With so many companies and people on the search for the "IoT killer horizontal app” for a decade, and nobody found it yet ☹. You can be sure that I do not either, otherwise I would not be writing this article and I will be furiously developing it. There are people who think pet care or fitness could be the "killer app" for IoT? Sorry, but I do not buy it.
For others, the killer IoT app winners will be in Verticals like predictive maintenance in manufacturing, smart home or smart city solutions. But I agree with Daniel Elizalde who is arguing there’s no true “killer app” for IoT and that any company can create the right killer app to solves a business need of a customer or a whole industry.
Claudio Carnevali, CEO of Iomote, posted recently the following comment in LinkedIn “ Why measuring Temperature and Humidity seem the killer application for most of the IoT industry? Are your customers rehumatic?”- The comment is comical but at the same time ironic. In the absence of bright or innovative ideas it seems that we would have discovered the fire when we install sensors and we are able to visualize temperature and humidity in real time on the screen of our smartphone.
Luc Perard, Global Head, IoT Partner Strategy for Telco at PTC published The Killer IoT App and wrote “the IoT leaders of every Telecom Operator around the world are anxiously looking for the killer IoT app/solution, which their IoT reps could sell in volume to their enterprise customers. I have bad news for them: There Is No Killer App in IoT”.
Instead of continuing to dream of finding the Holy Grail of the IoT, I think it will be more productive to analyse by categories what are the possible IoT horizontal applications that exist and if I am enlightened try to guess which application would be the milk to launch myself to develop it without fear.
In the next sections I will review some IoT horizontal apps in different categories that hope help you to join the dots to build your IoT Killer horizontal application in the IoT fragmented market.
Killer IoT App for IoT-Search
Who has not thought about repeating the success of the Google search engine in the IoT? Remember how many search engines appeared at the end of the 90s and only Google,with Bing's permission, has been done with a global monopoly that nobody seems to be able to snatch from him.
Although I have repeated many times that the IoT is not something new, the problem it faces in the next 5 years is: “Find 50 billion connected objects”.
How to find and communicate with these billions of objects is not an easy task, and I am not referring only to the technical part. The islands of devices, the thousands of public and private subnets have not yet found a consensus mechanism of unique identification and their voices are only heard by neighbours or friends or hackers.
There are 2 companies I am following, but I am sure the Big Predators are following startups or investing internally in search engines for IoT.
- Thingful - A Search Engine for the Internet of Things that allow find & use open IoT data from around the world. The challenge is growth the open IoT data worldwide.
- Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices. We can use Shodan to discover which of your devices are connected to the Internet, where they are located and who is using them.
Killer App for IoT-Messaging
The challenges of IoT application development are speed, scalabilty, and reliability for data exchanged among people, machines, sensors, and devices. The efficacy of many IoT applications depends on the data being sent and received in real time. But the IoT Architecture is very complex with many layers of computing and a variety of networks to transport the IoT data before is outdated and the application is thus useless.
If you are one of those people that thing Messaging is a niche technology and do not care. You are wrong. The IoT market is maturing and with that comes a realization that network-efficient, high-volume data streaming and messaging is critical for corporate applications and analytics. Simply put, companies using IoT devices need solutions that increase reliability, and reduce bandwidth and infrastructure requirements.
Current IoT messaging protocols transport excessive payload, therefore they consume more bandwidth, reduce battery life and increase latency. But, if we expect, in a near future, intelligent machines with Artificial Intelligence, do we really believe that they will need MQTT, COAP, XMPP or HTTP?. Machines do not need the seven ISO layers that humans need for applications communications. Therefore, or we find the killing IoT Messaging application or let machines create it.
Companies I am following:
- Solace – enables data movement by routing information between applications, devices and people across clouds using open APIs and protocols like JMS, REST, MQTT, WebSockets and AMQP.
- BugLabs - Offer dweet.io, a simple, effective messaging service for the Internet of Things. Fast, free and ridiculously simple— it's like Twitter for social machines.
- Unified Inbox - Focus on intelligent IoT messaging. UE solves the problems of interoperability, security, and convenience, including the problem of app overload by eliminating the need for additional apps to talk to your smart devices at the last mile.
- Pubnub - is a secure global Data Stream Network (DSN) and easy to use API that enables our customers to connect, scale, and manage realtime applications and IoT devices. With over 70 SDKs for every platform, 250ms worldwide data transfer times, and scalability for hundreds of millions of devices, PubNub’s unique infrastructure gives you the ability to easily connect and operate world-class realtime applications and IoT devices.
