IOT Talk with Spain's Innovation Expert- Enrique Dans

Last week, we got the chance to talk to Enrique Dans a professor from IE Business School, who has the most viewed technology blog in Spain. Dans is one of the most interesting people to talk about innovation with, and we wanted to get more details about what he thinks about IOT and the future.

According to Dans, IOT is currently at its earlier stages. The majority of people are currently using it mostly as a hobby or for basic conveniences. IOT is all over the place, we are seeing many applications here and there, as Dans called them “all these crazy little devices that you can put all over the place, and then we will start to realize that we can connect everything and manage it in such a strategy that is convenient”.  I agree 100 % with Dans. Right now these devices help to make our life simpler in one way or another. Some examples have been mention previously by some of my colleagues and a great example is this previous post.

In my opinion, IOT is a little scarier as the devices will have too much information about our life, personal data will be recorded, unfortunately easily hack-able or available for someone to take advantage of. A perfect example of this is Dans idea about the future of insurance with IOT which he mentions on this article. The internet knows already how much you sleep, how much exercise you do, and many other personal factors of your life that were unavailable before. To me this is very scary. But Dans is not a person that easily gets scared, and he is intrigued to know what will we do with all the information that is going to be generated through IOT. He definitely believes that IOT is the future and it has huge potential.

As IOT evolves as an industry, it will start to get some heavy weights involved and fighting over whose platform and data aggregator is adapted, or who becomes the most used “hub”. All the main players have started to move in that direction. Amazon with its web service, Google and its new router, and Apple with Homekit. Dans also mentions Facebook as an up and coming new player in IOT. Other possible players are traditional telecom companies. They all have different strategies, and it is going to be interesting to watch which approach will win in the foreseeable future.

To conclude IOT is definitely the future, and we will continue to see many companies trying to come up with more technologies and gadgets to make our life simpler. It will be interesting to see who the main players are going to be, and how IOT becomes more engrained in our lives.