The IoT Building Blocks You Ordered Have Arrived
With all the technology advancements going on in the Internet of Things we are very close to seeing some revolutionary applications to automate multiple aspects of our lives. But it won't be just one solution. Instead, it will be a series of services stitched together to build something unique. Each building block that makes up the entire ecosystem of connected devices is really only useful when it can be used and built upon the other. Not sure what I mean? Read on…
As an entrepreneur and business owner I have many meetings each week and often multiple meetings in one day. These meetings currently require a lot of manual work to setup and schedule with emails back and forth on firming up dates, times and locations. Here's a scenario I see happening in the next 3 years:
Someone with whom I would like to meet with opens an app to schedule a meeting. The app automatically knows all of the times they they are available and all of the times that I'm available. Beyond that, it knows where I will be coming from and where they will be coming from. It then picks the best location (coffee shop, restaurant, my office, etc.) where we should meet taking into account not only where we will be prior, but also where we might have meetings afterwards. It then makes a request to an online driver service (ala Uber) to pick me up at just the right time, factoring in traffic and weather conditions. The car is self driving; it just arrives and I get in and go. I don't need money for parking when it arrives at the destination and it of course has WIFI onboard so I can work along the way. Once my meeting is over, I'll walk outside and another car pulls up and takes me to my next appointment. At the end of the day it returns me to my home, office or say I have a kids soccer game to attend to? It will drop me off there. The system knows all the details of both my professional and personal life.
Sound far fetched? All of the technology is there to make this happen today and is only going to get better. A scenario like this shows the impact of taking smaller technology solutions ( calendar, weather, maps, self driving cars, AI, online payments, etc ) and joining them together into one solution to create an amazing experience. I for one am excited at the possibility. However, I do have to ask myself… if the computers and technology are running our lives to the extreme that I outlined, are we as humans becoming the dumb ones? When technology is doing everything for us, we need to be sure that us as humans keep ourselves “smart”, even as more and more devices around us become smarter. More on that topic in a future post…
Until then I invite you to check out IoT Weekly News for the latest news on these building blocks both today and into the future!