Comments for A Sensor In Every Chicken: Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things

A Sensor In Every Chicken: Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things

2010-07-30T04:32:18Z

A few months ago we wrote about how big-name companies are starting to talk about the Internet of Things - a term for the network formed by real-world objects connected to the Internet - indicating that the idea is picking up speed.

Today Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans appeared on the company's netcast, Talk2Cisco, to answer questions about the next 50 years and beyond via email and Twitter. Turns out one of the world's biggest technology companies is betting the Internet of Things is going to be big.

]]> There are already about 35 billion devices connected to the Internet, Evans said, far outnumbering the number of human users. And there are well over a trillion devices with network potential, he said, including cars, home appliances and tags for livestock and pets. This will make for a "thinking planet" of objects and computers with access to real-time data, Evans said.

One imminent use would be making home energy use more efficient by eliminating power used by devices when they are idle, he said.

Cisco designs and sells electronics, networking and communications technology and services. The company is currently working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to place sensors all over the planet that collect real-time information about climate change.

Evans also mentioned HP's Central Nervous System for the Planet, or CeNSE, a project to place a trillion push pin-sized sensors all over the planet as infrastructure for the Internet of Things.

Other predictions from Cisco's Chief Futurist, who doubles as Chief Technologist, Internet Business Solutions Group:

by 2012, 90% of data will be video
by 2050, a computer with the computing power of nine billion brains will be available for $1,000
we currently only know about 5% of what we will know in 50 years

Evans said humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined, although a lot of it is useless - comparable to saving all 2,000 photos from your weekend trip to the beach.

Therefore, filtering and sorting the exponential proliferation of data will become more and more important for computers, Evans said. And it will be even more important and possible for computers to interpret rich media such as photos and video. Google Goggles, an app that can recognize text, art and landmarks from images, is an early example.

The Internet of Things holds many possibilities for a network systems manufacturer like Cisco. It also looks like we may be needing a lot of those "50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person" created by switching to IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol which uses a 128-bit address, after all.

Photo from flickr cc:darynbarry

Comment from Simon on 2010-08-22

2010-08-22T07:30:27Z

Great article and yes I do believe we are moving to the internet of things (as I show in my documentary The future of the internet I and II). Every little device will have a connection to the "big machine". We started in hardware, then passed to software (microsoft), then moved to connectivity (internet), and in this last stage there is still a lot of room for growing and that will be the internet of things, then I think the next stage in this evolution will Artificial Inteligence... we will see

Comment from vicky romero-gomez on 2010-08-10

2010-08-10T20:39:29Z

Great post. Cisco certainly has been an early enabler of The Connected World (another term often used for IoT) and Recursion Software is excited to be collaborating with Cisco on Planetary Skin, which the article alludes to. To quote John Chambers "any device to any content wherever it is in the world over any combination of networks" is the functional definition of the pervasive ecosystem and the express goal of our platform.

I agree the IoT is misleading, since it inaccurately substitutes internet for network. Some applications, like connected appliances, have no need to leave home's LAN. I not too subtly poke fun at these various names in a recent eBook Developing For The Pervasive-Ubiquitous-M2m-Internet Of Things (www.slideshare.net/vickyrg). "The Network of Everything" or simply "Pervasive Computing" are preferable terms. Meanwhile, network providers almost universally call it M2M, since- at least in the short-term- they are more concerned with simply providing a connection rather than enabling the entire pervasive ecosystem.

Comment from joebiron on 2010-08-09

2010-08-09T10:54:26Z

Very interesting indeed. I'm glad to see Cisco jump into the fray as their presence, in some ways, legitimizes M2M and IOT (not that they needed to be legitimized).

I can definitely see video comprising 90% of data bits. Not sure about 2012, but it will happen. As connected things become ubiquitous, 4G wireless becomes cheap, and it becomes easy for software designers to build solutions to capitalize on those things, we'll find all sorts of uses for machine-captured video.

Comment from travesti on 2010-08-01

2010-08-01T15:34:24Z

Marshall, it's got a fair amount of retweets and "likes". In think those go a long way

Comment from arabalife on 2010-08-01

2010-08-01T14:10:40Z

Thanks. The Internet of Things, or The Internet of Objects was coined by MIT in the '90s. What term might be better to describe this explosion of networked devices?

Comment from Kostas Kavidopoulos on 2010-08-01

2010-08-01T10:32:17Z

and what about energy? All these machines, all these objects, all these people... how they will be fed?
Which do you think will be the major progress in the energy and food industry in the next ten years that could support all these projections bearing in mind that fossil fuels are depleted, their byproducts are polluting and the efficiency of RES hasn't reach yet the point to become a full substitute? I believe that nothing can be achieved without a major society reorganization!

Comment from Dave Evans on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T21:34:21Z

@ Adrianne, JJ - Thanks for the comments - I was specifically referring to the bits flowing across the Internet. i.e. 90% of that data will be video bits. (i.e. JJ's comment).

However, the video we create will be inextricably tied to the video flowing across the network, the two may essentially become the same.

Thoughts?

Dave...

Comment from Adrianne Jeffries on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T19:39:22Z

jj - Either that or 90% of all data that's being created. It's a little ambiguous. "We're creating all sorts of data.... by 2012 90% of that data will be video..." It's around the 28 minute mark.

Comment from jj on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T19:27:54Z

"by 2012, 90% of data will be video"
He must mean the 90% of data bits carried on the Internet will be video.

Comment from Dave Evans on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T18:44:37Z

Thanks. The Internet of Things, or The Internet of Objects was coined by MIT in the '90s. What term might be better to describe this explosion of networked devices?

Comment from Andrew Lovett-Barron on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T16:46:46Z

That large companies like Cisco are taking the Internet of Things is important. They've the infrastructure to start making a lot of the changes that will allow smaller companies and individuals to really make use of that technology.

Also, I dislike the Internet of Things term too, to be honest. But it's one star in the constellation which is ubiquitous computing, and I haven't really heard anything else that rises to the challenge. Spimes, maybe (though different)?

Comment from Chris Crum on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T15:55:54Z

Marshall, it's got a fair amount of retweets and "likes". In think those go a long way.

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T14:23:16Z

Contrary to all the other commenters, I thought this post was great and I find this subject very interesting! I do think chickens should be allowed to stay sensor-free, however.

Comment from Karl on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T14:05:18Z

"The Internet of Things" tops "Web 2.0" as the most annoying Internet term I've ever seen or heard.

Comment from rohit on 2010-07-30

2010-07-30T11:58:54Z

There already exists a decent image search engine, in the name of www.tineye.com.

So its pretty realistic to expect a full fledged search like this in the near future.

Rohit Sud

Comment from louis vuitton on 2010-07-29

2010-07-30T05:53:56Z

by 2012, 90% of data will be video,it will be true?
I don't think so!

Comment from AlanH on 2010-07-29

2010-07-30T04:56:22Z

Psst... text recognition has been around for years. Not new.
Art and landmark recognition is based on GPS metadata within the picture. It isn't magic.