Tag Archives: internet of things

Technica

The Internet 0f Th1ngs

Google-search-IoT

Technologist Marc Goodman describes a not too distant future in which all our appliances, tools, products… anything and everything is plugged into the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT describes a world where all things are connected to everything else, making for a global mesh of intelligent devices from your connected car and your WiFi enabled sneakers to your smartwatch and home thermostat. You may well believe it advantageous to have your refrigerator ping the local grocery store when it runs out of fresh eggs and milk or to have your toilet auto-call a local plumber when it gets stopped-up.

But, as our current Internet shows us — let’s call it the Internet of People — not all is rosy in this hyper-connected, 24/7, always-on digital ocean. What are you to do when hackers attack all your home appliances in a “denial of home service attack (DohS)”, or when your every move inside your home is scrutinized, collected, analyzed and sold to the nearest advertiser, or when your cooktop starts taking and sharing selfies with the neighbors?

Goodman’s new book on this important subject, excerpted here, is titled Future Crimes.

From the Guardian:

If we think of today’s internet metaphorically as about the size of a golf ball, tomorrow’s will be the size of the sun. Within the coming years, not only will every computer, phone and tablet be online, but so too will every car, house, dog, bridge, tunnel, cup, clock, watch, pacemaker, cow, streetlight, bridge, tunnel, pipeline, toy and soda can. Though in 2013 there were only 13bn online devices, Cisco Systems has estimated that by 2020 there will be 50bn things connected to the internet, with room for exponential growth thereafter. As all of these devices come online and begin sharing data, they will bring with them massive improvements in logistics, employee efficiency, energy consumption, customer service and personal productivity.

This is the promise of the internet of things (IoT), a rapidly emerging new paradigm of computing that, when it takes off, may very well change the world we live in forever.

The Pew Research Center defines the internet of things as “a global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centres in a world-spanning information fabric”. Back in 1999, when the term was first coined by MIT researcher Kevin Ashton, the technology did not exist to make the IoT a reality outside very controlled environments, such as factory warehouses. Today we have low-powered, ultra-cheap computer chips, some as small as the head of a pin, that can be embedded in an infinite number of devices, some for mere pennies. These miniature computing devices only need milliwatts of electricity and can run for years on a minuscule battery or small solar cell. As a result, it is now possible to make a web server that fits on a fingertip for $1.

The microchips will receive data from a near-infinite range of sensors, minute devices capable of monitoring anything that can possibly be measured and recorded, including temperature, power, location, hydro-flow, radiation, atmospheric pressure, acceleration, altitude, sound and video. They will activate miniature switches, valves, servos, turbines and engines – and speak to the world using high-speed wireless data networks. They will communicate not only with the broader internet but with each other, generating unfathomable amounts of data. The result will be an always-on “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment”, a mere prelude to the tidal wave of change coming next.

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In the future all objects may be smart

The broad thrust sounds rosy. Because chips and sensors will be embedded in everyday objects, we will have much better information and convenience in our lives. Because your alarm clock is connected to the internet, it will be able to access and read your calendar. It will know where and when your first appointment of the day is and be able to cross-reference that information against the latest traffic conditions. Light traffic, you get to sleep an extra 10 minutes; heavy traffic, and you might find yourself waking up earlier than you had hoped.

When your alarm does go off, it will gently raise the lights in the house, perhaps turn up the heat or run your bath. The electronic pet door will open to let Fido into the backyard for his morning visit, and the coffeemaker will begin brewing your coffee. You won’t have to ask your kids if they’ve brushed their teeth; the chip in their toothbrush will send a message to your smartphone letting you know the task is done. As you walk out the door, you won’t have to worry about finding your keys; the beacon sensor on the key chain makes them locatable to within two inches. It will be as if the Jetsons era has finally arrived.

While the hype-o-meter on the IoT has been blinking red for some time, everything described above is already technically feasible. To be certain, there will be obstacles, in particular in relation to a lack of common technical standards, but a wide variety of companies, consortia and government agencies are hard at work to make the IoT a reality. The result will be our transition from connectivity to hyper-connectivity, and like all things Moore’s law related, it will be here sooner than we realise.

