Donnie Berkholz's Story of Data

The reality of IoT today, not hype about 2019

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There’s been a lot of hype around the Internet of Things in the past few years, with lots of people talking about wearables and so on. All kinds of fun stuff like smart watches (I own a Pebble myself) and Google Glass. But it’s all seemed very much in the early-adopter stages.

Here’s a graph of Google searches for the “Internet of Things,” and you can see the huge increase in interest in queries over the past year in particular.

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The biggest problem with IoT is understanding the difference between the hype and the reality. Everybody’s interested but it’s all lots of handwaving about how magical the future will be. However, I keep running across crazy stuff like windmills and cranes and airplanes that are all connected today, and saving millions of dollars for companies. That’s pretty serious, and by no means is it hype.

So we decided to run an event called IoT at Scale supported by SAP, which is one of those real companies doing real stuff, to help bring together the worlds of the trendy and the industrial. It’s not about SAP tech, they just happen to be really interested in the topic.

We’ll be digging into what’s actually happening today with IoT. It’s easy to hype it and talk about whatever trillion dollar markets, which can make you lose sight that there’s real and interesting tech doing real and important things today. It’s just in the business world rather than the consumer world, so we don’t normally think about it.

If you want to try out some real tech, and learn about things that have really been done in IoT at a deeply technical level, check out IoT at Scale. We’ll have a hackday and a day of talks, coming up soon on Oct 16-17 in Palo Alto. Next month, we’re gonna do a version of this in Berlin too.

Disclosure: SAP is a client.

by-sa

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