The Internet of Things has been a much-hyped trend promising Jetson-style home automation, but the reality of internet-connected gadgets is already upon us with devices that ‘talk’ to each other.
As internet connectivity is applied to different product categories it remains to be seen which technologies will have mass-market potential and which are novel gimmicks.
The good news for retailers is IoT could be a potential goldmine. “Every ‘thing’ can and will become a consumer electronics product,” says Gregory Cornelius, managing director at Modn Media.
Last week Cornelius brought together a snapshot of emerging IoT devices from USA, United Kingdom, India, Singapore and Australia in an exhibition called Protiotype, as part of the Sydney Design Festival that included concepts through to prototypes and products already on the market.
Appliance Retailer spoke to Cornelius about where the trend is at and where it is heading.
“We live in a time of unprecedented innovation as entrepreneurs seek to connect software to hardware. The Internet of Things is creating a new category of consumer electronics products from wearables to measuring gauges to furniture — everything is being connected to the internet.
“The Internet of Things is in a period of innovation now. So you are seeing all kinds of people and businesses explore what potential products and applications there may be.”
Fueling the boom is improved affordability of tools needed to design and make these devices which is opening up opportunities to a larger number of entrepreneurs and start-ups.
“It’s interesting to speculate where it might go and it’s clear that there are different categories of things, from fitness to monitoring temperature and home environments and medical applications. It’s going to be really interesting to see what works,” Cornelius said.
David Vandenberg founder of Solidifier, a co-working space for IoT hardware start-ups, emphasised that an IoT device needs to be useful, even if it just does something small.
“A lot of people talk about these grand things like turning your air conditioning on before you come home and the internet on the fridge. Those things aren’t really that useful, they are very gimmicky, novel. A lot of the usefulness of these things will be very subtle and they will be integrated into a central place where you just have more visibility of what’s going on and have more control of it.
“It might be as simple as if you just buy a device and plug it into the wall it is automatically connected to your ecosystem. Then maybe it’s just something simple like my home power usage. [For example] I can see how much power my toaster is using. I can see how much that is costing me every day without having to do anything specific. That’s a possibility as well.”
Vandenberg said the biggest challenge IoT is facing will be how to integrate and manage internet-connected devices in the home.
For example if all your IoT devices connect to the internet via wi-fi, if you ever changed your wi-fi router it would be a headache to reconnect each of the devices. At the moment it’s not a problem to enter a wi-fi password into a handful of devices, but imagine having 20 or 30 devices that don’t have a touch screen.
IoT devices “are a lot harder to control so the management of the ecosystem is crucial,” said Vandenburg.
He pointed to brands such as NinjaBlocks, Nest and Belkin that have products which function as an internet of things hub where things connect to.
“Right now if you only have a couple of things that do specific things it’s fine to manage them separately but eventually it’s going to become unmanageable. That’s going to be the next step, more integration between those things, but they are going to be everywhere.”
Above is a display from the Protiotype exhibition of a product called Tempo — a Bluetooth Smart thermometer, which sends the temperature reading to your smartphone. The company BlueMaestro says it has a Bluetooth range of up to 75 metres and is ideal for monitoring the temperature of pets’ reptile enclosures.
The Skulpt Aim belongs in the fitness category of IoT devices. It measures body composition and analyses individual muscles. Simply place the device on the muscle you want to measure, and instantly get the fat percentage and overall muscle quality for that body part.
