In hindsight it’s always easier to find the connections that made something possible. The causes are often more evident and the shift can be segmented into easily definable parts when we pay attention to what’s been happening. The technology revolution has had a clear trajectory. When we view the two phases we’ve already been through, we’ll see that the third phase is quite predictable. Not predictable in terms of who will win in the new market segment, but predictable in terms of where the technology itself will go.

The phases

We’ve already lived through two distinct phases of the web from a commercial and a human perspective. The first was the connection of infrastructure and the second was the connection of people. But now, we’re entering a third, and most interesting, phase: the web of things. The web of things can be defined as a world where the web becomes so omnipresent that it becomes mostly invisible. It will be a world where everything and everyone is augmented via technology and our connection to both computing power and the network itself. You may be asking why anyone would want this and how it could relate to business, but before we do that, it’s worth considering how we got here as this will uncover why the web of things is a natural evolution.

Evolution at warp speed

The law of accelerating technology returns doesn’t just apply to tools, but also to the overriding ecosystems that the tools make possible. Each stage of progression is more accelerated than the previous one. Each phase has a shorter life expectancy than the previous phase. It took us about forty years to build and connect machines. It took us only a little more than 15 years for people to be plugged into the system. The phase of the web of things will be shorter again. When the profit motive and significant personal benefits conspire, the world changes quickly. This shouldn’t be very surprising given that everything we’ve witnessed in the dawn of the technology age has arrived much more quickly than we would have expected. From an historical perspective, technology and its impact on our species is now evolving at warp speed. It’s something we see and even feel in our skin. But it, the technology, has its own agenda, so it won’t stop. The hardware we need for an effective web of things is not here yet. The technology is full of flaws, and the biggest of these is that it’s currently too demanding of us.

Inventing and stealing time

While the convenience of the smartphone is addictive and amazing, it has some clear negative effects on our being. It pretty much owns us, and we serve it. We probably haven’t been as obsessed with gadgets as we are now at any point in history. There’s been a dramatic shift over the past decade in the way we interact with technology. Even in the early days of the web, we used to visit our desktop computer when we needed it. Now, it comes with us and interrupts us all day long. On average, we interact with our smartphone 150 times a day.¹ Rewind to the gadget innovation of last century — the good old 1900s — and we see a different story. Gadgets from the industrial era invented time.

Now let’s take our minds to the gadgets we employ today: iPods, Nintendo DS, smartphones, tablets, laptops, gaming consoles, TiVo and so on. Sure, some are extremely useful, but they tend to take more time away than they invent. They give a little at first; then they take a lot. It’s almost as though they take us into a wormhole of exploration that eats up more than the efficiency they create. Gadgets from the digital era steal time.

This has started to make me wonder about the time we give to our gadgets. Do we own them, or are they starting to own us? I think the challenge of technology today is about understanding how we use these tools. Are we using them to consume or to create? Will we use them to create output, or be constantly giving them all of our input? For me, this is a vital question where time is our most important asset. It’s an even bigger question for entrepreneurs. The difference we make is largely a function of what we create. And in order to create something we increasingly need to pay attention to the devices around us and ensure we’re in control of them, not the other way around.

Immature technology

Considering how gadgets control our lives, to a degree, is a reminder of how immature mobile technology currently is. It’s a bit like a baby that needs to be cared for, caressed and interacted with all day long so it can survive. It’s not very independent yet. We have to remember that the commercial internet is still a teenager. It was 19 years old in 2014, a mere adolescent working out what it wanted in life. It’s a child we love and have great hopes for, but at the moment it’s a bit annoying and it sucks up a lot of our resources.

