As the 'internet of things' continues to develop, and machines continue to get smarter and autonomous, one industry has not been left behind; the motor vehicle industry.
Technology allowing cars to park themselves is already included as standard in many models, as is technology which allows cars to brake in order to avoid a collision. Your car, like most things in your life now a days, stores an enormous amount of data about you and your driving habits. So will your car soon be reporting you to the police when (if) you speed?
Now, everyone has at some point in their life sped. I don't condone speeding, but let's be clear, some speed limits are manifestly too low. If you're on an empty highway, kilometres from civilisation, why would you sit on the mandated 100km/h. Germany and the Autobahn have the right idea - you can go any speed you like, so long as it is safe.
Densro Technology has developed the V2X which is a short length, two - way communication technology. Effectively, this technology allows vehicles to communicate to other cars and infrastructure, allowing your vehicle to let other vehicles know when you are changing lanes, or identify the timing of traffic signals. Soon, we may all have cars like Kit from Knight Rider.
So, will this technology evolve into the vehicle communicating to the police without your input and spell the end of the speeding car? In short, no. A major marketing tool for car manufacturers is the speed the car is able to reach (notwithstanding speed limits prevent those cars from reaching those speeds). Of course, governments may pass legislation requiring vehicles to report if their owner sped, but that would encounter hurdles relating to privacy and voter backlash concerns.
So for now we are safe; that is until the cars start driving without the need for a driver. But, according to Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, that's not until at least 2023. So, until then, safe driving.
The Internet Of Things, commonly referred to IoT, is according to Gartner Research the hottest technological trend and every major electronics company has been pushing out to the market as many IoT-enabled devices as their engineers can think of. Under a technical point of view, the IoT ecosystem is made by a network of hardware (from thumb-sized sensors to large equipment) and software that are able to talk to each other via the Internet. But what’s their purpose in an already digital world?
Let’s start from the basics: our world is not exactly a digital one. Even if 40 years have passed since the introduction of the first home computer, according to Cisco still 99% of the things we own and use every day aren’t connected. Many of them have very intelligent electronics inside, but they aren’t able to talk with anybody else except their very owner.
Cars are a good example: even a medium-priced sedan has a fuel-injection system, called ECU, which is able to perform millions of operations per second and can display any kind of problem on the driver’s dashboard. But all that fine engineering ends the moment you close the door. How can the “Net” bring the gift of speech to such autistic appliances?
Back in the ‘90s, domotics had promised to change people’s lives but in the end it failed to go beyond tech fairs and geek houses, partly because of high setup costs and low flexibility, but mostly due to the fact that it didn’t revolutionize the way we interact with the building, merely speeding up old tasks.
But this time, all the big names in the industry have invited themselves to the party. And vendor interoperability is the key to success. Here’s a practical example: Parrot’s Flower Power not only can monitor your plant’s health, but can also ask the courtesy to your Gardena sprinkler system to send in some water, thanks to the help of Belkin’s WeMo Maker intelligent switch.
Now, extend this to a whole botanical garden and you’ll understand the impact it may have even on the headcount of the staff.
Also, Amazon's Dash button can be glued where you use a product so that when it will run out, you can have it delivered to your door just by pressing the button once. May have an impact on old-way retailers? Definitely.
More and more new bridges in the US are being equipped with sensors to monitor the concrete floor for cracks and ice, propagating the news to nearby cars so that they can calculate an alternative route to avoid the danger. Smart traffic lights are starting to adapt their behavior according to the current and forthcoming traffic and the same will soon apply to highway lanes, allocating more way where needed instead of letting the drivers remain stuck in a queue with 5 empty corridors on the other side.
IoT is not an consumer-only technology. Industries have been using machine-to-machine auto replenishment and factory-wide integration since the ‘80s. However, the Internet of Things is coming to take them to the next level. Smart Grids enable manufacturing equipment to notify in advance powerhouses of surges in the electricity demand and driverless forklifts, such as Amazon’s Kiva Systems, not only show up at the unloading dock when the supplier’s truck arrives but adjust their schedule in advance in order to have time for this weightlifting session.
And IBM’s z-System is able to detect failed components, order the spare parts and have a technician come in for servicing. All without any human intervention, thus saving at least 1 hour of a skilled IT employee. Multiply this by the thousands of servers a large corporation can have and you get the big picture.
The current best selling IoT product is a lightbulb. Yes, a century old item, but on steroids. Philips calls is “Hue” and the “You” assonance is there for a reason. Not only it has a LED source inside, but each bulb can reproduce over 65.000 combinations of light intensity and, of course, hue. It’s connected to the internet using ZigBee, a more robust version of the Bluetooth protocol, and a WiFi gateway.
But choosing the color of the living room is only the beginning. By using the IFTT (if-this-then-that) service, the lights can blink and change color if something happens on your Gmail or Facebook account, or simply when you are arriving from work. They can also simulate human activity to fool thieves or integrate with the music system to be on sync with the tunes. And thanks to the help of a smoke alarm made by Nest, they can also wake you up in case of danger for the occupants of the house. And every imaginable integration can be done via drag&drop using the IFTT website, without ever having to write a single line of code.
