
The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret - pierregillesl
https://medium.com/internet-of-shit/the-internet-of-things-has-a-dirty-little-secret-28bce2d412b2#---0-91.rwny5cnj4
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rmah
What the author fails to understand is that IoT is not a consumer thing, it's
an industrial thing. And silicon valley has (mostly) missed the boat. They're
behind the curve.

There are already 100's of millions, if not billions, of IoT devices in the
field, monitoring and controlling electrical, transport, logistical,
agricultural, manufacturing and other infrastructure. There are hundreds of
companies that are highly active in this space and doing quite well. Some are
new, some are old. They operate at every layer from device manufacturing, to
data collection, to analysis and more.

The consumer stuff, like Nest, or colored light bulbs are just fads, IMO. The
only area where I think IoT may have _some_ viability in the consumer space is
healthcare. I do not mean things like jogging bracelets or the other
"wellness" silliness that gets sold directly to consumers. I mean devices that
monitor actual health metrics (blood sugar, heart rate, etc). There are large
trials being done by health insurance companies right now to determine if
active and constant monitoring will help reduce costs and improve outcomes
among high risk populations.

Anyway, if you want to keep on top of IoT, ignore the SV hooplah and read
industrial-focused rags instead.

~~~
keithnz
that's the area we are in. Doing smart metering type things, vaccine
monitoring, all kinds of agricultural monitoring, from soil to water to
weather. Then having the ability to stitch together various data streams and
output various data streams.

And its one thing to have a IoT thing, but how you consume it and what you can
do with it needs to be pretty good otherwise a lot of value is lost.

At the moment, lots of the IoT opportunities is where the value of the
information / control is pretty high.

Consumer household and personal Gadget IoT is interesting, and yes, sort of
fadish at the moment, but I think it will develop, manufacturers as standard
will put in the cheap chips that allow their things to be connected. But the
big thing is, what does it connect into? Ideally some open platforms, but more
likely the likes of Google will start hoovering IoT info / providing control
and incorporating it into their platform. It does a lot to try and understand
your patters of behavior, so seems like a natural extension that it knows what
info to tell you about from your IoT devices, and what kind of control you
want

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duaneb
Who is buying these things? Even the "high-end" (nest) is buggy, expensive,
and hostile to ownership. What is the appeal? Can anyone explain? My
thermostat has no physical ability to lock me out or brick itself. That this
is even on the table is terrifying.

~~~
increment_i
One possible explanation is the peacock feathers effect. People come into your
home and go "Oooh, what's that?". The homeowner now has a chance to stand out
from her peers.

Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer IoT
come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware that "all
software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer
> IoT come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware
> that "all software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course)_

That's one angle. Another one is that people who have enough understanding of
how "smart devices" exactly work can see that cloud-dependence is ridiculous
engineering, if you look at the product as something designed to provide value
to users. The question becomes, whether or not it bothers you that the
companies building this stuff are actually user-hostile. Personally, it does
bother me - that's why I steer clear of them and warn people about this.

~~~
increment_i
Again, something software devs catch right away, that the layman often
doesn't.

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azinman2
Overly doomsday. Easy to say these things for just about anything in tech
these days.

I'm working on Vanadium (by Google) [1], which will allow all this stuff to be
server-less and secure (by default). Once this or things like it are adopted
there's less a need for revenue to pay for the backend, nor the ability/need
for companies going out of business to brick their devices.

[1] [http://v.io](http://v.io)

