The Intangible Assets of the Internet of Things

From ACM TechNews:
The Intangible Assets of the Internet of Things
EE Times
(04/16/12) R. Colin Johnson

Internet Protocol addresses assigned to all electronic appliances will prompt the challenge of extracting value from the big data of the Internet of Things (IoT). IBM researchers envision a worldwide electronic nervous system with trillions of sensors monitoring the status of everything of interest to humans and streaming the resulting exabytes of data to cloud-based cluster supercomputers that use analytics software modeled on the human mind to extract the ultimate value from the data. “It’s not about making individual widgets, but rather about constructing a complete sensory system--a vertical solution that includes the sensors, networking, storage, servers, software, and analytics,” says Hewlett-Packard's Stan Williams. Engineering challenges for the IoT center on addressing difficult problems in security, standardization, network integration, ultralow-power devices, energy harvesting, and perceived network reliability. Data overload prevention is the prime engineering challenge for networking the IoT, notes Freescale Semiconductor's Ian Davidson. Gartner's Mark Hung says the unifying theme in consumer IoT applications will be control, monitoring, and diagnosis to facilitate a seamless user experience. "The Internet of Things will use a set-and-forget model that makes people more efficient, makes their lives safer, and just generally makes everything more convenient," says Ember Corp. CEO Bob LeFort.

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