Killer IoT App for IoT-Security
Revel Systems ex-CTO Chris Ciabarra’s thought IoT’s killer app is home security, but like Jon Hedren I do not agree that IoT’s killer app is home security.
Of course, IoT security is a growing concern as more devices become connected to us, our homes, our cars, our cities. Existing devices as such as new devices have not been or are being designed to help mitigate the perceived widespread vulnerabilities. Besides, there is not certification authority to label IoT devices that meet certain benchmarks for internet and data security.
Whether because of government regulation or good old-fashioned self-interest, we can expect increased investment in IoT security technologies.
Based on Forrester’s analysis, Gil Press , Forbes contributor, wrote a list of the 6 hottest technologies for IoT security, including a list of sample vendors.
It is likely that after a necessary consolidation in the IoT security market we will find some killer application. I have no doubt that the evolution of blockchain technology will play an important role in the creation of the Killer IoT Security application end to end.
You can review 25 trailblazing IoT security companies, presented alphabetically in “25 leading IoT security companies” and read “Two startups and two approaches to IoT security” comparing two companies VDOO and Armis-
Killer IoT App for IoT-Commerce
The IoT has already started working its way into retail stores, and technologies will continue to disrupt the traditional retail process in the coming years.
Today digital signage, smart mirrors, in-store robots, beacons and other devices that retailers use to automatically send notifications and discounts directly to shoppers' smartphones when they enter a store are enhancing the shopping experience.
Reading What’s the Future of IoT Devices for E-Commerce?, one could say that IoT devices for e-commerce is certainly the most thrilling invention since the creation of the Internet itself, and certainly the biggest thing to hit e-commerce (even if it’s still in its infancy). Imagine a future where everyday objects are able to identify themselves to other devices thanks to their internet connexion.
There is no doubt as to the potential of IoT technologies in significantly enhancing e-commerce. As more devices get connected and gain smart features, the IoT ecosystem will continue to grow, paving the way for even better data generation and gathering and ultimately a better customer experience.
IBM’s Watson IoT platform and Visa’s global payment services now collaborate in what is going to be a great IoT improvement. Their goal is to embed payment in everyday life devices like watches, rings, tools, cars, etc. This way, they bring points of payment to potentially each one of the 20 billion connected devices that should exist in 2020.
Think in 5G and Ethereum. The possibilities that this cellular connectivity technology and the Blockchain IoT platform plus the advances in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will offer hardware and software engineers will be a new green field to build Killer IoT-commerce apps. With all of these changes taking place, the sky's the limit for the IoT-Commerce.
Killer App for IoT-Social
Social Internet of Things (SIoT) extends the paradigm of IoT with its improved intelligence, user friendliness and context-awareness. In the article “The Social Internet of Things Is the Future of Smart Objects”, Michael Kamleitner explain that the term SIoT (Social internet of Things) has a different definition from what you might expect. In short, it doesn’t refer to smart objects that are connected to social networks, which really wouldn’t be something mind-blowing, but rather to intelligent devices that are able to create social relationships among them, fact that leads to social networks of their own.
One of the most remarkable ideas behind the SIoT paradigm is that humans wouldn’t be involved in establishing relationships between the objects.
IoT's Killer Application could be to turn Machines into Social Beings. IoT will enable Machines to communicate, interact and learn from each other. At the beginning, even simple ad-hoc connections will bring an incredible value when applied to the already existing Machine population, and with the increase of complexity and computational power the interactions will evolve into even more complex and completely new behavioural patterns which will increase the value of the installed systems manifold.
Are you thinking Why Social Media Companies Want To Control The Internet Of Things? - it's a logical progression, as an industry that has spent the last decade figuring out how to connect people to one another now tries to connect people to their things.
I will follow the following companies in social IoT. But need to investigate more.
- Tencent
- Life360
- Digitsole Smartshoe | The World's First Intelligent Sneaker
- Facebook Building 8
Summary
Search for the killer IoT horizontal application is a chimera given the definition of the IoT. However, the challenges that the IoT has to achieve that 50 billion machines can be found, communicate safely through various networks, socialize and favour the monetization of its services, open great opportunities for hardware and software engineers to develop different killer applications. And I'm sure some will find it. I wish I could be part of one of them.
In part 2 of this article I will review IoT Killer Vertical Apps for Industrial, Commercial, Consumer and Government IoT Apps. Stay tuned!
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