Imagine a morning when you’d wake up hearing the alarm preset to your mood. Kudos to the device where you keep track of your to-do lists, upcoming appointments, events, contacts etc. that makes it possible to predict your mood through a sophisticated algorithm. All the home appliances you have installed would know in advance when you are about to enter your home or leave, and take necesssary anticipatory steps to enhance convenience and reduce wastage. In a typical Internet of Things (IoT) world, you won’t feel like interacting with any machine, be it a TV or a car. Who loves dealing with machines anyway? Especially when they are not smart enough to understand your needs.
IoT (also known as machine-to-machine communication) is a concept that can free human beings from the boring tasks of operating machines. In an IoT-enabled world, machines will be self-sufficient to operate on their own. Once programmed, they won’t need human interactions any more except for troubleshooting malfunctions. According to Wikipedia, Internet of Things is a network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to enable it to achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator and/or other connected devices; each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure.
Till date most of the progress in the IoT space has largely been in advanced economies. A study by Cisco Systems shows that transitioning home appliances alone to an IoT world can lead to $4.6 trillion in value creation within the next decade. The poster child of IoT success, Nest, was recently acquired by Google for $3 billion.
Technology in general is no longer a sector that is limited by geographical boundaries. A certain technology can start in one place and rapidly evolve in other countries. For instance, micro payment is something that was first introduced in developed economies (e.g. PayPal). It was later transformed into mobile payments in developing countries like Kenya and Bangladesh, and found phenomenal market success. We believe IoT won’t be much different. Though it has been conceived and nurtured in the context of a developed economy originally, some adaptation of IoT applications could very well find similar success in developing economies. The question is how and when. With the rapid growth and interest in IoT space globally, it is not long before they begin to show up in our lives.
The need, however latent, exists for sure. Applications across multiple sectors including electricity, health, payment, security, agriculture etc. are quite possible in mid to long term. Controlling the air conditioner remotely can make one’s life much easier and optimize energy consumption. IoT devices capable of sensing the environment of the room temperature, humidity, people’s movement etc., can save energy by electronically regulating power. Tracking health metrics through various wearable gadgets is something that has already become popular among smartphone users. Personal medical history can be recorded in cloud; that can be leveraged whenever required. Sensor based farming in agriculture can make traditional processes more efficient and productive.
We have seen large uptake of mobile apps in the local market in Bangladesh over the last few years. Not only has it grown by the number of users, a large pool of app developers have emerged. If we think about real world applications, IoT in some way could be viewed as mobile apps in the hardware space. And if we can serve the global mobile apps market from Bangladesh, there is no reason why we couldn’t do that for IoT devices.
There is one important dimension to keep in mind when we think about IoT. In the marriage of the atoms and bits that IoT represents, privacy issues will become a key factor for consideration. As our clothes and bodies generate terabytes of data, whose data will they really be? And what about the data generated by our appliances? Do the manufacturers have control over them? Or do we? How do we ensure our well-intentioned data sharing mechanisms will not end up in the hands of miscreants for abuse? And if they do, what recourse might we have from a legal perspective?
These questions should not deter us from exploring the opportunities associated with IoT. But we would do well to keep them in mind as we chart our future into a world of connected devices and network intelligence.
This article was written in 2015.
pi STRATEGY