Plenty of science-fiction stories feature ordinary household appliances staging a revolt. In an episode of Futurama, toasters and home robots rise up against their human oppressors. Two trends are now starting to make such scenarios seem less far-fetched.
One is the wave of Internet of things devices being developed for homes—on full display at the CES trade show last week. The other is the increased hacking of home networking gear—as demonstrated by a zombie horde of home network routers discovered recently.
The Internet of Things concept involves connecting machines, facilities, fleets, networks, and even people to sensors and controls; feeding sensor data into advanced analytics applications and predictive algorithms; automating and improving the maintenance and operation of machines and entire systems; and even enhancing human health.
Fifteen years ago, one of the first major initiatives in the Internet of Things took place. In 1999, the Auto-ID Center was formed at MIT; it later became the Auto-ID Labs, a global consortium of researchers and practitioners. The goal of both organizations was to research and help implement radio-frequency identification devices (better known by their acronym, RFID). That same year also marked the first recorded use of the Internet of Things (IoT) term by an Auto-ID co-director. (While the concept of connected things goes back at least two decades, to our knowledge it was Kevin Ashton, a co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, who first used the appealing IoT term in 1999.) RFID was arguably the first major IoT technology of any scale.
From smart thermometers to connected kitchen devices to vehicle WiFi hotspots, the Internet of Things ecosystem is expanding rapidly with a host of new applications and technologies. Using CB Insights interactive rankings feature, we compiled a list of the most active venture capital and corporate investors in the IoT space in 2014.
Intel Capital tops the list based on unique company deals in 2014, followed by Sequoia Capital and True Ventures, which has made the IoT vertical a key focus area of its portfolio.
Sories about the Internet of Things — everyday objects that have been upgraded to send and receive data — are growing ever more common in the media, and for good reason. As a July post in the New York Times’ Bits blog commented, “Over the next few years, very little stands to be bigger than the Internet of Things, or IoT…. The IoT is expected to eventually touch some 200 billioncars, appliances, machinery and devices globally.”
Sensors are expected to be a big opportunity for chip makers in 2015, according to an annual survey of chip executives by audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG. That’s a pretty good sign that the Internet of things, or making everyday objects smarter and connected, is driving the industry’s growth.
Intel took the wraps off its integrated Internet of Things platform that is starting to drive real revenue at the chip giant. In the past year, the IoT division’s revenue is expected to grow 18 percent to $2 billion in 2014, according to Doug Davis, head of the division, in a media briefing today. And now the company will give customers a single platform to create Internet of Things applications.
Venture capitalists invested a record amount in agriculture and food startups in the third quarter this year, totaling $269 million across 41 deals. Conservis, for example, raised $10 million to offer farmers a real-time view of operations.
Humanity has arrived at a critical threshold in the evolution of computing. By 2020, an estimated 50 billion devices around the globe will be connected to the Internet. Perhaps a third of them will be computers, smartphones, tablets, and TVs. The remaining two-thirds will be other kinds of “things”: sensors, actuators, and newly invented intelligent devices that monitor, control, analyze, and optimize our world.
Over the last several years, stories of the technologies making up an Internet of Things have started to slip into public consciousness. As this is occurring, we believe the whole story of Smart Systems and the Internet of Things is not being told. Many of the dispatches coming in from the “front lines” of technology innovation are but fragments of a much larger narrative.
From our perspective, this story is not just about people communicating with people or machines communicating with machines.
