A while ago one of our fellow Heretics asked me about my opinion on “The Internet of Things” — how real is it, when will it come, what does it mean?
For me the whole space suffers from a “meme stigma”: We have been talking about smart fridges (literally) for such a long time now and yet we all seem to be fine without an intelligent fridge who can magically order milk for us when we run low, that people give the space a bad name.
And yet — I argue that we are already in the middle of the “smart devices” revolution. I wear more compute power on my wrist than I had in my desktop computer when I learned to program. My phone has a 64-Bit processor (something which until recently was only available in super-expensive servers). My house is heated by an ingenious piece of hardware/software which knows when I am home and when not, what the weather is like outside and what my preferences are — and thus regulates temperature so I feel comfortable all the time. My car has god-knows how many CPUs. And my buddies are building an interactive Christmas tree lightshow using a $20 embeddable computer and a handful of dirt-cheap sensors. Oh — and then there is this dude at the end of the street who sees the world through Google Glass since weeks now…
This is happening. Right now. And I believe this is the biggest change in computing since the advent of the personal computer. Incredibly exciting times — with opportunities bigger than anything most of us have ever seen before.
Get cranking. Time is ticking.