~~~
owenwil
Sounds really interesting, though isn't Google's core mandate to make money?
Why would Brillo also exist? I hope to see it public soon!

~~~
azinman2
vanadium.github.com

It's open source. Not everything Google does is directly for money.

Update: didn't see your brillo comment. First I've heard of it actually. Looks
like Brillo is an OS and meant for embedded devices -- Vanadium is Go code
that works on iOS, Android, your desktop, your server, your raspberry pi, etc.

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kylehotchkiss
IoS is a highly enjoyable Twitter and also writes longer articles well. I
don't know how you are, IoS author, but keep it up, I enjoy reading these

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TeMPOraL
Welcome to the Internet of Things - home automation 2.0, with a bit of SV-
style greed sprinkled to fuck things up.

I just came back from a "smart home" trade show, talked a bit to the regular
companies doing regular home automation. It's expensive, yes - you get
industrial-quality products and a solution designed (and priced) for your
particular needs. Basically, I'm talking about companies that were doing IoT
for the past two decades, long before anyone ever thought of that acronym. I
have a few observations:

\- Everyone does exactly the same thing. HVAC, alarms, lights, window blinds,
access control. There isn't really much more to sensibly automate at home for
an ordinary person at this moment. So they try to differentiate by look&feel,
UI and the type of installation - e.g. whether it can be laid over an existing
building easily, or whether it would require to dig up the entire electrical
installation and is therefore best done during construction or big renovation.

\- Everything runs local first. As it should. Most solutions are wired, some
are wireless - via Zigbee, LoRa, Wi-Fi, or some protocol, but still over a
local network. Cloud services are often added to enable remote viewing and
management via mobile devices, but this is a bonus, not the core thing in the
installation. One company I talked with today ensured me that their pretty
mobile apps / tablet control panels have configurable network URL, so you can
expose your automation server however you like or _not at all_ \- just point
the app to an IP in your local network.

\- A typical setup is expected to work fully locally and is resilient. In many
cases, even if your central server goes down, your "smart" wall switches still
work and control the stuff.

\- The business model is honest. You submit your needs, get a quote for the
installation, and when you decide to go ahead then the company comes, set
things up, and it's done. No silly recurrent fees, no bullshit subscriptions.
You bought the hardware, it's yours.

So basically, it works as it _should_. It's not hot and sexy (most of your
installation will be hidden in the walls anyway), but it is reliable and it is
honest. It's how grownups do business. Contrast that with the startup IoT
bullshit.

As some of HNers mentioned already over the last few months, what we need is
not Internet of Things, but an _Intranet_ of Things. Exposing all that data to
cloud by default is user-hostile and bad engineering. Adding a subscription-
based business model on top of that is literally screwing people over.
Ownership is like privacy nowadays - too easy to give up for convenience,
because the people selling people stuff make money off their mistakes.

------
TheGuyWhoCodes
Whether you want it or not your home might have a smart meter for
electricity,gas or water.

Your Energy/Water supplier knows a lot about you already, they use this
information to give you better experience or offer services. Sure there isn't
the risk that this will brick or stop working but you don't have that privacy
in some parts of the world, and in the end it's about making money.

If you buy an IoT product that can't function without the internet, or can't
have that smart turned off you you bought a bad product and you should feel
bad.

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kordless
> Before you buy into ‘smart’ devices, consider this: nobody really knows the
> answer because they don’t want to tell you. It’s better if you don’t know.

For anyone listening, don't allow others to tell you what to think. The
statement above, for example, is in dire cognitive dissonance and directly in
conflict with itself. "nobody really knows" vs. "they don't want to tell you".

The fact is, if we keep on keeping on with this stupid VC model thing with
startups, it's likely to end badly.

------
lostcolony
The main issue, I think, with IoT, is that most of the focus is on consumer
use, and so many companies are trying to start there, without a clear view of
how always sending data back to the company benefits the consumer.

Consumers don't really -care- about that data, for the most part. What benefit
do they get? The data by itself largely isn't useful to them, and the extra
device 'smarts' often doesn't require internet enablement. Nest doesn't need
to send your data anywhere; it just needs to be smart enough to figure out
when you're home and what temperature you like. Maybe a (secure, obviously)
web panel to allow you to configure it remotely. That is, the benefit of a
'smart' device to the consumer is currently largely orthogonal to the benefit
a company gets from it, that massive trove of data. I think, as we move
forward, and more and more leaks of data occur, more and more egregious abuses
of the data occur (even by the company that sold the device), there will be a
second generation of consumer devices, that don't send their data to anyone
except you; you gain 95% of the benefits of the current tech, but with a
guarantee of end to end encryption.

In consumer spaces, there is, however, market opportunity for sufficiently
complex devices. For example, Tesla, the data coming from the car can be
useful directly to the consumer (notifying them of parts operating outside of
expected parameters, etc), and the model could be changed so that data goes
back to Tesla only when the consumer decides to as part of getting that part
serviced; Tesla still gets relevant data, but not all of it, and the benefit
of some people sending it (much like anonymous usage statistics for software)
affects everyone. While over the air updates are cool, they could be done
without the user information being shared, and they could be set to be
disabled, instead requiring user intervention, for the security conscious.

But both of those miss what is perhaps the most intriguing application of IoT
- industry. Where the collection of data from numerous disparate parts and
places is beneficial to the customer. That is, a Nest (and its functionality)
for a consumer is hardly necessary; they know when they're cold, they know
when they're hot, they can change it. But for a multi-national conglomerate?
They can run analytics against that data and find places that are
losing/gaining heat too fast, indicative of poor insulation, or poor placement
of heating/cooling devices. They can be notified of failures in cooling of
rooms containing mission critical hardware, and respond quicker. Etc. The data
gathering across many devices directly benefits the customer, rather than only
really benefitting the company that sells the device.

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awinter-py
All the IOT features in the article are just 'remote control'. Nobody who used
a television in the 80s 90s or 00s will be surprised that bundled remote
controls tend to suck.

The good news for IOT builders: standalone remote controls have tended to suck
too. On-device non-remote physical buttons also often suck.

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joesmo
Great article. I wouldn't place technology that obviously benefits
tremendously from being Internet connected like wireless music systems in the
Internet of Shit category, however. You might as well start tossing in
e-readers, tablets, and laptops then.

~~~
anexprogrammer
I might. If it had delivered what was promised on the other hand...

Three years ago I tried very hard to go wireless+online for music. I
diligently uploaded thousands of .flacs to Google Play when I bought my new
Nexus. Yet when I was around the house, or taking the dog for a walk, or going
to and from work about half of the time there was silence as it was buffering
or whatever. This was in Newcastle, not the third world or rural Scotland. I'd
have expected much better, like connectivity and enough buffering to play
nearly all the time. I'd have expected good enough even somewhere with spotty
data coverage.

Around the same time I bought a nice Denon Network Music player for the home
system. Paid a good few pounds in the hope of decent midrange quality. Since
when, BBC have reduced stream quality, and Last FM radio (the main reason I
bought it) was discontinued.

Internet of S __* seems fairly accurate then.

Now all my music is back as lossless on FreeNAS, and I have a LAN only app on
the phone as remote control. When out with dog, the old ipod nano is good
enough and lasts much longer than the Nexus did. The Denon now ranks as
pointless waste of money. It plays my freenas archive, but I could do that
already.

So for me, my online music experiment is over, and I'm >£500 lighter.

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anotherevan
Said it before, and I'll say it again. Much more interested in the intranet of
things, than the internet of things.

