The Internet of Things : Turning Physical Objects into Virtual Minting Machines

The Internet of Things (IoT) opens up many opportunities for networking equipment and consumer electronics manufacturers. They will need to come out with consumer devices and plug-ins/attachments to conventional physical assets that will enable these hardware to connect to the Internet, as a result of the expansion of the Internet beyond conventional IT hardware. We are already witnessing inroads of IoT in the automotive sector, where manufacturers have taken to connecting cars with the Internet to achieve a variety of end-user objectives, not necessarily limited to navigational aids. Thus, the potential scale of opportunities to do business in IoT is high.

Taking informed decisions 

Businesses, by making use of embedded sensors, will be able to capture and analyze information from a higher-than-ever number of sources that will help them make better-informed decisions. This does not leave out small and medium-sized businesses as well. Imagine that if you are an SME and you managed to fit every single SKU in your inventory with RFID tags (even passive RFID tags will do), then you will never run out of stock or unnecessarily pile up producing SKUs which are in low demand, since you would have a completely accurate idea of what is in demand in the market and what EXACTLY do you have ready for supply in your inventory. This will be very important for SMEs in the face of uncertain economic conditions in the next calendar year. Wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters and home entertainment systems are examples of solutions already available that are seen to accelerate the move towards IoT. Advancements in image recognition technologies will, for instance, provide businesses with a security mechanism (in the form of face recognition) that is both pretty robust for most purposes as well as completely natural and convenient to the user. Image recognition can be built into most devices, which will help users identify objects of interest and even possibly go for a purchase, since now they have complete information of what they just saw. Project Glass by Google is an excellent example of what opportunities lie in store for businesses. Businesses will be able to make e-payments much more convenient and almost natural for the end-user by enabling NFC support in their hardware so that a tap is all it takes for the payment and the user does not need to face the hassles of pairing up his device or establishing a connection by explicitly specifying configuration details. Applications lie even in the pharmaceutical sector, where containers can make use of cellular technology to communicate. This will also bring with itself many challenges owing to the complex web of connections amongst devices, which shall become difficult to manage. The entire cost of communications might rise by a signifact percentage owing to everything being connected. Support desks will need to ramp up their monitoring of each of the connected devices to make sure everything is in order.