
The Internet of Pointless Things - stanfordnope
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/09/21/consumers-prepare-for-an-internet-of-very-pointless-things/
======
buffoon
Yes. Another angle...

Just looking around me there are 45 wireless SSIDs, crazy interference and
nothing but crap flying around my airspace. Half the time I can see people's
bluetooth devices wide open in nearby houses as well.

Add to that the impending 9000 useless little devices that will be broken and
this is the RF equivalent of space debris. It's got to the point I can barely
keep a WiFi connection up for more than a few minutes already. Even on my 4G
connection I'm lucky to get 4mbits due to the contention locally. I can upload
at 40mbits though which is crazy

So literally last weekend I cabled my house with 5 runs of 100 meg ethernet
and a couple of long patch leads in the living room and stuffed in a cheap 8
port netgear switch from ebay. Plugged the whole thing into my router and
turned off the WiFi entirely just using it as a switch + NAT combo.

I can now transfer files between my desktop and laptop at 10Mbytes/second
rather than 500k/second with dropouts. It is simply bliss. Even my wife is no
longer annoyed about the prospect of dangling wires because stuff is working
again.

It has got to the point that I'd rather have a broken CAT5 plug that falls out
every 5 minutes than WiFi. I really don't know how all this tech is going to
work when there is so much contention and noise already. I think it will just
contribute to the pain.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I just don't understand this wireless craze. I get that normal consumers buy
into it, but for anyone mildly technically inclined, nobody should be using
wireless anywhere they can avoid it. Wireless is just a messy solution. The
only wireless devices I use at home are my phones.

~~~
mkj
Do you use laptops on couches at home? Cables seem hasslesome there.

~~~
buffoon
That's what I'm now doing. I duct taped a couple of ethernet cables to the
back of the couch and you just stick your hand down and grab one if you need
it. I terminated the cables slightly earlier and used an inline coupler so you
can replace the last 1m when the plastic clip inevitably breaks off after a
couple of months without having to rerun 25m of cable.

I mostly use a desktop so this is primarily for the wife and kids.

~~~
exodust
This is crazy. Duct taping cables to the couch? Too funny.

What about tablets/iPads for wife and kids?

I don't know why you were getting so many dropouts but it's not because "wifi
is bad". I live in a house with lots of noise from neighbours wifi, but no
problems here. Wifi will be solid for months at a time.

I must have a good wifi router (Billion 7800NL). Not all routers are created
equal, I've gone through a couple of duds before the Billion. Some deal with
interference better than others. Let the router choose the channel
automatically too, very important.

My house is old, quite large, thick walls and so on. But everyone uses wi-fi
here from different rooms without any issues. A lot of simultaneous
connections going on too.

------
Machiq
I am from the industry on the B2B side and this article rings even more true
and much more strongly so on the B2B - industrial internet side of things. Go
to any 'messe' (as they call it in Germany) or salon or expo and you see tons
of connected/connectable industrial products but when you dig deeper into how
those machines/components are going to be integrated, installed, commissioned,
used and maintained, it becomes quickly evident that the vendors haven't
thought those things through.

The dominant discourse when you talk to many OEMs is that this is a defensive
play to be prepared for all those secretive inventions that Google and Apple
are making in their X-Labs. They don't know what's coming so they are throwing
everything at it to "cloud-wash" and "IoT-wash" their offerings even when
their customers are justifiably scared about the risks of cyber-attacks that
connected machines bring into their factories and plants.

In short, not enough RoI evident for the investments and changes in processes
IoT mandates in the enterprise - especially in the production plants. However,
based on my discussion with all the different actors, its likely that we'll
find use cases in either Operations Optimization or Asset Optimization.

~~~
graffitici
I actually think the industrial side of the story is where real value will be
created. I'm also working on an industrial iot application, and would really
like to chat! Is this your company?

