As per data by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), technology products such as wearables, drones and smart home appliances will see an increase of 1.3% as compared to last year’s industry revenues. Rising awareness about the Internet of Things and a fetish for “smart products” is expected to push USA’s consumer technology industry to a whopping $286.6 billion by the end of this year.
If you search for “Internet of Things” on Google, the results returned will define it as a proposed development of the Internet, wherein objects of everyday use are connected, and have an ability to send and receive data. This revolutionary concept basically posits a scenario where, every device you could think of, from a washing machine to a door knob to something more intricate like a wearable device could be functioned through internet access. Smartphones will remain an important part of this treatise. Estimates by data analyst firm Gartner say that by 2020, there will be over 26 million connected devices, the connection being between people-things, things-things, and of-course, people-people. But how could so many connections help you?
The future looks pretty cool with so much of interconnectedness. Things which looked like they could only happen in science fiction movies are already a movie, thanks to newer strides made in technology. Finding a parking spot is a hassle for most of us, especially if we happen to visit a city’s hotspot on a weekend. Services like StreetLine’s Park Sight which beautifully employ IoT to let you search for a paring spot without having to waste fuel, money or end up hogging the scarce road space. Newer advancements mean it would not be farfetched to expect your printer to order ink for itself before it is running out of it.
As with everything else, IoT has its issues as well, privacy being one of the biggest concerns raised by people familiar with the technology and related elaborateness. With so many devices connected to each other, will it be possible for individuals to protect their personal information? What if some miscreant manages to hack on to your web of connected devices? It would be a deplorable sham. As the conversation around IoT continues to hound us, it is left to be seen how exactly the various challenges and opportunities around the technology shape up.
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