The IoT means that all physical objects in the future will be assigned an IP address and be transformed into information technologies. As a result, your lamp, cat or pot plant will be part of an IT network. Things that were previously silent will now have a voice, and every object will be able to tell its own story and history. The refrigerator will know exactly when it was manufactured, the names of the people who built it, what factory it came from, and the day it left the assembly line, arrived at the retailer, and joined your home network. It will keep track of every time its door has been opened and which one of your kids forgot to close it. When the refrigerator’s motor begins to fail, it can signal for help, and when it finally dies, it will tell us how to disassemble its parts and best recycle them. Buildings will know every person who has ever worked there, and streetlights every car that has ever driven by.

All of these objects will communicate with each other and have access to the massive processing and storage power of the cloud, further enhanced by additional mobile and social networks. In the future all objects may become smart, in fact much smarter than they are today, and as these devices become networked, they will develop their own limited form of sentience, resulting in a world in which people, data and things come together. As a consequence of the power of embedded computing, we will see billions of smart, connected things joining a global neural network in the cloud.

In this world, the unknowable suddenly becomes knowable. For example, groceries will be tracked from field to table, and restaurants will keep tabs on every plate, what’s on it, who ate from it, and how quickly the waiters are moving it from kitchen to customer. As a result, when the next E coli outbreak occurs, we won’t have to close 500 eateries and wonder if it was the chicken or beef that caused the problem. We will know exactly which restaurant, supplier and diner to contact to quickly resolve the problem. The IoT and its billions of sensors will create an ambient intelligence network that thinks, senses and feels and contributes profoundly to the knowable universe.

Things that used to make sense suddenly won’t, such as smoke detectors. Why do most smoke detectors do nothing more than make loud beeps if your life is in mortal danger because of fire? In the future, they will flash your bedroom lights to wake you, turn on your home stereo, play an MP3 audio file that loudly warns, “Fire, fire, fire.” They will also contact the fire department, call your neighbours (in case you are unconscious and in need of help), and automatically shut off flow to the gas appliances in the house.

The byproduct of the IoT will be a living, breathing, global information grid, and technology will come alive in ways we’ve never seen before, except in science fiction movies. As we venture down the path toward ubiquitous computing, the results and implications of the phenomenon are likely to be mind-blowing. Just as the introduction of electricity was astonishing in its day, it eventually faded into the background, becoming an imperceptible, omnipresent medium in constant interaction with the physical world. Before we let this happen, and for all the promise of the IoT, we must ask critically important questions about this brave new world. For just as electricity can shock and kill, so too can billions of connected things networked online.

One of the central premises of the IoT is that everyday objects will have the capacity to speak to us and to each other. This relies on a series of competing communications technologies and protocols, many of which are eminently hackable. Take radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, considered by many the gateway to the IoT. Even if you are unfamiliar with the name, chances are you have already encountered it in your life, whether it’s the security ID card you use to swipe your way into your office, your “wave and pay” credit card, the key to your hotel room, your Oyster card.

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Even if you don’t use an RFID card for work, there’s a good chance you either have it or will soon have it embedded in the credit card sitting in your wallet. Hackers have been able to break into these as well, using cheap RFID readers available on eBay for just $50, tools that allow an attacker to wirelessly capture a target’s credit card number, expiration date and security code. Welcome to pocket picking 2.0.

More productive and more prison-like

A much rarer breed of hacker targets the physical elements that make up a computer system, including the microchips, electronics, controllers, memory, circuits, components, transistors and sensors – core elements of the internet of things. These hackers attack a device’s firmware, the set of computer instructions present on every electronic device we encounter, including TVs, mobile phones, game consoles, digital cameras, network routers, alarm systems, CCTVs, USB drives, traffic lights, gas station pumps and smart home management systems. Before we add billions of hackable things and communicate with hackable data transmission protocols, important questions must be asked about the risks for the future of security, crime, terrorism, warfare and privacy.