The web of things

Our connected technology needs to split into smaller fragments to provide a more independent function, just as our industrial gadgets did. The fragmented nature of the web of things will enable technology to get on with its job of augmentation without needing our attention. It will be a welcome relief and will make technology more human than it currently is. Maybe our ears will become the killer app (for humans), instead of our hands and eyes, as in the movie Her. In this movie the interactions are largely verbal and without many screens. Screens are only present when needed via a head-up display or holographic image. The screens themselves as a form of hardware are no longer. For the web of things to flip to a service rather than a burden it needs to be more like the movie Her and less like the movie Minority Report. It needs to be the bellwether for screen redundancy. The next stage for the ‘thingternet’ is for it to become invisible. It has to be more like electricity, water and gas are in our homes, in business and in modern civilised geographies in general. Companies that enable and promote this shift will be the biggest beneficiaries of the third phase of the web. It’s early days and the prize is big.

thingternet: ‘the web of things’; a world where everything in it is connected to the internet

It’s already begun

The web of things isn’t something that’s coming. It’s already here. The number of everyday items augmented by web connectivity is astounding. Even when we look at our own homes, we can see the momentum building: personal technology and gadgets, cars, bicycles, televisions, white goods, light globes, thermostats, athletic shoes, clothing, pillows, beds, door locks, toys and wearables — not to mention our phone (the smart hub).

Will everything be connected?

We know from technology deflation, which was discussed in chapter 7, how cheap the augmentation of technology has become. Many of the widgets used to create this connectivity are cheaper than the packaging they’re sold in. A radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip, for example, is cheaper than the glass bottle Coca-Cola comes in. Other more complex connectivity elements come at the cost of a few dollars. The price of technology is not the issue. If we add to this people’s desire for everything to be connected to the web, there’s no stopping it from becoming a mainstream communications phenomenon that will dwarf the impact of the social web. After all, a web of things has more direct financial implications and monetisation potential because it’s the ultimate in direct marketing. Being in constant contact changes so much.

We do need some perspective here, though, as it’s easy to get a bit over-excited and assume that everything anyone could or will buy will be part of the web of things. However, this is one time when some excitement is justified. Let’s take the following audit of a home:

• Every water, gas, electricity and plumbing outlet (our shower, toilet and kitchen appliances) will measure and send data.
• Every product in the fridge, cupboard and bathroom medicine cabinet will be connected (mostly through packaging) and be able to provide data. The fridge, cupboard and bathroom will also know what’s in them.
• Every piece of furniture, and every entry and exit point to the home will be connected. We’ll have live, HD-quality cam feeds in every room on demand.
• Every toy will augment our children’s playtime and provide peace of mind to helicopter parents.
• Every piece of sporting equipment will provide valued performance feedback to the weekend warrior (we already do this with our phones).
• The building materials in new houses and gardens, such as hoses and web-screen windows, will provide home hacking data.
• Municipality garbage bins will have detectors in them ensuring the web-enabled packaging of trash goes in the correct bin.

You get the picture. It’s the same for retail, the city, the country, the office and the sporting club. It’s all going to be connected.

Then what?

The job of business owners then becomes not about deciding whether it will happen to their industry or product, but about how these ‘aware’ products can help the end user get more value because of the connection. In much the same way that smart brands quickly dreamed up ways of benefitting a connected audience on social channels, smart industries need to quickly dream up ways of benefitting people through connected things. How can they help them save energy, money and time; provide feedback; give life-hacking suggestions; and cross-reference data with other services? How can they create a mutual benefit for the brand, the end user and the community? That’s the emerging job of marketers.

Everything can and will be connected, unless of course the item’s brand proposition is that it’s ‘deliberately not connected’.

What’s first?

The connected home we spoke about above and the quantified self will provide the seeds of belief and value for everyone to embrace the web of things. The connected home and the quantified self can be defined as technology that tracks our human movements, providing data and feedback on what we do physically. Many popular smartphone apps already play in this space. The benefits we see from using gadgets such as fitness-tracking apps for quantifiable feedback are indisputable. Their popularity will provide a Trojan horse for more personal, and in some ways invasive, tracking into our lives.

