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Follow UsRemember Star Trek? The fascinating thing about Star Trek apart from the characters was the devices - who can forget the communicator, the transporter and the phaser? The smart phone of today can do fascinating things, including recognizing our voice to turn on lights or identifying a bird by recording its tweet - apart from taking a phone call. The transporter had the ability to move things and people from one place to another through space. We have already started copying objects by "printing" a copy on a 3D printer when required.
A lot of this device magic is enabled because the scale, storage, computing power and price point of the cloud is enabling these scenarios in a way that was unthinkable 15 years ago. The Kinect device from Microsoft recognizes your face and voice, interprets your gestures, and can even figure out your age, gender and sense your heartbeats! Tie that to BigData processing on the Cloud, and you can know your users like never before! The device-cloud scenario really comes to life when you start asking questions after the data has been collected - questions you would never have thought of asking before the device-cloud scenario took shape. A lot has been written and said about the proliferation of smart devices, the Internet of Things, BigData and the cloud - 2014 and beyond will see enterprises bring device-cloud scenarios into reality by combining the power of all these disruptive technologies to bring very unique experiences to the end user. Let us look at some of the things that seem to be out of Star Trek but will be a reality for enterprise applications in 2014 and beyond.
Customer Relationships and Market Research
Devices like the Microsoft Kinect have opened up new worlds in how we detect and analyze human behavior. They don't just record video - they analyze movement, study faces and can do some things right out of Star Trek. As people step into a car dealership or step up to a store display, technology combined with Kinect can detect the age and gender of the visitor. With an array of Kinect sensors, we can infer whether the visitor is happy with the display, and how long the attention span is. This inferred data can provide fascinating insights into how the product has been received, by what kind of people, how the product's display is affecting people and a host of other parameters. And it can only happen because the computing power of the Cloud is working behind the scenes. In the near future, you can see displays change automatically to suit your personal preferences as you approach a car in a showroom, or a toothbrush shelf! Sound scary? Welcome to Minority Report!
The Connected Vehicle
Autonomous cars - cars that drive themselves - are already running in test mode in the US states of Nevada, Florida and California. Devices like laser radars and laser arrays that map the immediate environment of the car in 3D to allow the car's "brain" to determine how to safely navigate the road and traffic. The collected data (the size of that data brings it into the BigData realm) can then be analyzed offline using the power of the cloud to refine driving algorithms and make these cars more viable as commercial offerings. Closer to home, Icertis is working on technology that can get the telemetry information of a vehicle - parameters include the position of the vehicle via GPS, engine speed, temperature, gear changing patterns, road conditions and the like - that can be processed in the cloud to analyze and respond to changing conditions. For example, by analyzing the driving pattern, road and traffic conditions, the vehicle's engine can be sent instructions to change its operating parameters to increase fuel efficiency or to improve driving conditions by making it safer to drive. By analyzing engine parameters and "mashing" them up with manufacturing and historical data, component failures can be predicted. So don't be surprised when your car automatically slows down and tells you to visit a repair shop (or drives itself to the nearest shop) because the chances of your brakes failing or of a fuel hose breaking loose have increased!
The power of the smartphone
Many applications available on the phone today leverage the cloud for providing some exciting features that the smartest phone by itself may never be able to provide. When you use your phone camera and pan the scenario around you, objects of interest including restaurants and shops pop up on the screen. You can even have the locations of your friends and family members pop up on the screen. When you make your phone "listen" to a song playing in the background, it tells you who the artist was, the lyrics, and can also provide a translation of the lyrics in your native language! All this can be enabled by utilizing the storage and computing power of the cloud and the BigData technology that enables large scale parallel processing of the data that makes up all this information.
The use of smart phones and portable devices in enterprise applications deployed on the cloud is exploding, as innovators figure out new ways to make their operations more efficient, make their customers happier and sell more. 2014 will see these devices become even more popular - you will use them to identify yourselves and transact at banks, make the grocery store pack everything as you drive through to pick up, or help you drive your vehicle automatically from where it is parked to where you are (remember James Bond's "Tomorrow Never Dies"?)