When I attended Digital Shoreditch last week I wondered if it could live up to its billing as a “unique community celebrating the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent of London and beyond.” Would it be about how Shoreditch was the centre of the digital world? Would it be all marketing fluff and hype? Or would there be some depth and substance to it which would acknowledge that people outside of London have internet access and enjoy Kindles and Angry Birds as much as any tube battling warrior? So, I set off to find out.
Looking through my schedule, I realised that most of the talks I’d chosen were (in one way or another) to do with the Internet of Things. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the Internet of Things refers to the idea that we are starting to connect more “things” to the internet than just our computers and smartphones. Right now you can connect to a plethora of devices over the net, from home security and heating systems to the humble kettle. While this is currently the domain of the early adopter with cash to spare, the technology is becoming more affordable all the time and it’s estimated that there will be billions of devices connected to the Internet within the next decade.
It’s hard to define what a thing is in the IoT; however, in a general sense it’s going to be something that’s a) connected to the internet and b) has some kind of sensor or data that we’d be interested in knowing about. It could be a camera, a GPS location, a temperature sensor or even a combination. Basically it will have information that we want to monitor or track over the internet.
The first session I attended was a panel of industry experts from some impressive sounding (and serious) companies, including IBM and ARM; all with teams and departments dedicated to researching and developing ideas and technology for the IoT. And they have ideas. Big ideas.
Imagine a world where you could log on and check the location and details of a container ship that your company runs; that would be useful, right? Now imagine that each container on that ship was tagged and you could track it wherever it was. Not too hard, that’s probably done right now anyway. Now imagine that each product in the container was tagged and each component that went into making that product was tagged and that it was all connected to the internet. You could then imagine that when a parts manufacturer found out that a particular component was faulty, that they would know exactly which products had used it, where they were and maybe even notify the customers or manufacturers.
No? You’re not in the manufacturing game? How about this then; all of the food in your fridge could be tagged and, when something was running low, your “smart fridge” would detect this and send you a text/shopping list every Monday to let you know what to get. Or you could have an app that would talk to your fridge and figure out what to remind you to get when you arrived at the supermarket. Maybe it could order the food for you automatically from your favourite supermarket and a van driver would turn up once a week with exactly what you need?
How close are we to this dream of fridge-driven, automatic shopping? If the experts are to be believed, we’ll be there by 2030 when the IoT will be as embedded into our daily life as much as the smartphone is today. The challenge right now is to get the foundations laid. We need a fast, reliable network infrastructure that works everywhere. We need cheap batteries. We need to be able to produce billions of processors and radio-network chips that are small and can be easily used in lots of different environments. This is what the big thinkers are considering right now.
Of course, the big thinkers aren’t the only people looking at this. There people who are looking for practical ways of using the Internet of Things today and, the way I see it, that’s the beauty of IoT right now. It’s young, it’s new and it’s got endless possibilities.
In the few talks I went to there were ideas that ranged from large-scale, cheap and easy to read flood sensors to “smart buttons” scattered around a home which can help people in the early stages of dementia with their daily routine. These simple ideas can quickly work together with existing services so that you could have a smart car which knows that the tyres are wearing thin – it then checks your diary, books itself into the garage and sets a reminder for you. How about if every item you owned was tagged and indexed so that you could Google those jeans you can’t seem to find? A simple idea but it sounds very cool.
As with all new technology there are risks and obstacles that aren’t immediately obvious. Thankfully, there are also people out there who are considering what these might be. Things like:
Privacy: what happens when your car starts advertising products to you based on what kind of driver you are? Who exactly has access to your car’s data and where do you set your privacy settings?
Security: what kind of pranks could friends play on you if they got remote access to your heating controls? How do we prevent someone from hacking into your fridge and getting it to order hundreds of pints of milk?
Automation: as we get more and more data, we’ll probably need Artificial Intelligence to help us sift through all the information and prioritise what we do. If this starts applying to public services, would this disrupt the political system? Could we start voting on which algorithm is used to sweep the streets?
The Internet of Things is just in its infancy and there is already so much to consider and speculate on that it can be mind boggling. I’m sure that over the coming months and years it will crop up more and more in the media just like the Web 2.0 did over a decade ago. Just like any other emerging technology there will be huge successes and massive failures. But if just 25% of what I heard at Digital Shoreditch comes to pass, then it’ll be a game-changer in the same way that the World Wide Web has been.