[http://www.zeefaxcms.com/images/data_sheets/zeefax_data_shee...](http://www.zeefaxcms.com/images/data_sheets/zeefax_data_sheets/ZFX_MachIQ%20Data%20Sheet.pdf)

~~~
Machiq
No it's not my company - thanks for pointing it out though - I am cofounder at
a startup and we call ourselves MachIQ. Looks like a Trademark purchase will
have tp be made eventually :-)

you can reach out to me via LinkedIn/Google - rchikballapur.

Cheers!

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VLM
As a meta comment, I can't get to the forbes story on a direct link because I
adblock and scriptblock. I googled the title and got in via the google search
free pass and I now see I'm blocking 19 social scripts/ads which provide zero
to negative value for me. The point is no one wants spam or pointless
interruptions or endless big brother tracking. The future of "smart devices"
is your overhead lightbulb connecting to an absolute minimum of 19 social
media and tracking sites and government offices to permanently record your
every activity and no one wants that except spies and corrupt people.

If there's no end user benefit unless they can get the government to force the
population to use them, most "smart" devices will end up doing the equivalent
of the 80s/90s VCR clock flashing 12:00. Maybe the strategy to work around
that is light bulbs of the future will refuse to turn on unless you give the
home factory in China full access to your complete facebook, twitter, and
linkedin profiles and perhaps your credit card number so you can purchase
"upgrades" to run beyond 100 hours or beyond 50% brightness levels.

I'll be using dumb bulbs and laughing at people stuck with inferior smart
bulbs.

~~~
ams6110
I've considered going back to candles, honestly. This stuff is SO out of
control.

~~~
ashark
Careful. If you don't source your candles properly you might end up with lead
wicks, even though they've (shockingly recently) been outlawed in the US.

I've also got concerns about the material used to make the candles themselves.
I started burning beeswax candles, and now when I'm around the more common
sort it smells like factory waste, or like someone took all the chemicals
under a sink and mixed them together. Unpleasant and disquieting.

~~~
artmageddon
Not to mention the fire hazard that they pose..

------
benevol
It's sort of getting old.

Create a closed/proprietary platform, lock people in, cash out.

Create sloppy "security", sell the solution for it, cash out.

We really don't need this stuff. It exists because money is being spent on
talking us into spending money on it.

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phodo
I take a contrarian view on this. Such advancements / toys / useless things
are vitally important to forward progress. What this article fails to
recognize is that innovation is often built on the current "pareto (efficient)
frontier" ... that is, it is built around the universe of available
devices/applications/protocols/technologies/useless-things ... rearranged and
consumed in new and novel ways. While the final application might not be a
smart oven, as it might indeed be a useless item, that final application could
very well be an application that requires the availability of a smart oven
from which to build on, or one whose innovation was triggered by the
availability of a smart oven. In other words, a smart oven plays a role in
innovation and society as a whole, and shouldn't be dissed.

~~~
chadgeidel
I agree - with the caveat that it should be "done responsibly" (which is a
tough nut to crack in this context).

I'd love a "smart house" \- the fewer things I have to do when I get home, the
more time I have to relax or do my own thing! I know the promise of the smart
house and the execution of the smart house are years apart, but I feel we are
just now getting to the "promise" part.

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hobo_mark
obligatory:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit](https://mobile.twitter.com/internetofshit)

~~~
manaskarekar
It's funny how you get redirected to a mobile version of a website when you're
on the phone, but not to a desktop version when you're on the computer.

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normloman
Remember in the 90s when everyone said virtual reality and smart TVs were the
next wave of high tech? And how all the big companies started putting money
into R&D for said technologies? Remember how it never materialized? (Well,
it's being realized now, 2 decades late.)

The "internet of things" is the same shit. Something people like to mention at
TED conferences. But do we want it? Is the market ready for it? No one's
asking that. If you ask me, we're not ready. At the moment, the tech is too
expensive and too useless. A few things will win out with affluent customers
(thermostats, audio systems). But putting chips in everything we own is a far
off dream.

~~~
lucozade
Funny how these things are. My reading of the last 20 years is the exact
opposite.

We've gone from talking about how devices will change how we live and work to
having devices that are changing how we live and work. Ok they weren't VR or
TVs, they were sensor heavy mobile devices. But still.

And they're not completely pointless. They may not have solved world peace but
they've changed comms in quite positive ways; I have to travel for work and
video chat to my family is a wonderful thing.

Also, over the last year or so, I've seen a noticeable increase in people
taking an interest with their health due to Fitbits and the like. Having that
feedback loop, although a small thing, can make quite a difference.

I can see this sort of thing having logical extensions into the home because
we now carry sophisticated control systems with us. It wouldn't surprise me in
the slightest if we don't start getting QR codes on menus/food packs with
nutrient content, for example.

Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that what I'm talking about here are
all first world solutions to first world problems. But the idea of connected
stuff affecting ones life isn't in the future.

