THE INTERNET OF THINGS, PART 2:
OUR MOBILE "EYES AND EARS"

Today, mobile web access is driving innovation and tailoring it to the needs of users on the go. How is this likely to impact you and your business?

Today there are roughly 1.5 billion net-enabled PCs and over 1 billion net-enabled cell phones. Within 5-10 years it is predicted that 100 billion devices will be connected to the net. As the smartphone revolution moves the web from our desks to our pockets, it is altering how and how fast applications obtain and process data. Since the different generations use the technology differently, another challenge for technologists are designs that work for different generations needs.   

Sensors are playing an increasing role in this evolution. Our phones and cameras are becoming the eyes and ears of applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we are looking at, and how fast we are moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time and the scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude. The Gartner Group projects that by year-end 2010, physical sensors will generate 20% of non-video internet traffic.

This widespread mobile access to the net is driving innovations in content, commerce, entertainment and gaming. Many of these innovations will be tailored to the information needs of users on the go, which are different from the information needs of the same user while at a desktop PC.

Take search, as one example. Google Mobile App for iPhone made an evolutionary jump in the way it delivers search results. The application detects the movement of the phone to your ear, and automatically goes into speech recognition mode. It uses its microphone to listen to your voice, and decodes what you are saying by referencing not only its speech recognition database and algorithms, but also the correlation to the most frequent search terms in its search database. The phone uses GPS or cell-tower triangulation to detect its location, and integrates that information into the search. So a search for “pizza” returns the results you most likely want: the name, location, and contact information for the three nearest pizza restaurants.

What makes the application a step ahead evolutionarily is that we have shifted from searching with our keyboard and stilted grammar to talking to and with the Web. It’s getting smart enough to understand some things, such as where we are, without us having to tell it explicitly.

Some of the databases referenced by the Google Mobile application, like the mapping of GPS coordinates to addresses, are “taught” by the application, others, such as speech recognition, are “learned” by processing large, crowdsourced data sets. This system is coordinating speech recognition and search, search results and location and is a smarter system than what we saw a few years ago.

Other innovative examples include a piece of technology, Nike Plus, which allows people to transform their iPhones and iPods into personal trainers, collecting real-time workout data, allowing them to react in real time and letting them track their performance on their PCs. Taking the concept a step further, another iPhone app prototype for the HumanAPI, collects heart rate data and transmits it via Bluetooth to an application for real-time visualization. You can view a series of videos here.

Wikitude travel guide app for the Android works with image recognition. Point the phone’s camera at a monument or other point of interest, and the application looks up what it sees in its online database (answering the question, “What looks like that somewhere around here?) The screen shows you what the camera sees, so it’s like a window but with a heads-up display of additional information about what you are looking at. It’s the first taste of an “augmented reality” future. It superimposes distances to points of interest, using the compass to keep track of where you are looking. You can sweep the phone around and scan the area for nearby interesting things.

Layar Reality Browser takes this idea further, promising a framework for multiple layers of augmented reality content accessed through the camera of your mobile phone. Layar shows you what is around you, by displaying real time digital information on top of reality through the phone’s camera.

Another application brings to mind  sensor-based applications as giving you superpowers. Darkslide gives you super eyesight, showing you photos near you.

Twitter is allowing developers to add intelligence to devices and inanimate objects in a surprisingly warm and human manner. One early UK experiment, BakerTweet, allows bakers to dynamically send out tweets to customers alerting them when fresh batches of buns have emerged from the oven. Botanicalls uses networked open source hardware and software to allow plants to communicate with people in human terms (e.g. "water me please") by either using the telephone, text message, or Twitter.

iPhone Twitter apps can “find recent tweets near you” so you can get super hearing and pick up the conversations going on around you.

These are just a few examples of an evolution that will be impacting business and marketing on a more massive scale in the future.  The businesses that learn to harness real-time data will be ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage.

Next editions of the Internet of Things will look at crowdsourcing and green applications.

 

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