internet-things [27 March 2017].

2. MIT Technology Review (2001) ‘Coffee Cam’. Available from: http://www.technologyreview.com/article/401059/coffee-cam [27 March 2017].

3. Williams, M. (2000) ‘LG launches Internet Fridge’. Digital Arts. Available from: http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-lifestyle/lg-launches-internet-fridge [24 March 2017].

4. Hajdarbegovic, N. (2014) ‘IBM sees Role for Block Chain in Internet of Things’. CoinDesk. Available from: http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-sees-role-block-chain-internet-things [24 March 2017].