Futuristic Companies Seeking IOT Innovations

In a world that is increasingly becoming man-made and technologically governed, have you ever wondered about the ‘next big thing’?

The new buzz word in town, which is attracting attention and sparking curiosity is - the ‘Internet of Everything’. Coined by a British technologist Kevin Ashton, in 1999, he defined it as a network that not only connects people but also the objects around them. When people first heard of this, they might have thought it was the science-fiction stuff. Even today in 2016, the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is in its nascent stage but growing quickly. But why on earth would we require so many devices to be talking to each other?

So to understand what this might look like, let us see some examples of how ‘Internet of Everything’ might function for us. Imagine, your alarm clock wakes up you at 7 a.m. and then notifies your coffee maker to start brewing coffee for you. For instance, you want to make it to a meeting in time, your car could sense the best route to take you to your destination. Further suppose, if you face a traffic jam, your car can send a text to the party waiting for you, notifying them how late it would get.

It is predicted to cross $1.46 trillion international market by 2020 and up the $700 billion investment mark of last year. Yes, a trillion-dollar market! It means a lot of companies would want a slice of the pie.

So who do you think are the leaders in IoT industry?

Companies globally are investing heavily in manufacturing IoT based platforms, software systems, mobile applications, twisted optical fiber networks and electronic chips to connect machines to machines and smart devices.
Global enterprises like ‘Oracles’, ‘Siemens’, ‘PTC’ and ‘Qual Comms’ are hoping to make it bigger with this new-age technology which is forecasted to connect 50 billion devices worldwide by 2020. One of the most successful verticals in this trade is undoubtedly, the global wearables market. This particular column of devices is expected to reach a value of around 53.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 with items like smart watches, fitness and health trackers and even smart jewelry and smart clothing. Not to forget, the home automated systems, which is also seeing significant growth and is expected to grow to nearly 60 billion U.S. dollars within a span of four years.

Talking about investments and expansion, ‘Amazon’ has invested a great deal in development of cloud storage systems which is basically IoT platform making. It goes by the name Amazon Web Services or AWS and it several tools like Kinesis- a real time streaming service, S3 –the simple storage service an Dynoamo DB- massively scalable No SQL data base.

Second down in the line is ‘Bosche’- a German conglomerate which by far is best known for its automotive parts division, is now working towards making smart home device. It is aiming at a product that will ease maintenance and monitoring of different home appliances. It will become one of the key enablers on the IoT network.

Likewise, ‘Google’ has ambitions plans to get smart thermostat maker ‘Nest’ for which it paid $3.2 billion, on the business edge it is developing combination of fiber-optic back-end network combined with massive public cloud. Not to forget, ‘Microsoft’s’ unique cloud computing tool ‘IoT Suite’- Azure, developed as a notification hub for sending messages across IoT devices and Power BI to ease customers’ transition to IoT. Strikingly, ‘IBM’ too has been making a big effort with its Watson smart products injecting cognitive abilities into environment based applications tailored for specific industries.

In the Indian IT and analytics space too with various funding options available, a number of startups continue to be on the rise. The early bird watch in 2016, tells the tale of emerging IoT startups in the country– ‘Altiux’, ‘Eco Axis’, ‘Nexiot’, ‘SenseGiz’, ‘Yuktix’, ‘Maven Systema’ and ‘Entrib’ to name a few.

‘Altiux’ innovations, for example is a software and product engineering firm that is developing edge nodes, gateways, data analytics solutions for an IoT ecosystem. ‘Cooey’ is designing mechanisms to cater to the needs senior citizens, wanting to live independently with the focus on storing medical history and providing hospital services at their doorstep. Similarly, ‘Maven Systems’ is a M2M product development company with expertise in wireless connectivity for technologies like ZigBee, WiMAX and indigenous solutions like smart metering, telematics, remote monitoring of mining and construction equipment and so on.

On a broader scale, IoT can be applied to infrastructure, transportation, healthcare networks that we need in our “smart cities.” It can in turn help reduce wastage, improve efficiency and productivity, as IoT allows endless opportunities which we can’t even think of today. However, it is expected to raise new concerns over data privacy, data sovereignty and security.

Needless to say, the real value of the Internet of Things created through convergence of data and leveraging it would fail if there isn’t an infrastructure in place to analyze and support IoT networks in real time. This change is sure to arrive and here to stay, whether we like it or not. Our lives would be transformed, everything around us would be smarter from toaster to traffic-lights, streetlights to seaports!

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