The Internet of Things

Connected world

I'm currently considering  the top 10 game changers for technology over the next 10 years.  Now much greater minds than mine have devoted vast amounts of time and energy to this kind of crystal ball gazing.  There are many suggestions and I’ll explore some of them over several posts this week.

One point that most of the tech soothsayers are agreed on is that the internet is at the core of the technology explosion.  That's a safe bet, surely, because it's all about being connected.

We can already see many of the elements that are developing because they are the points of pain for us at the moment.  In no particular order these are:

• bandwidth (needed to deliver all you need as fast as you need it) 
• storage (to retain everything that needs to be kept) 
• processing speed (to crunch the data fast enough not to slow you down).

Each of these pain points has big business working hard to find the answers quicker than the competition and I don’t think we doubt that they will succeed.

How we will be connected is again quite well mapped out.  We know, for example that the current internet address system  is seriously overloaded.  We need IPv6 to provide the capacity to connect the billions of devices we will be using. 

With exponential growth in users, devices and bandwidth requirements we are going to need huge amounts of storage.  The word ‘huge’ doesn’t really do this justice.  Already we are exceeding our size vocabulary since gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes just don’t cut it in the big picture.  Exabytes and zettabytes are what we need to quantify this insatiable appetite for data storage.

Since each and every connected device from your smartphone to your toaster is going to need to remember what it’s doing, local storage is still going to play a big part with flash memory providing that capability.  Flash memory is great for your immediate local storage and processing needs and is already replacing those mechanical devices.   We already use flash memory but expect to see it appearing in much greater capacities in a whole lot more devices.

You’re not going to want to store all this good stuff locally where it could get corrupted or lost and we will no doubt be looking to the ‘cloud’ to provide that storage capability.  We can see that starting already but most people don’t yet trust their treasures to a faceless provider so that is going to have to change.  I’m sure that it will happen and happen pretty quickly.

Data, data everywhere

I’m excited about this technology because it’s something we can readily relate to as it already exists in foundational form.  We use the internet every day.  We know that it's there for us today and it will be there in an improved form tomorrow.

Sure, I can’t fathom the volumes of devices, the speed of transfer and the storage capacities that are envisaged because they are way beyond my point of reference.  I can simply accept that they are huge, they are coming soon and that’s enough for me, for now.