5 ms·

I believe in IoT. What I don't really believe in are 'smart devices' as they are currently being sold. The major benefit of IoT is for the people able to harve

I believe in IoT. What I don't really believe in are 'smart devices' as they are currently being sold. The major benefit of IoT is for the people able to harvest the data, there is generally little added value for the end consumer. I see the first major growth area in industry, and I see this happening now. Major manufacturers are adding data acquisition to all their processes. The second major growth area might be the public sector. Smart Cities are building up hype and I'll think we'll hear a lot more about these kinds of initiatives in the near future. As for the consumer sector, I don't see major benefits for the consumers, but from a producer's viewpoint, adding telemetry to their devices might give them valuable information. So I think we'll see everything becoming 'smart', but not for our own benefit (and hopefully not on our bill).

TheGRS 9y ago
The thing that I'm not super clear on is how IoT will benefit many of us when the data will likely be owned and kept close to the various companies that are harvesting all of it. I see why it would be advantageous of a smart Mr. Coffee sending data off to its servers so they can collect usage data, then they can improve their product and marketing. But the real breakthroughs would be in sharing this data openly. Maybe people can make connections between coffee consumption and say...obesity, car accidents, productivity, family spending habits, etc, etc, etc. Like we might be able to put massive data to a lot of the experiments we hear about all the time that use a tiny case study of maybe 20 students at some university. And not only that but people could begin to act on the data and develop new products, solutions and services to our benefit and continue to get more data about them in real time. That's the advantage I see to IoT, but I don't see it doing much for us in its current stage as companies have no real incentive to share all that data. Maybe some sort of open IoT is what we need to get things moving the right direction. But then we all know security is still a major pitfall of IoT to begin with.
- deathhand 9y ago
  I feel the same way about open data and genetics but people(hn) have privacy fears.
- keithnz 9y ago
  We are an IoT company, and the data generally is owned by the device owner. There is the possibility some will share data though, potentially in anonymous form.

TheGRS 9y ago

The thing that I'm not super clear on is how IoT will benefit many of us when the data will likely be owned and kept close to the various companies that are harvesting all of it. I see why it would be advantageous of a smart Mr. Coffee sending data off to its servers so they can collect usage data, then they can improve their product and marketing. But the real breakthroughs would be in sharing this data openly. Maybe people can make connections between coffee consumption and say...obesity, car accidents, productivity, family spending habits, etc, etc, etc. Like we might be able to put massive data to a lot of the experiments we hear about all the time that use a tiny case study of maybe 20 students at some university. And not only that but people could begin to act on the data and develop new products, solutions and services to our benefit and continue to get more data about them in real time. That's the advantage I see to IoT, but I don't see it doing much for us in its current stage as companies have no real incentive to share all that data. Maybe some sort of open IoT is what we need to get things moving the right direction. But then we all know security is still a major pitfall of IoT to begin with.

deathhand 9y ago
I feel the same way about open data and genetics but people(hn) have privacy fears.
keithnz 9y ago
We are an IoT company, and the data generally is owned by the device owner. There is the possibility some will share data though, potentially in anonymous form.