The physical mash-up

Connecting things matters because seemingly separate worlds start to collide. Disruptions caused by the technology revolution start to overlap and interact in ways we may not imagine. Connected ‘stuff’ has an impact on where we live and work, our shopping, retail distribution, media feeds, pricing algorithms, and on product distribution and manufacturing in a non-linear way. A world that knows what’s in it, who’s using what and where everything is, changes the face of commerce. It creates great layers of overlapping knowledge, and in doing so, changes what becomes important in commerce. Previously irrelevant industries and data points become a new core focus of an industry.

Let’s take the connected toilet, which will have myriad sensors with the quality output of a diagnostic laboratory and could analyse all human refuse. It will tell someone they’re about to get sick before they show any symptoms and it will have a DNA digital signature of each household member to warn of potentially life-threatening illnesses. A connected toilet could do this without people having to change a single life habit. It would just do it. Who wouldn’t want to get an early detection of cancer? All of a sudden toilet manufacturing becomes an important business alliance for the medical industry.

As we saw with the social web, the power comes from the mash-up. Instead of mashing up the virtual to create new output, we’ll start to mash up the physical through these connections to create new value and meaning. Consider these:

• The fridge becomes important to packaged goods manufacturers.
• Your wardrobe matters to clothing brands.
• The television (or screen) senses what’s in the house and serves up specific and relevant media based on purchase frequencies and the products the house has in it.

Marketing becomes more a task of non-linear mash-ups than it does about vertical supply chain selling and price-based distribution models.

If-this-then-that living

The benefits of all of this won’t be the soul domain of the commercial brands and technology providers. As with anything that hopes to change the nature of how we live, the benefits in the first instance need to be human or the technology won’t disseminate. Simplified apps are already emerging that give non-techies super-tech powers. The average person can code without coding and program the world around them without any programming skills.

One of the stand-out services that already does this, is IFTTT — which is an acronym for ‘If This Then That’ — and it pretty much does exactly what it says. The application enables users to mash up recipes, or condition statements as they are known in the geek world, which automatically makes one thing happen when something else ‘triggers’ an event. While the service first entered the market by providing a tool for certain social media to interact with, it’s now entering the web-of-things space and already interacts with a number of hardware providers. The way services such as IFTTT will be used is by linking various web services and hardware devices so they talk to each other by instructing one connected device to undertake a certain action or output when a predetermined event occurs on that or another device. IFTTT is the start of the new world we program around us, and all we need to be able to do is read. As with social media, the tools were democratised to the simplest human operator level, so previously complex and industrial-level controls will be in the hands of everyone. This has the potential for amazing life hacks; for example, adding seasonal citrus fruit to the shopping list when the toilet data says vitamin C levels are below the optimal level.

life hack: any procedure or action that solves a problem, simplifies a task or reduces frustration in everyday life²

Ambient sharing

What we currently share socially is a small portion of the sharing we’ll do when ubiquitous computing arrives. We won’t just share what we think and portions of our social lives. We’ll share our entire physical graph of movement and consumption. What smart businesses will do, is connect what they sell and open up or hand over the software-development ecosystem to the crowd to see what they can build. To benefit from a connected world, businesses need to let go of perceived control and hand the brand over to the audience in the same way traditional media should have — but didn’t — when social media arrived.

The connected home, the quantified self, two-way loyalty, gamification and real data will usurp demographic profiling and marketing guessing games forever. But getting to that phase requires companies and brands to have trust in the potential or organic commercial ecosystems. They will have to trust that the opportunity can’t be totally strategised or foretold and just needs to be embraced. It will be a bit like walking in the fog: we won’t be able to see the end of the trail, but as we move forward more of the path will become clear. It will take a non-predictive mindset, one that’s curious to unknown possibilities.

As the people shaping the connected world (entrepreneurs and corporations alike), we now have a chance to invent the commercial implications of the inevitable web of things. The social web has now connected us and introduced a new era for startups, so we should take the lead and create physical-goods mash-ups and value equations that couldn’t exist in a world without connectivity. And as for the social web, we’ll only ever know what people want to track, share and do when the tools are put in their hands.

When people are able to track something, they start keeping score. We can’t help but turn things into a game. While it’s true that business is already a game, the gaming mechanics of industry are about to enter an entirely new era.