Alive and present everywhere open IoT Ecosystems the stepping stone to Smart Living

Introduction

The IoT is a much-marketed term as the future of all things;

the IoT is interconnected landscape of life experiences and transactions

What is the IoT, how is it intended to work and how does that relate to how it currently works. What are the real business opportunities and how will they be measured as a success? How can your business gain an advantage or benefit? Finally, are there any risks associated with the IoT, either foreseen or not and how might they be mitigated?

What is the IoT and where does it come from?

The IoT is problematic as a description for Ubiquity a concept that has been around for a long time.

Ubiquity is a synonym for omnipresence, the property of being present everywhere

Defence Ubiquity

The technology that underpins ubiquity comes from defence, specifically battlefield command and control (CnC) and has been evolving since the second world war. At that time, it was essential to coordinate and protect allied forces during the war. This strategic view of the battlefield as it changed was provided first through telephone communications (easily intercepted), radio communications (also easily intercepted) and then later RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging).

The second part of the technology that underpins ubiquity is security, the interception of communications in the second world war made it essential to provide proof of authenticity and to encode or encrypt important messages. While this was a common practice off the battlefield by people with the time to do this, the speed of change and the danger on the battlefield made this impossible, although the USA did use native american indian code talkers this security was not embedded across all battlefields as it had also been used in the World War I but German anthropologists had attempted to learn the languages.

Post the second world war, beacon technology (encrypted identifiers) with satellite uplinks provided oversight on large assets. However, until beacons could be miniaturised while maintaining a secure satellite uplink true battlefield ubiquity could not exist. This problem was overcome during the 1990’s enabling complex CnC of navy task groups, air forces, missiles, ground force vehicles and individual soldiers. The defence industry now has access to a fully ubiquitous battlefield command and control system, however it is still controlled by human choice based upon interpretation of sometimes confusing data. This interpretation and ownership of Meaning still resides with human control.

What is the IoT now and what will it become?

Commercial Ubiquity

The IoT is a stepping stone to Ubiquity. The commercialisation of ubiquity has been going on for a long time. It has included white goods requesting a service without customer involvement to fridges asking for milk, cars contacting the garage and customers monitoring their devices remotely.

However, it is yet to deliver the promise of true ubiquitous ecosystems talking to each other and creating a ubiquitous living environment by augmenting human existence, through simplification and service revolution.

Ubiquity is a network of negotiated connections, contracts with policies and attributes that are always present and open

In ubiquity the CIO once again comes to the forefront of the information exchange, management and security around products, services and things as they don’t require marketing to acquire each other’s benefits.

In open IoT Ecosystems there is an emergent human cognition language

This is devoid of the current marketing paradigm of using images to entice rather

Open IoT Ecosystems focus people on avatars in a new and more disruptive way