Is IoT waiting for Cluetrain?

For context, here’s some quotes from The Cluetrain Manifesto:

1. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
2. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
3. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
4. Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”

I’ll come back to Cluetrain later. First I want to talk about IoT meet-ups and the types of people I’ve met there.

The Five tribes of an IoT meet-up

The Banker

At every IoT meet-up I’ve attended, commercial folks ask for application ideas: “how can I monetise this stuff?” Their interest in the Internet of Things is impelled by forces beyond pationate curiosity in networked gadgets. But that’s OK, they’re in the minority and their “short little span of attention” means their interest quickly wanes.

The academic

Then there’s the researchers, the PhD’s, the academics. European funding rules drives a counter intuitive behaviour. In the past, academics were free to experiment all semester, uninhibited by nasty brushes with realities such as “real world application”. Now the Eurocrats request that Jonny Citizen is produced as evidence; “My name’s Jon, and I want a Gizmo!” And so, before the Euros flow, ideas and dreams of impossibility are flattened to a level of understanding typified by any uninterested manager. Therefore this group reluctantly shares the same imperative as the commercial guys but their desire to research drives them ever onwards.

The Maker

The third group is the Maker, driven by a relentless internal desire to make “stuff”, to play and to hack! They play to learn and do this for reasons best known to themselves and without asking for a penny from anyone.

The Evangelist

Forth group is made up of Corporate evangelists, the guys earning fat salaries to turn-up to talk about products, projects, ideas and success stories in a trustworthy anti-sales fashion. Their original passion now upstaged by a mortgage, a partner, some kids, a dog, a 4x4, and a pointy haired boss with targets and a bigger mortgage.

The Pioneer

The fifth group are the brave souls that have put everything on the line to build a business to fuel their passion, and maybe pay some bills. The small business owner hoping to extend networks and sell services. The pioneers of the IoT frontier.

The Missing

There is another group but they don’t turn-up. Local government, town councils; the guys with the problems that perhaps IoT could help solve. But hey, it’s after 16:30 and they’ve got picket fences to paint.

The ideas are too small

So armed with drinks of our choosing and hogging most of an unpopular Tuesday-afternoon’s-worth of pub space, we’ve been invited to think of great IoT ideas and shout them out. Clearly we’re at the bottom of the triangle and “that triangle” has boundary markers labelled “quick ROI”, “lack of imagination”, and “parochial-thinking”.

The shouts start with: early flood warning.

Pause. Traffic management.

Longer pause. Intelligent parking bays.

#hmmpf

Then someone asks: “what about privacy issues?” This stuff only works if people share their data right? How can that be abstracted, what does the sensor/server/analytics-engine/client architecture look like? Who owns what?

And then we spiral into the usual — Generation-X trying to understand Generation-Z problems and attitudes. This, on top of the resident concerns: how do we monetise, fund research, play with, and sell this stuff?

Fact is, the scope of the ideas is being curtailed by everyone’s personal reality.

A Conversation of enthusiasts

For now, the meet-ups are the conversations that share knowledge and power enthusiasm, which in turn, encourages small scale developments. Even building a smart city falls into this category. A smart city is still just 1 city and there are 3,500 cities with 100,000+ citizens.

It has to be this way

Projects start small and grow. In any industry this happens. Orville and Wilbur couldn’t have built a Dreamliner as a first project. Henry Ford couldn’t hope to mass manufacture GT40's.

And then Larry and Sergey flipped the world on its head, they grew Google from nothing to a very big something is just a few years. Yet, they didn’t. All they had to do was spider what had been built – and that building effort was long in its making. IoTweb will require lots of similarly discoordinated activities that can then be pulled together once there’s sufficient signal volumes across a range of data types. Perhaps there will emerge Meaning Engines, Predictive Engines or Causality Engines, capable of answering today’s imponderables — depending on your level of subscription of course!

Cluetrain reversed: The Conversation is the Market

Cluetrain states: The Market is the Conversation. Could that be reversed? The Conversation is the Market? If so, Cluetrain is what IoT is waiting for:

1. Individuals, Cities, Infrastructure and local authorities produce (and later, sell) IoT data.
2. Google, Amazon, Intel or similar builds a Meaning Engine: an IoT ingest warehouse. It publishes API’s for consuming data (for which it pays) and produces insight (which it sells).

I have no doubt the lawyers will do quite well from privacy, safeguarding and ownership matters. Here’s an example of data you could sell:

All the data captured about the use of your car; mpg, frequency of use, single occupancy ratio, journeys times and distances etc,. all captured and transmitted thanks to a Telematics box of tricks.

At present, insurance companies offer these devices to reduce insurance premiums for young drivers, but their use and ubiquity will grow exponentially.

A market of conversations

1. The conversation is machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
2. “The market” is the data-to-insight value chain, “the place” is where conversations are streams of micro-data, ingested, interpreted, normalised and published.
3. The Value of Insight, Causality and Predictive data follows Metcalfe’s Law.
4. Monetisation will follow.

Is IoT waiting for Cluetrain?

Maybe, but Cluetrain is a concept, it won’t get you from A-to-B. We’re waiting for the Meaning Engine. We just didn’t know it yet, and when it arrives and we do the equivalent of *Googling* ourselves, the data will be endless, sobering and somewhat similar to Douglas Adam’s Total Perspective Vortex.

The New Engines are now approaching platform Internet. Please Find the App!