I had the good fortune to attend GTK’s and Pillsbury’s amazing Internet of Things Private Executive Event in Palo Alto last week.
It was a star-studded, technocratic affair - drawn from Kamal Ahmed’s and Ali Tabibian’s amazing Silicon Valley network, by the high-profile speakers and panelists including Qualcomm’s chairman Paul Jacobs, General Electric's Head of Software Bill Ruh, Cisco's Vice President Tony Shakib, Splunk CTO Todd Papaiaonnou and by the incredibly exciting and timely topic itself.
Whatever name you want to call it - the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Everything, Machine-to-Machine Computing, the Embedded Internet, Smart Services - the fundamental idea is that we are moving rapidly to a world where online connectedness exists not just on our desktops and smartphones, but rather is woven into the very fabric of our world (cars, planes, factories, our bodies and more).
This coming reality is scary to some for sure, but the myriad of productivity and efficiency gains an IoT world promises is as exciting as business gets.
And so the attendees - from Fortune 500 tech stalwarts like Intuit, Amazon, HP, and Oracle, to high-profile VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, to some of the hottest IoT start-ups in the world (StreetLine, Jasper Wireless, Liquid Robotics) - listened as the speakers shared both the key IoT tech. advances (miniaturization, affordability, de-wireization) and the corresponding best areas of business opportunity.
My Three Takeaways:
Better Health and Wellness. Any fears of big brother and losses of privacy in an IoT world are well offset by the opportunities to save and prolong lives via inexpensive, unobtrusive, and accurate monitoring of “on the body” health data and events.
We can see the possibilities in the early successes of the quantified self-movement, pioneered by companies like FitBit and Jawbone that monitor sleep, exercise, diet, heart rate, and body temperature, and more.
As technology and the collective data sets naturally grow and improve, the opportunity to intervene quickly (and remotely!) in both catastrophic and chronic health events is incredibly exciting.
The Industrial Internet. General Electric’s Billion Dollar Bet to transform the 122 year old company from one based on building and selling large and complex machines - jet turbines, locomotives, and power plants - into one based on selling analytics and services to ensure that these machines run incrementally ever-more efficiently highlights the promise of the Industrial Internet.
Its decidedly low glamour goal? To apply a form of Moneyball to the gigantic Old Economy backbone of our modern world and “eek out” 1%, 2%, and 3% efficiency gains that in their aggregate represent trillions of dollars of increased productivity and profitability.
Energy. Energy is a HUGE area where converging and coalescing IoT tech advancements are starting to allow for massive reductions in our global carbon footprint while making the energy to power our cars, drive our factories, and light our homes cheaper and more accessible and reliable.
Great for those of us in America, but life-changing for the three billion people around the world without daily access to electricity, heat, clean water, and reliable food.
An overly optimistic take? Perhaps.
But even if only 1/10 of the productivity and efficiency promises shared in Palo Alto last week come to pass, IoT represents a business opportunity so large, multi-faceted, and all-encompassing as to make even the most grizzled and cynical market observers more than a little giddy.
And that about sums up my time in Palo Alto last week - a bunch of big, technologically literate kids talking and acting as if we all together are about to enter one of the biggest candy stores in any of our lifetimes.
To Your Success,
