(This is the first Future Patrol, a monthly series of macrotrend posts by WONY Strategist Emily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)
#The Internet of Things
What it is:
Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk fiction writer and prophet of the #Internet of Things, coined the portmanteau “Spime” in 2004, as a thought experiment.
Sterling wrote in Wired:
“In July, Mexico’s attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him…Of course, it’s his brain that makes him smart. It’s the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time. The same kind of upgrade is happening to brainless devices, tools, toys, and doodads all around us, creating a world that is Googleable. Ordinary items are being embedded with rudimentary communications and tied to databases….The future product that embodies these developments will be so radically different from today’s that it will need an entirely new name. So let’s give it one. Because it’s tracked precisely in space and time, let’s call it a spime.”
Now, just a few years later, the formerly science fiction vision of a ubiquitous network through which everyday objects embedded with chips, sensors, and “smarts”communicate information by themselves – is becoming an inexpensive mainstream reality.
According to a 2011 Cisco study, the number of devices connected to the internet last year outnumbered people on earth in 2008. Among these devices are the #Internet of Things – not Kindle Fires but microwaves, jewelry, and livestock that communicate autonomously, without human intervention. The way this is heading is the creation of ambient intelligence through mapping, tagging, and data gathering of regular stuff.
McKinsey describes the range of networked objects: “Pill-shaped microcameras already traverse the human digestive tract and send back thousands of images to pinpoint sources of illness. Precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is farmed—for instance, by spreading extra fertilizer on areas that need more nutrients.”
Examples:
The recently launched Twine is a little internet-connected box with censors for moisture, temperature, and vibration, with a dead-simple interface that lets you set it to text, email, or tweet you whenever it notices that your dog bowl is dry, your dryer’s stopped vibrating, your pipes are about to freeze (or whatever your heart desires).
WHEN current rises above 1A for 90 minutes THEN email “The kids have watched enough TV today.”
WHEN Bedside Lamp is turned off THEN tweet “Goodnight, John-Boy.”
Designed by MIT Media Lab alums David Carr and John Kestner, the Twine was a Kickstarter superstar, raising $556,541 on a $35,000 goal (the third largest Kickstarter campaign ever).
At $99 and built to be hacked/customized, it’s a bellwether of the #Internet of Things to come.
Twine also engages the trend #QuantifyMe: consumer hunger for metrics, dashboards, and data about their personal activities. As Nanveet Alang writes in a piece on Twine in the Toronto Standard: “I’d love to have a record of how many times I opened the fridge in the last two weeks of December (my guess: 9000).”
CES was teeming with new products that are part of this trend (though many of which seem woefully specific when compared to Twine):
· Samsung is offering a washing machine and dryer which is Wi-Fi enabled and can be controlled from inside or outside your home.
· Xperia SmartTags are NFC chips that you can stick throughout your home and program with different actions and settings. When you enter the room and tap your phone to the SmartTags, your phone will automatically adjust to the profile you created.
What does this mean for business?
· New metrics: being able to instantly answer how many people laid on a particular mattress at Sleepy’s, as compared to how many people bought it, mean that engagement measurement can get a lot more granular, if not straight-up invasive
· New data flow and consumer demands: for dashboards, suggestion engines, and deals (as Sterling darkly envisioned, “vacuum cleaners that bellow ads for dust bags”)
· New semantic search engines: ease for customers looking for particular objects, the next step in the vein of apps like Aisle411
· New accountability: “Hackers, activists, advocates, competitors, designers – all of us – can query the data-stream to find out what, for example, happens to the high-impact rubber on our sneakers’ soles at the end of their life – are they being recycled into schoolyard playgrounds or are they becoming aerosol carcinogens?”
Images via spime.org, usc.edu, mediacup.teco.edu
