IOT: Why Do We Care

To Start With

Disruption has been the keyword in the technology landscape of lately and the kind of disruptions that we have witnessed in past 10 years have been much more than what human race has seen in past except for the World War II era. We have seen how this disruption have made computing so pervasive that we start and end our day with computing devices, that would have qualified to be called as Super Computers at one point of time in human history.

But after so much disruption, IoT promises to be another disruptive technology that have the potential of impacting every facet of our life and every facet of industry in long term. We have learned from our mistakes from internet era, and the evolution of IoT is cases based as of now. But before embarking on our journey to unfold the impact or potential impact of IoT, we have to understand why connected devices qualifies to be called disruptive technology.

It started with

We have seen over past few years that technology has focused on improving customer profiling, and generating meta-data to make it possible for suppliers to reach to their customers. In the process things have moved from creating all the beautiful arches at entrance of your shop to cost per click model. The cost of click has been largely the game of few large players that control search market, and e-commerce websites who have so painfully captured our buying behavior over months of purchases.

But this data driven approach doesn’t come free, and these players have offered some value proposition to end users. Be it efficient and relevant search or be it discounted products.

But invariably these platforms have captured information that has been shared by users consciously while taking some action or other. Whereas connected ecosystem offers an advantage that the information entry and capture becomes context based without explicit entry by the end user, and hence leads to better data quality.

Threat or Opportunity

There is no doubt that IoT is the biggest change that will impact all our lives going forward, and for various industries, be it e-Commerce, manufacturing or technology the impact of IoT will be the way these industries perceive this. For industries like digital marketing, IoT would require the digital marketing firms to adapt to new technology as the existing technology is going to be irrelevant in near future.

People will spend more time with small screens like wearable, and more time with the benefits from technology, rather than looking at the pretty interfaces. In such scenarios analytics will play increasing role in predicting when a certain purchase decision is about to come, and accordingly customer targeting is going to be precise

Well these are some specific scenarios, and I believe the best way to realize the impact of IoT would be discuss specific use cases in details, that I would touch upon later on. For the time being, lets wait, watch and predict.