In the same way our every move online can be tracked, recorded, sold and monetised today, so too will that be possible in the near future in the physical world. Real space will become just like cyberspace. With the widespread adoption of more networked devices, what people do in their homes, cars, workplaces, schools and communities will be subjected to increased monitoring and analysis by the corporations making these devices. Of course these data will be resold to advertisers, data brokers and governments, providing an unprecedented view into our daily lives. Unfortunately, just like our social, mobile, locational and financial information, our IoT data will leak, providing further profound capabilities to stalkers and other miscreants interested in persistently tracking us. While it would certainly be possible to establish regulations and build privacy protocols to protect consumers from such activities, the greater likelihood is that every IoT-enabled device, whether an iron, vacuum, refrigerator, thermostat or lightbulb, will come with terms of service that grant manufacturers access to all your data. More troublingly, while it may be theoretically possible to log off in cyberspace, in your well-connected smart home there will be no “opt-out” provision.

We may find ourselves interacting with thousands of little objects around us on a daily basis, each collecting seemingly innocuous bits of data 24/7, information these things will report to the cloud, where it will be processed, correlated, and reviewed. Your smart watch will reveal your lack of exercise to your health insurance company, your car will tell your insurer of your frequent speeding, and your dustbin will tell your local council that you are not following local recycling regulations. This is the “internet of stool pigeons”, and though it may sound far-fetched, it’s already happening. Progressive, one of the largest US auto insurance companies, offers discounted personalised rates based on your driving habits. “The better you drive, the more you can save,” according to its advertising. All drivers need to do to receive the lower pricing is agree to the installation of Progressive’s Snapshot black-box technology in their cars and to having their braking, acceleration and mileage persistently tracked.

The IoT will also provide vast new options for advertisers to reach out and touch you on every one of your new smart connected devices. Every time you go to your refrigerator to get ice, you will be presented with ads for products based on the food your refrigerator knows you’re most likely to buy. Screens too will be ubiquitous, and marketers are already planning for the bounty of advertising opportunities. In late 2013, Google sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission noting, “we and other companies could [soon] be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Knowing that Google can already read your Gmail, record your every web search, and track your physical location on your Android mobile phone, what new powerful insights into your personal life will the company develop when its entertainment system is in your car, its thermostat regulates the temperature in your home, and its smart watch monitors your physical activity?

Not only will RFID and other IoT communications technologies track inanimate objects, they will be used for tracking living things as well. The British government has considered implanting RFID chips directly under the skin of prisoners, as is common practice with dogs. School officials across the US have begun embedding RFID chips in student identity cards, which pupils are required to wear at all times. In Contra Costa County, California, preschoolers are now required to wear basketball-style jerseys with electronic tracking devices built in that allow teachers and administrators to know exactly where each student is. According to school district officials, the RFID system saves “3,000 labour hours a year in tracking and processing students”.

Meanwhile, the ability to track employees, how much time they take for lunch, the length of their toilet breaks and the number of widgets they produce will become easy. Moreover, even things such as words typed per minute, eye movements, total calls answered, respiration, time away from desk and attention to detail will be recorded. The result will be a modern workplace that is simultaneously more productive and more prison-like.

At the scene of a suspected crime, police will be able to interrogate the refrigerator and ask the equivalent of, “Hey, buddy, did you see anything?” Child social workers will know there haven’t been any milk or nappies in the home, and the only thing stored in the fridge has been beer for the past week. The IoT also opens up the world for “perfect enforcement”. When sensors are everywhere and all data is tracked and recorded, it becomes more likely that you will receive a moving violation for going 26 miles per hour in a 25-mile-per-hour zone and get a parking ticket for being 17 seconds over on your meter.

The former CIA director David Petraeus has noted that the IoT will be “transformational for clandestine tradecraft”. While the old model of corporate and government espionage might have involved hiding a bug under the table, tomorrow the very same information might be obtained by intercepting in real time the data sent from your Wi-Fi lightbulb to the lighting app on your smart phone. Thus the devices you thought were working for you may in fact be on somebody else’s payroll, particularly that of Crime, Inc.

