The use of monitoring technology to track objects, appliances, animals, and, yes, even sometimes people is a fact of business for many companies. Using tags, sensors, and chips paired with wireless technology, they’re gathering loads of data about the location, status, and other features of objects, ranging from tools needed at a construction site to a patient’s whereabouts in a hospital to cars backed up on a highway. Once connected, though, there’s the even bigger job of analyzing the information and getting it to the right recipients who can put it to use.
This is the nascent Internet of Things, where wireless networks of objects are being created using RFID, Bluetooth, GPS, and other technologies, working in tandem with cloud computing environments, Web portals, and back-end systems that seek out patterns of activity among the connected objects that promise to help enhance a range of business and other processes.
In theory, there are few things that can’t be given a tag or sensor and connected to networks in order to share information. Businesses could then track and monitor just about every product in the supply chain, so inventory stock-outs will be a thing of the past, lost shipments a rarity, and shoplifting nearly impossible. Counterfeit pills would be easier to spot, traffic congestion easier to avoid, and equipment easier to track and keep operating. Getting to this interconnected world, though, takes some effort.
By creating a network of things that have sensors of some kind, “then we have the intelligence to examine patterns and trends that tell us a lot about our business’s strengths and flaws -- indeed, about the systems and networks and patterns that exist in all aspects of our world,” says Bill Hardgrave, director of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas’s Sam M. Walton College of Business.
Putting tags, sensors, or chips on objects requires businesses to decide which things can be monitored in a way that delivers business benefit. To make those decisions, companies must have a clear perspective on what data needs to be generated, who controls that data, and what they hope to deduce from it.
“Connecting the objects calls for companies to figure out a network, not only to collect the data from sensors, but to deliver it where it’s needed. That includes deciding which systems, processes, or operations will leverage the data,” says Michael Liard, practice director for RFID at market research firm ABI Research .
Producing useful intelligence requires analytics to suss out what’s really important from the mass of data collected. This often requires cooperation and planning among different people and organizations that have an interest in the data and the intelligence coming from it -- such as retailers and their suppliers, or doctors and their patients. That way, everyone in the data chain gets what they need in a manner most likely to yield tangible improvements to business.
Any telco worth its name has a DMS - Device Management System. This system tracks every handset, its capability: (MMS, WAP, GPRS, GPS) & has ability to send the handset customized configuration settings over the air. Interface of DMS is also available to customer support staff.
Your experience with support guys might be due to the fact that there is some lag between handset change by user & its reflection in DMS - which at times can take hours.
Have you ever called help and had them tell YOU what kind of phone you have??
Are you calling from the phone with the problem? Where you are? What software rev? What installed apps? How much memory is used? Stack size? What you see on the screen?
Any realistic enterprise/industrial deployment has something like this:
PND = Personal Navigation Device. Garmin, Magellan, TomTom
Hottest consumer category for the last few years. Lots of room to move. PND killed in car navigation. Some say Smart phone will kill PND- I think not. It will upgrade it, force it to increase function, add dead reckoning from vehicle data and so forth.
Yes- There is a cost/performance trade off. But now, just about everything is 'smart'. Our phone, our Microwave, our thermostat. Soon more of these will be connected. I mean IP connected.
Then it is just a matter of being "Service Oriented" For example, your PND send traffic data via cloud service to other PND's. The GPS/Depth sounder on pleasure boats profiles the Chesapeake bay and updates the charts. Much of the sensor cost can be eliminated by smart use of existing sensors- for example, a load cell in my chair could tell if I was there. But image analysis from my webcam or home security camera could do it even better.
I think the tipping point will be reached when DPWS for Wireless Plug and Play is in most stuff. This means devices can identify themselves to their environment. Functional networks will self configure, without a master plan. We have a way tro go here- for example, cell phones do not currently identify their make, model and OS revsion to their own carrier!
I think this will happen in cars first. In-vehicle systems, PNDs, entertainment and cell phone will start to self organize, driven by 3rd party apps.
The immediate problem: Security. Past that: Self Awareness.
Very well stated, Lawrence -- amd I happen to agree with you 100 percent that this is where we're headed as a culture (and as a publication devoted to the future of the Internet). The notion that RFID and other wireless technologies will combine with GPS, cloud computing, and existing back-end systems to enable all this doesn't really require a stretch of the imagination. As Amy Rogers Nazarov points out in her report, how companies pick and choose where and when to add sensors, tags, and this sort of Web 3.0 oversight will require a bit of balancing between need and want -- requirements versus budget. Where will it be smartest to instrument/interconnect/add intelligence to the network first? The future is pretty damn fascinating.
Yes!The Internet of Things!This is the substance of Web 3.0. This is where Internet Evolution is going!
Making things connect is what I do, what I have done for a decade.Now that 32 bit embedded CPU’s can cost as little as candy in a vending machine or be as powerful as a desktop (Intel Atom) we have the hardware we need.The gating factor has been software- specifically middleware for embedded devices.We are getting there.
Fortunately, the cloud is ready with Service Oriented Architecture.The internet of things is huge.You probably have two or three computers.You have dozens of ‘things’ that could/should/will connect.Each of these ‘things’ could have vital data, but the data is vital only at certain moments.Devices need to ‘publish’ events and cloud services need to ‘subscribe’ as needed.
Here are some quotes about the Internet of things
L.V.Gerstner – IBM"...a billion people interacting with a million e-businesses with a trillion intelligent devices interconnected ..."
Paul Otellini- CEO Intel “The pervasive internet will bring us the tools we need when we need them by proactively anticipating what we need”
Roberto Siagri-CEO Eurotech “ An embedded computer system is typically any microprocessor-based device that encapsulates a basic process knowledge. Consequence: IT integration is at best an effort in hindsight and at worstignored altogether. Pervasive Computing provides technology and infrastructure to enable the process knowledge and associated parameters to be distributed within the enterprise. Consequence: IT integration becomes native capability of the system.”
Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded“Smart, connected, service oriented devices”
In in the end, it was said in the beginning by the inventor of the concept-
Mark Weiser, chief scientist at Xerox PARC Principles describing ubiquitous computing:
The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
Technology should create calm- "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."
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