
What's Wrong with the Internet of Things - ghosh
http://www.tomtunguz.com/simplicity-complexity-coin/
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Sanddancer
Ugh. The example given here, the electric imp, is everything that's wrong with
how people want to commoditize the Internet of Things. Had the "as a service"
product been optional, I'd have already purchased a half dozen of them for
various projects I'm working on. However, because it can only use the
integrated wifi to connect to their servers, there's no way to build devices
that will work in situations where internet access is spotty and/or latency
management is crucial. Internet of Things is neat, and fascinating, but
articles like this may very well smother it in its crib. Dependency on a
central server is the one way to ensure that it stays just a geek toy.

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mrtree
IoT researcher here. You can buy devices with LTE or GSM connectivity, or
Bluetooth LE if you prefer. Those still work well for battery devices since
the new Bluetooth provides sleep cycle syncing. Also for LTE sleep patter
synchronization is being added.

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Sanddancer
I know that part, and battery life is not the issue. My issue is more with the
Electric Imp specifically having everything communicate up with the
mothership. For background, the application I wanted to use it for is a
costuming project with lighting and sound synchronization, where having to
send my data up into the ether and then back down into the other costumes and
props, in areas with potentially no GSM/LTE signal, is a no-go. There are
quite a few bits of TCP/IP that would make my job easier, but dependency on an
outside server isn't one of them.

~~~
sounds
I came to say the same; my application differs but the breakthrough is not
SaaS, it's Moore's law even while Dennard scaling is running out.

I specifically mean the density at minimum cost per transistor. ARM cores are
now providing what I used to need x86 cores for.

Embedded has been around longer than any other app.

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bakhy
IoT is a really unsettling prospect. I was expecting a text dealing with this,
but alas, mostly click-bait. the text is superficial ideological bickering
which takes IoT for granted. IoT is simply here, it seems. the text deals only
with what kind of IoT you should like.

it's only a question, as one commenter here put it, of our psychological
adaptation to it. like cows in a super-high-tech milking farm, we should adapt
to being monitored and analyzed by devices 24/7\. furthermore, according to
the text here, the most important aspect of this might just be the need to
centralize all the collected data! crazy.

not to mention, i still haven't seen anything other than gimmicks and empty
talk about ubiquitous devices. which devices? what is the actual use here? you
can change your thermostat temperature before getting home? good going for
Nest and their product, it certainly seems useful, but there is no revolution
here, other than perhaps a completely revolutionary loss in privacy.

and BTW it all sounds like some kind of bubble. like the need to find a way to
sell more new stuff has recently gone into over-hype.

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knowaveragejoe
It sounds like you're failing to grasp the true implications here. Sure, there
is loss of privacy, but there is massive efficiency to be gained for both
businesses and end consumers. As with everything we will have to make
tradeoffs, and as time goes on I hope privacy considerations will continue
play a larger role in the debate.

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bakhy
i don't know why you think i failed to grasp that. there are benefits, i
agree. i just don't see any such great or important benefits which would
justify this almost complete destruction of the notion of privacy. can you
give me some examples?

PS there's a lot more to life than efficiency ;)

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knowaveragejoe
You're using the negative connotation of efficiency that should really be
discarded. It doesn't only mean "more, faster, because higher profits, work
like crazy until you die", that notion is extremely narrow for what efficiency
actually means.

Efficiency saves lives right now. It is also what will enable us to save our
species from the destruction of the planet. In a world as populated as ours,
efficiency is by and large what the very concept of sustainability _itself_
consists of.

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bakhy
you are again projecting some notions of yours into me, than correcting your
own projections as if i actually said that. if you would be interested in
having a conversation, we might try that. till then, buh-bye.

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amirmc
I agree that the IoT should be about improving lives but that's true of any
new product/service/thing and is not specific to IoT.

I do think the post misses the much larger point of _how_ such services and
products get created and deployed. Right now, developers either have to (1)
use someone else's platform and be locked in or (2) build a system completely
from scratch.

We've already seen what happens with option 1 on the web, where the company
providing the platform can make an arbitrary decision that puts you out of
business - or they get acquired and shut down or a whole host of other things.
Option 2 is just too difficult right now unless you're doing nothing but
'appccessories' (toy devices that have some networked functionality) - mainly
because we're dealing with distributed systems and the problems they pose.

What's needed are _open-source_ tools to make option 2 viable for a new wave
of developers. In other words, we need the equivalent of the open-source LAMP
stack but for distributed systems. Just think for a moment of the billions of
dollars of value that this open toolstack enabled. We need an equivalent stack
to solve the modern problems and empower developers to make _new_ products and
services.

I see these modern problems as related to (1) how we create and deploy
applications, (2) how those applications store and sync their data and (3) how
they identify and securely connect to each other. Of course, there are
solutions to all of these right now but they're cumbersome and inappropriate
for the environment we're deploying to. I'm working on a toolstack that deals
with these issues but in a much more scalable and resilient way. We're calling
it the MISO stack and I'll be writing more about it soon. In the meantime, you
can look at following post to get an idea of what we're doing and why.

[http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-
nymote/](http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/)

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digitalengineer
I think we love to think that. Developers care about the 'how'. Most of the
users, sadly, don't.

And –to be perfectly honest– most developers will sell their service/product
with the client data should a big fat offer come along.

~~~
amirmc
It's the developers I'm talking about, not the users. I've yet to see any
breakout company that's using a proprietary IoT platform (but correct me if
I'm wrong). There's an inherent risk associated with trying to build a big
company that way.

Yes, the developer could still sell everything to a third party but that's not
really what I'm trying to tackle. It's the problem of building and connecting
such applications/services in the first place. You shouldn't need a 'platform'
to do that.

~~~
digitalengineer
I agree, you shouldn't. However, I think dev's will flock to the first
commercial API that allows them to concentrate on the specific problem they're
trying to tackle. They'll worry about the 'walled garden' if it ever get's so
far that it would become a problem. It could even go the Twitter-way. Open for
all and pinching down on devs when they've grown (too?) succesfull.

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primitivesuave
In certain European farms, each cow carries a computer and produces 200 MB of
data each year. Contamination and irregularities are found through analyzing
the data they are producing.

IoT will certainly improve our quality of life, but I suspect it will be in
the background for some time. The processes that bring you the things you use
and interact with every day are already getting smarter and more connected,
but I doubt most people will have an intelligent anticipatory device strapped
to them for quite some time. Humans have to first psychologically adapt to a
world where you don't need to stand in check-in lines at an airport terminal.

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noonespecial
I think we're still waiting for the "IBM PC Compatible" moment on the IoT.
Most of whats available today reminds me of the C-64 era of computing.
Everything is limited, silo-ed, and locked. Lots of gardens, no ecosystem.

There's a big difference between complexity being _hidden_ from the user and
complexity being locked away in a portal, platform, or single service.

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simonbarker87
We had this discussion in our office recently - I'm a fan of using the
Internet to add more powerful functionality but for a product to really be
adapted at scale the Internet connection still needs to add value without
requiring the user to interact for more than a few seconds periodically - if
at all. I think the IOT category will allow products to better integrate into
people's lives but also give power users more control and value.

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ronaldx
My concern about the "internet of things" is not discussed here.

My concern is that "internet of things" is really a synonym for "things that
used to work great independently but now have external dependencies that make
them less reliable and less accommodating, for primarily anti-consumer reasons
including surveillance and vendor lock-in"