A network of unintended consequences

For all the untold benefits of the IoT, its potential downsides are colossal. Adding 50bn new objects to the global information grid by 2020 means that each of these devices, for good or ill, will be able to potentially interact with the other 50bn connected objects on earth. The result will be 2.5 sextillion potential networked object-to-object interactions – a network so vast and complex it can scarcely be understood or modelled. The IoT will be a global network of unintended consequences and black swan events, ones that will do things nobody ever planned. In this world, it is impossible to know the consequences of connecting your home’s networked blender to the same information grid as an ambulance in Tokyo, a bridge in Sydney, or a Detroit auto manufacturer’s production line.

The vast levels of cyber crime we currently face make it abundantly clear we cannot even adequately protect the standard desktops and laptops we presently have online, let alone the hundreds of millions of mobile phones and tablets we are adding annually. In what vision of the future, then, is it conceivable that we will be able to protect the next 50bn things, from pets to pacemakers to self-driving cars? The obvious reality is that we cannot.

Our technological threat surface area is growing exponentially and we have no idea how to defend it effectively. The internet of things will become nothing more than the Internet of things to be hacked.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Google Search.

Technica

Your Toaster on the Internet

Toaster

Billions of people have access to the Internet. Now, whether a significant proportion of these do anything productive with this tremendous resource is open to debate — many preferring only to post pictures of their breakfasts, themselves or to watch last-minute’s viral video hit.

Despite all these humans clogging up the Tubes of the Internets most traffic along the information superhighway is in fact not even human. Over 60 percent of all activity comes from computer systems, such as web crawlers, botnets, and increasingly, industrial control systems, ranging from security and monitoring devices, to in-home devices such as your thermostat, refrigerator, smart TV , smart toilet and toaster. So, soon Google will know what you eat and when, and your fridge will tell you what you should eat (or not) based on what it knows of your body mass index (BMI) from your bathroom scales.

Jokes aside, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to herald an even more significant information revolution over the coming decades as all our devices and machines, from home to farm to factory, are connected and inter-connected.

From the ars technica:

If you believe what the likes of LG and Samsung have been promoting this week at CES, everything will soon be smart. We’ll be able to send messages to our washing machines, run apps on our fridges, and have TVs as powerful as computers. It may be too late to resist this movement, with smart TVs already firmly entrenched in the mid-to-high end market, but resist it we should. That’s because the “Internet of things” stands a really good chance of turning into the “Internet of unmaintained, insecure, and dangerously hackable things.”

These devices will inevitably be abandoned by their manufacturers, and the result will be lots of “smart” functionality—fridges that know what we buy and when, TVs that know what shows we watch—all connected to the Internet 24/7, all completely insecure.

While the value of smart watches or washing machines isn’t entirely clear, at least some smart devices—I think most notably phones and TVs—make sense. The utility of the smartphone, an Internet-connected computer that fits in your pocket, is obvious. The growth of streaming media services means that your antenna or cable box are no longer the sole source of televisual programming, so TVs that can directly use these streaming services similarly have some appeal.

But these smart features make the devices substantially more complex. Your smart TV is not really a TV so much as an all-in-one computer that runs Android, WebOS, or some custom operating system of the manufacturer’s invention. And where once it was purely a device for receiving data over a coax cable, it’s now equipped with bidirectional networking interfaces, exposing the Internet to the TV and the TV to the Internet.

The result is a whole lot of exposure to security problems. Even if we assume that these devices ship with no known flaws—a questionable assumption in and of itself if SOHO routers are anything to judge by—a few months or years down the line, that will no longer be the case. Flaws and insecurities will be uncovered, and the software components of these smart devices will need to be updated to address those problems. They’ll need these updates for the lifetime of the device, too. Old software is routinely vulnerable to newly discovered flaws, so there’s no point in any reasonable timeframe at which it’s OK to stop updating the software.