~~~
normloman
Yeah but in order to reach that conclusion you have to abstract too much. We
can all agree that devices are and will change how we live. But now we're not
talking about VR, Smart TVs, or the Internet of Things anymore. Because the
truth is, we never know what form the next wave of technology will take. And
that's why I'd rather experiment than prophesize.

------
tomtoise
See: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/883092715/smart-froc-
th...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/883092715/smart-froc-the-worlds-
first-smart-highchair)

~~~
tonylemesmer
As a coherent story this chair is terrible. The parents start off saying they
couldn't find a good chair for their kids. So they designed a decent looking
chair and it seemed like a great idea that it would work for kids until they
were about 10 years old. That's a great solution, adult chairs can be pretty
bad for kids at the dinner table. Anyway.

Then inexplicably, halfway through the video this crap about measuring the
child's weight every time they use the chair. Nothing in the original problem
says anything about tracking weight? Ridiculous leap from "can't find a good
high chair" to "high chair with built in wireless scales".

Is there something in the kickstarter ts&cs that says "projects must have
wireless connectivity and an app" that I'm missing?

~~~
tomtoise
It's one more ridiculous example of the 'Internet of Shit'.

If it's not secure, I could imagine people fiddling with the weights just to
scare the crap out of parents. It's something my younger self would do.

------
aetherson
Here's my litmus test for taking an IoT thing seriously: If nowhere in the
entire ecosystem of that thing does anyone try to replace light switches with
taking out my phone and fiddling with an app, I'll at least listen.

It demonstrates to me how fundamentally unserious the IoT is that people keep
coming back to trying to replace a light switch. Light switches are really
good, guys. They're fast, everyone understands them, and they're reliable.
Don't get me wrong, anything can be improved, but:

1\. Every IoT lightbulb thing I've ever seen has been strictly inferior to the
light switch.

2\. Even if you did manage to actually improve it, how _much_ are you
improving it, at what _cost_? I'm not going to pay $100 to make it very very
slightly more convenient to turn on my lights.

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puranjay
As a consumer, why would I ever buy a "smart device" from a startup that may
not exist in 2 years?

~~~
roel_v
Many of them aren't as 'smart' as they pretend to be, and can easily be
MitM'ed. No subscription fees, local data storage. Depends on the
functionality of whatever server it is connecting to, of course. I did this
with a body scale - the online component is only storage.

Then again, most of this 'connected' crap is good as a hobby only. I like
playing with it, but the actual added value is very low.

------
dmritard96
There are many pointless devices. But there are also devices that actually
solve peoples problems. They will be the ones that emerge as real companies.

------
pessimizer
Smart Pipe

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ)

------
sageabilly
I'm pretty sure whoever wrote this article doesn't cook.

I'm a huge believer in data and its ability to make things better, whether for
companies (seen for years with Business Intelligence software and whatnot) and
now, with IoT, for individuals.

Problem is, now that we can gather thousands of data points about an
individual (what exact time I woke up this morning, how well I slept, how long
I brushed my teeth, the calories in my breakfast, what I had for breakfast,
what time the sun came up, my self-reported mood, the length of my commute,
how many stop lights I encountered...) we have no idea what to DO with that
data. The state of IoT is ridiculous right now because every company is trying
to cash in on it using the old model of marketing ("Surely if we know enough
about our customers we can create ads that they will want to action on!") and
this old model is 95% dead now that the majority of people get their content
served up via the internet instead of newspaper/magazine and streaming instead
of cable.

I believe that once the marketing field catches up with the way people are
actually living and works in conjunction with the makers in technology
companies coming up with products and solutions that actually make people's
lives better then IoT will start to make sense. I have hope that this will
happen... but am pessimistic about the timeline.

IoT means data, and to me "more data always means more better", but data is
only as good as the questions you ask it and right now we're really, really
bad at asking the right questions.

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Jemmeh
For me the environmental impact is also a factor.I don't need a bunch of items
sitting around wasting energy because they're all pointlessly wi-fi connected,
have sensors, or are "always on and ready to go". And with more complicated
parts things are more likely to break, so that's more likely to go in a
landfill.

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sixbrx
I think what we need is a nice standard icon representing clearly that a
product does NOT communicate wirelessly at all. Then let consumers decide
which devices are useful to have connected as part of an IOT and which they
would rather not.

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toothbrush
Needs JavaScript to read article text.

~~~
vlunkr
I also had to whitelist the site on ghostery. I'm not sure which one it was
depending on.

