A Sensor In Every Chicken: Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things
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
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.
Photo from flickr cc:darynbarry
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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.
by 2012, 90% of data will be video,it will be true?
I don't think so!
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
"The Internet of Things" tops "Web 2.0" as the most annoying Internet term I've ever seen or heard.
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.
Marshall, it's got a fair amount of retweets and "likes". In think those go a long way.
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)?
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?
"by 2012, 90% of data will be video"
He must mean the 90% of data bits carried on the Internet will be video.
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.
@ 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...
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!
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?
Marshall, it's got a fair amount of retweets and "likes". In think those go a long way
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.
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.
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