In addition to security, there’s also a question of utility. Netflix and Hulu may be hot today, but that may not be the case in five years’ time. New services will arrive; old ones will die out. Even if the service lineup remains the same, its underlying technology is unlikely to be static. In the future, Netflix, for example, might want to deprecate old APIs and replace them with new ones; Netflix apps will need to be updated to accommodate the changes. I can envision changes such as replacing the H.264 codec with H.265 (for reduced bandwidth and/or improved picture quality), which would similarly require updated software.

To remain useful, app platforms need up-to-date apps. As such, for your smart device to remain safe, secure, and valuable, it needs a lifetime of software fixes and updates.

A history of non-existent updates

Herein lies the problem, because if there’s one thing that companies like Samsung have demonstrated in the past, it’s a total unwillingness to provide a lifetime of software fixes and updates. Even smartphones, which are generally assumed to have a two-year lifecycle (with replacements driven by cheap or “free” contract-subsidized pricing), rarely receive updates for the full two years (Apple’s iPhone being the one notable exception).

A typical smartphone bought today will remain useful and usable for at least three years, but its system software support will tend to dry up after just 18 months.

This isn’t surprising, of course. Samsung doesn’t make any money from making your two-year-old phone better. Samsung makes its money when you buy a new Samsung phone. Improving the old phones with software updates would cost money, and that tends to limit sales of new phones. For Samsung, it’s lose-lose.

Our fridges, cars, and TVs are not even on a two-year replacement cycle. Even if you do replace your TV after it’s a couple years old, you probably won’t throw the old one away. It will just migrate from the living room to the master bedroom, and then from the master bedroom to the kids’ room. Likewise, it’s rare that a three-year-old car is simply consigned to the scrap heap. It’s given away or sold off for a second, third, or fourth “life” as someone else’s primary vehicle. Your fridge and washing machine will probably be kept until they blow up or you move houses.

These are all durable goods, kept for the long term without any equivalent to the smartphone carrier subsidy to promote premature replacement. If they’re going to be smart, software-powered devices, they’re going to need software lifecycles that are appropriate to their longevity.

That costs money, it requires a commitment to providing support, and it does little or nothing to promote sales of the latest and greatest devices. In the software world, there are companies that provide this level of support—the Microsofts and IBMs of the world—but it tends to be restricted to companies that have at least one eye on the enterprise market. In the consumer space, you’re doing well if you’re getting updates and support five years down the line. Consumer software fixes a decade later are rare, especially if there’s no system of subscriptions or other recurring payments to monetize the updates.

Of course, the companies building all these products have the perfect solution. Just replace all our stuff every 18-24 months. Fridge no longer getting updated? Not a problem. Just chuck out the still perfectly good fridge you have and buy a new one. This is, after all, the model that they already depend on for smartphones. Of course, it’s not really appropriate even to smartphones (a mid/high-end phone bought today will be just fine in three years), much less to stuff that will work well for 10 years.

These devices will be abandoned by their manufacturers, and it’s inevitable that they are abandoned long before they cease to be useful.

Superficially, this might seem to be no big deal. Sure, your TV might be insecure, but your NAT router will probably provide adequate protection, and while it wouldn’t be tremendously surprising to find that it has some passwords for online services or other personal information on it, TVs are sufficiently diverse that people are unlikely to expend too much effort targeting specific models.

Read the entire story here.

Image: A classically styled chrome two-slot automatic electric toaster. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Technica

Wearable Gadget Idea Generator

Need a new idea that rides the new techno-wave where the Internet of Things meets smartphones and wearables?  Find the sweet-spot at the confluence of these big emerging trends and you could be the next internet zillionaire.

