The Internet Isn't About Things, It's About Cheap Data

It's just stuff. All those devices and machines and whirlygigs and the other impedimenta that clutter up our pockets and carryalls and lives. 

It's what we can do with the information that stuff provides that makes them useful and even, sometimes, beneficial.

A couple of decades into The Knowledge Era we still seem to be ambivalent about the relative roles of the intangible and the tangible. We get that our livelihoods are increasingly dependent on the intangible, that wealth and wisdom are sourced more from the ephemeral than from the physical. We just can't seem to let go of the comfort that having something to hold on to offers us.

The whole internet of things meme is really about the wonder of communications and knowledge transfer than about the things themselves. It is about empowering us to make other connections that may enrich, simplify, complicate or otherwise enhance our existence.The decreasing expense of identifying, using and sharing that information is what is going to define the future. Assuming we can get the stuff out of our way. JL

Stacy Higginbotham reports in GigaOm:

The value that comes from connecting your thermostat to the internet is that you suddenly to cheap information about the temperature of your home, and by collating other data points, you also have access to detailed information about what is happening in the home.
The value that comes from connecting your thermostat to the internet isn’t that you can now control it from your smartphone, or that it’s a theoretical home for new ads. The value is that you suddenly have access to cheap information about the temperature of your home, and by collating other data points or simple extrapolation techniques, you also have access to detailed information about what is happening in the home.
This can be cool. It can be creepy. And it can be convenient. But as is always the case when we encounter technological shifts, the internet of things is really a tool. And like a hammer is used to expand the amount of force generated over a small area (allow you to hit something really hard), the internet of things is a tool is for cheaply delivering and gathering information.

What can a connected GE jet engine tell you?

So sensors on your car should be sending information back to the manufacturer about features you use, and your mechanic about how you are driving and wear and tear on the car’s parts. The manufacturer could then change the car’s design, as Ford has done, while your mechanic can offer you a preventative maintenance contract. Shared over a wider network, you can offer real-time traffic information or even improve weather forecasts by acting as a traveling weather station. But you might also open yourself up to tracking by the government or unscrupulous data-miners seeking to help advertisers establish ever-more-granular demographic profiles.
So if we view this as a tool, then let’s stop talking about the internet of things as this monolithic system that will make homes smarter, businesses leaner, and so on. We need to break this tool down and figure out what information we want and where we can get it. We also need to think about what it can unleash on the world and how to set safeguards.There’s also the overlap between the consumer and the business worlds, be it where the home meets the smart grid or where a patient meets the hospital;
this access to data is turning former software vendors into service providers and how industrial access to information changes the products a company can sell.

But wait, there’s more

It’s all well and good to think about what cheap access to data can mean, but we’re also experiencing a revolution in how we get access to that data and what people can do with it once it’s out there. An entire generation of startups built on the back of the maker movement and crowdfunding sites have formed to build the products that will connect us in our homes and workplaces.But it’s a tough journey from developing the idea for a connected baseball to getting the product in stores around the world