Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

SAN FRANCISCO — If you have sent email on Google or used Microsoft’s browser or databases, you have touched the technology handiwork of Adam Bosworth.

Mr. Bosworth, a tall and grizzled but still trim 60-year-old, is a Johnny Appleseed of sorts in the tech industry, with a penchant for being intimately involved in the creation of generations of widely used technology.

While it is never easy to predict what the next big thing will be, identifying what Mr. Bosworth is working on is always good for clues. Right now, along with competitors at companies like Amazon and Google, he is building what some call a “data singularity.”...

Awareness of the Internet of Things is gaining a bit of traction, at least in some quarters.

There is now high IoT awareness in more than half (56%) of those in the retail industry, according to a new survey.

Overall, a majority (73%) of companies have deployed, or plan to deploy over the next 12 months, some types of IoT solutions, according to the 2,500-person, 15-country survey by IDC.

More than half (58%) say they consider IoT to be a strategic initiative....

Gartner Research predicts that the typical family home will contain as many as 500 networked devices by 2020. Similarly, Ericsson forecasts 50 billion connected “things” by the same date. Reaching these lofty projections over the next four years, however, will require a fundamental reorientation in the way that technologists and product designers work together to create successful “connected” personal devices and home appliance products. This evolution to “Internet of Things (IoT) 2.0” will be difficult for many companies to achieve — not for lack of technological expertise but because they’ll fail to recognize the value of design in connected product development.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity — the forerunner of consumer-focused IoT — has been around for decades. Overwhelmingly, those IoT 1.0 applications pushed technology to address B2B market requirements.

Product design considerations in the IoT 1.0 world are not critical to persuading customers to adopt offerings. Enterprise IoT buyers seldom require great design, because most often the buyer is not the product’s end user. Fleet logistics companies, for example, monitor the condition and location of their vehicles. Their developers focus on meeting operational and environmental requirements, caring little about the physical appearance or user experience of a dashboard- or engine-compartment-mounted device that monitors vehicle data....

Two months after Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) announced a platform to connect appliances to the internet, Amazon Web Services’ Internet of Things is out of beta and available to customers.

The platform – similar to offerings from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and IBM – can command smoke alarms and fitness trackers from computers.

Moreover, it extends far beyond the home; it can monitor and manage critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment facilities and wind turbines.

The Internet of Things, as it is known, is big industry for tech companies working to connect devices to the cloud. Microsoft – which estimates there will be 30 billion connected devices by 2020 – launched in the space last year with its Azure platform. Google-owned home automation company Nest, which makes smart thermostats and other connect devices, announced earlier this year plans to open a Seattle-area engineering center and hire 100 employees....

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a phenomenon and an entity. It refers to the way Internet connectivity has expanded to include everyday objects and to how those everyday objects interoperate with our daily lives.

No longer do we “access” the Internet. The Internet is ever-present. It operates as an automated entity that can carry out functions that reflect and affect the physical world. We conduct business, live our lives, and dictate our affairs in its presence and based on its rules. Anything from your refrigerator to your key fob could be connected.

Forbes contributor Jacob Morgan wrote,
     "If it has an on and off switch then chances are it can be a part of           the IoT."

Increasingly, however, IoT devices may not even have an on/off switch.

In the wake of this ubiquity, massive implications exist for policy, safety, government, regulation, privacy, provision, and technology....

Among many other things, connected objects will allow consumers to buy things more easily.

The Amazon Dash button introduced several months back is a good example of at least the start of this.

The highly publicized buttons can be mounted pretty much anywhere, such as on a washing machine or near a coffee maker to remind a consumer to re-order supplies while in the context of using the particular device or appliance.

Somewhere between 300,000 and a half million of the buttons have been shipped since Amazon started sending them to Amazon Prime service members, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who sees them heading into the millions going forward....