So, junk the late-night caffeine-induced brainstorming parties with your engineer friends and visit the following:

http://whatthefuckismywearablestrategy.com/

Courtesy of this wonderfully creative site we are now well on our way to inventing the following essential gizmos:

heart rate monitor that turns the central heating on when your sleep patterns change
pair of contact lenses that posts to facebook when it’s windy
t-shirt that tweets when you drink too much coffee
pair of trousers that turns the central heating on when you burn 100 calories
pair of shoes that instagrams a selfie when the cat needs feeding

 

 

Idea Soup, Technica

The Internet of Things and Your (Lack of) Privacy

Ubiquitous connectivity for, and between, individuals and businesses is widely held to be beneficial for all concerned. We can connect rapidly and reliably with family, friends and colleagues from almost anywhere to anywhere via a wide array of internet enabled devices. Yet, as these devices become more powerful and interconnected, and enabled with location-based awareness, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) services, we are likely to face an increasing acute dilemma — connectedness or privacy?

From the Guardian:

The internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the internet by hundreds of companies — both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated – sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye on us.

Ephemeral conversation is over. Wholesale surveillance is the norm. Maintaining privacy from these powerful entities is basically impossible, and any illusion of privacy we maintain is based either on ignorance or on our unwillingness to accept what’s really going on.

It’s about to get worse, though. Companies such as Google may know more about your personal interests than your spouse, but so far it’s been limited by the fact that these companies only see computer data. And even though your computer habits are increasingly being linked to your offline behaviour, it’s still only behaviour that involves computers.

The Internet of Things refers to a world where much more than our computers and cell phones is internet-enabled. Soon there will be internet-connected modules on our cars and home appliances. Internet-enabled medical devices will collect real-time health data about us. There’ll be internet-connected tags on our clothing. In its extreme, everything can be connected to the internet. It’s really just a matter of time, as these self-powered wireless-enabled computers become smaller and cheaper.

Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how it will change society for the better. It’s true that it will make a lot of wonderful things possible, but the “Internet of Things” will also allow for an even greater amount of surveillance than there is today. The Internet of Things gives the governments and corporations that follow our every move something they don’t yet have: eyes and ears.

Soon everything we do, both online and offline, will be recorded and stored forever. The only question remaining is who will have access to all of this information, and under what rules.

We’re seeing an initial glimmer of this from how location sensors on your mobile phone are being used to track you. Of course your cell provider needs to know where you are; it can’t route your phone calls to your phone otherwise. But most of us broadcast our location information to many other companies whose apps we’ve installed on our phone. Google Maps certainly, but also a surprising number of app vendors who collect that information. It can be used to determine where you live, where you work, and who you spend time with.

Another early adopter was Nike, whose Nike+ shoes communicate with your iPod or iPhone and track your exercising. More generally, medical devices are starting to be internet-enabled, collecting and reporting a variety of health data. Wiring appliances to the internet is one of the pillars of the smart electric grid. Yes, there are huge potential savings associated with the smart grid, but it will also allow power companies – and anyone they decide to sell the data to – to monitor how people move about their house and how they spend their time.

Drones are the another “thing” moving onto the internet. As their price continues to drop and their capabilities increase, they will become a very powerful surveillance tool. Their cameras are powerful enough to see faces clearly, and there are enough tagged photographs on the internet to identify many of us. We’re not yet up to a real-time Google Earth equivalent, but it’s not more than a few years away. And drones are just a specific application of CCTV cameras, which have been monitoring us for years, and will increasingly be networked.

Google’s internet-enabled glasses – Google Glass – are another major step down this path of surveillance. Their ability to record both audio and video will bring ubiquitous surveillance to the next level. Once they’re common, you might never know when you’re being recorded in both audio and video. You might as well assume that everything you do and say will be recorded and saved forever.

In the near term, at least, the sheer volume of data will limit the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn. The invasiveness of these technologies depends on asking the right questions. For example, if a private investigator is watching you in the physical world, she or he might observe odd behaviour and investigate further based on that. Such serendipitous observations are harder to achieve when you’re filtering databases based on pre-programmed queries. In other words, it’s easier to ask questions about what you purchased and where you were than to ask what you did with your purchases and why you went where you did. These analytical limitations also mean that companies like Google and Facebook will benefit more from the Internet of Things than individuals – not only because they have access to more data, but also because they have more sophisticated query technology. And as technology continues to improve, the ability to automatically analyse this massive data stream will improve.

