THE INTERNET OF THINGS, PART 3:
ROARING CROWDS AND SILENT SENSORS

Businesses are learning to harness real-time data to inform a more efficient feedback loop for product development, customer service and resource allocation. What might this mean for the evolution of your business?

To understand where the Web is going it helps to remember one of the fundamental ideas underlying Web 2.0—that successful network applications are systems for harnessing collective intelligence.

Perceiving the Global Voice
These days, many of us now understand and experience an aspect of collective intelligence in the sense of “crowdsourcing,” where large groups of people are creating collective works which far exceed what can be provided by any of the individual participants. Wikipedia (a prime example of crowdsourcing) defines crowdsourcing as “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.”

Examples of these marvels are marketplaces such as eBay, Craigslist, mixed media collections like YouTube, iStockphoto and Flickr, and the vast personal lifestream collections on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

Applications can also be constructed in such a way as to direct their users to perform specific tasks, like building an online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), annotating an online catalog (Amazon), adding data points to a map (as in many web mapping applications) or finding the most popular news stories (Digg, Twine). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk even provides a platform to engage people in tasks that computers cannot perform on their own.

Comcast has changed its customer service approach using Twitter; other companies are following suit in some novel ways. Consider how Twitter is being used to report news of disasters, and to coordinate emergency response. Initiatives like InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters) take this trend and amp it up. InSTEDD uses collective intelligence techniques to mine sources like SMS messages (e.g. Geochat), RSS feeds, email lists (e.g. ProMed, Veratect, HealthMap, Biocaster, EpiSpider), OpenROSA, Map Sync, Epi Info TM, documents, web pages, electronic medical records (e.g. Open MRS), animal diseases data (e.g. OIWE, AVRI hotline), and environmental feeds (e.g. NASA remote sensing, etc) for signals of emerging disasters. The Global Virus Foundation Initiative (GVFI) now deliberately collects data (in this case, about emerging diseases crossing over from animal to human) that can be fed into this global early-warning system.

Crowdsourcing is categorized into four key areas, with some interesting examples.

• Individual businesses, sites or forums that channel the power of online crowds (see examples)
• Brand-sponsored initiatives or forums that depend on crowdsourcing (see examples)
• Brand initiatives that allow users to customize their products (see examples)
• Brand-sponsored competitions/challenges focused on crowdsourcing (see examples)

As individuals and companies continue to explore the uses of crowdsourcing we are sure to see more growth and application of this type of collective intelligence gathering.

Sensing a Greener Planet
The Internet of Things—and its application of sensors for homes and businesses--is helping to drive some green initiatives. Energy sensing devices promise better decision-making and control in using precious resources.

Consider the so-called “smart electrical grid.” Researchers combing the smart meter data from 1.2 million homes in the U.K. have already discovered that each device in the home has a unique energy signature. It is possible to determine not only the wattage being drawn by the device, but the make and model of each major appliance within—think CDDB (Compact Disk Database) for appliances and consumer electronics.

Smart Grid initiatives will reduce our energy usage by increasing the intelligence of the system used to deliver it. The data that will be revealed by smart grid applications will not only make our utilities smarter, it will likely make marketers smarter too.

Real-time traffic monitoring systems like Microsoft Clearflow reduce wasted time and energy in commuting. Web services reporting progress of buses and trains against their scheduled times make public transit more effective and enjoyable. These are tangible consumer benefits from instrumenting the world. Sensor-driven congestion pricing schemes like the one IBM built for the city of Stockholm create economic incentives to reduce traffic at peak times.

Even without sensor-driven purchasing, real-time information is having a huge impact on business. Businesses are learning to harness real-time data as key signals that inform a far more efficient feedback loop for product development, customer service, and resource allocation.

Whether your customers are declaring their intent through their actions or their words, many wise companies are exploring new ways to both listen and join the conversation.

Contact Software Consortium or call 1-877-850-9393 to discuss how to leverage our top-level talent to empower your business.

 

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