In the longer term, the Internet of Things means ubiquitous surveillance. If an object “knows” you have purchased it, and communicates via either Wi-Fi or the mobile network, then whoever or whatever it is communicating with will know where you are. Your car will know who is in it, who is driving, and what traffic laws that driver is following or ignoring. No need to show ID; your identity will already be known. Store clerks could know your name, address, and income level as soon as you walk through the door. Billboards will tailor ads to you, and record how you respond to them. Fast food restaurants will know what you usually order, and exactly how to entice you to order more. Lots of companies will know whom you spend your days – and nights – with. Facebook will know about any new relationship status before you bother to change it on your profile. And all of this information will all be saved, correlated, and studied. Even now, it feels a lot like science fiction.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Big Brother, 1984. Poster. Courtesy of Telegraph.

Technica

The Rise of the Industrial Internet

As the internet that connects humans reaches a stable saturation point the industrial internet — the network that connects things — is increasing its growth and reach.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.

Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.’s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet,” bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.

The concept of Internet-connected machines that collect data and communicate, often called the “Internet of Things,” has been around for years. Information technology companies, too, are pursuing this emerging field. I.B.M. has its “Smarter Planet” projects, while Cisco champions the “Internet of Everything.”

But G.E.’s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.

In recent months, Ms. Paul has donned a hard hat and safety boots to study power plants. She has ridden on a rail locomotive and toured hospital wards. “Here, you get to work with things that touch people in so many ways,” she said. “That was a big draw.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest industrial company, a producer of aircraft engines, power plant turbines, rail locomotives and medical imaging equipment. It makes the heavy-duty machinery that transports people, heats homes and powers factories, and lets doctors diagnose life-threatening diseases.

G.E. resides in a different world from the consumer Internet. But the major technologies that animate Google and Facebook are also vital ingredients in the industrial Internet — tools from artificial intelligence, like machine-learning software, and vast streams of new data. In industry, the data flood comes mainly from smaller, more powerful and cheaper sensors on the equipment.

Smarter machines, for example, can alert their human handlers when they will need maintenance, before a breakdown. It is the equivalent of preventive and personalized care for equipment, with less downtime and more output.

“These technologies are really there now, in a way that is practical and economic,” said Mark M. Little, G.E.’s senior vice president for global research.

G.E.’s embrace of the industrial Internet is a long-term strategy. But if its optimism proves justified, the impact could be felt across the economy.

The outlook for technology-led economic growth is a subject of considerable debate. In a recent research paper, Robert J. Gordon, a prominent economist at Northwestern University, argues that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the last eight years.

Since 2000, Mr. Gordon asserts, invention has focused mainly on consumer and communications technologies, including smartphones and tablet computers. Such devices, he writes, are “smaller, smarter and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living” in the way that electric lighting or the automobile did.

But others say such pessimism misses the next wave of technology. “The reason I think Bob Gordon is wrong is precisely because of the kind of thing G.E. is doing,” said Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business.

Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Internet of Things. Courtesy of Intel.[end-div]

Technica

The Internet of Things

The term “Internet of Things” was first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton. It refers to the notion whereby physical objects of all kinds are equipped with small identifying devices and connected to a network. In essence: everything connected to anytime, anywhere by anyone. One of the potential benefits is that this would allow objects to be tracked, inventoried and status continuously monitored.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

THE Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.

But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.

“We’re going to put the digital ‘smarts’ into everything,” said Edward D. Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. These abundant smart devices, Dr. Lazowska added, will “interact intelligently with people and with the physical world.”

The role of sensors — once costly and clunky, now inexpensive and tiny — was described this month in an essay in The New York Times by Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology; he said the ultimate goal was “the sensor-aware planetary computer.”

That may sound like blue-sky futurism, but evidence shows that the vision is beginning to be realized on the ground, in recent investments, products and services, coming from large industrial and technology corporations and some ambitious start-ups.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Internet of Things. Courtesy of Cisco.[end-div]