News about Internet of Things (IOT) is ubiquitous these days and it is very difficult for anyone not to realize that it is the next big thing in the semiconductor industry. While the 1990s leading to the early 2000s saw tremendous progress in personal computers, the last decade has been all about smart phones and tablets. The announcement of Iphone by Steve Jobs in 2007 was a “eureka moment” for mobile devices and ushered an unprecedented growth in the phone and tablet space- a tectonic shift from personal computers. However, as was with the computers towards the end of last decade, smart phones are showing signs of saturation in terms of commercial growth. Though companies like Samsung and Apple keep churning out latest models of their flagship smart phones aka galaxy and Iphone but the buzz that was there around an Iphone 4 or 5 or even 6 launch seems to be missing with every new generation. It is like watching Die Hard 10 or Rocky 15 on HBO just to draw an analogy. But don’t be under the illusion that the smartphone is completely dead. Rather it is far from it. Working in a company whose bread and butter business is making chips for smartphones, I will be the last person to sound the death knell for smart phones but it is just the growth in this sector has slowed which has led all the semiconductor companies trying to venture into so called “adjacent markets” to keep their business viable.

In the past couple of years every tech. company seems to be looking at IOT as the next big thing after smartphones to capture the imagination of consumers. It doesn’t matter whether your primary business is personal computers read Intel or mobile devices read Qualcomm, IOT has caught the attention of every major player in this sector. While we are all aware of Internet what is IOT then? According to the website “HowStuffWorks”, the phrase “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton, likely in 1999 as the title of a corporate presentation he made at his place of employment, Proctor & Gamble. Ashton toyed with the idea of putting a RFID tag on each lipstick and having them communicate with a radio receiver on the shelf to track sales and inventory and signal when restocking was needed. He argued that similarly such data collection can help in predicting as well as solving lot of real life problems on the earth. Loosely speaking we think about Internet as a slew of devices such as servers, modems, router etc. When we use the internet we are basically tapping into information which was already stored whether it be using google search or listening to songs. Instead of relying on humans to upload information, can we design the devices which will record our actions by itself, transfer the information to a repository which could be tapped into as and when required? All of this can be done without any human intervention and loosely speaking is the premise on which IOT is built. IOT as the name suggests is an aggregation of billions of devices connected using the internet. The hardware in these devices which are so called “smart devices” send and receive the data through different communication protocols. Typically the data is stored over some cloud-computing servers and then the information is downloaded by different apps or browsers.The cartoon below explains the concept of internet of things.

Let us consider an example using smartphone as a typical IOT device. Every smartphone has a tracking sensor in it which keeps track of all our movements and is constantly uploading the information to the cloud. When I am entering a particular retail store it matches my location and buying choices and highlights if there are any promotions that are going on for those products in that particular store. Another example is a smart refrigerator. It will keep track of your groceries and use by date and will start alarming when the milk or yogurt is set to expire. Some of the more advanced types can directly order the stuff that you eat regularly from Amazon or other online retailers to be delivered at your doorstep even before you notice. Obviously at the user end, the refrigerator knows your eating pattern while at the other end of the cloud, the retailers keep your account information in order to charge for milk or bread or yogurt supplies that need to be replenished. With our lives becoming more complex and busier by the day, these smart devices have become part and parcel of our lives subconsciously, and lets be honest, I would be rather focusing on an important business meeting instead worrying whether I need fresh supplies of groceries or trying to keeping a crying child at bay without worrying about the latest promotions when going out with the family to the mall.

But there is an old adage there are no free lunches. Advances in IOT also comes with its own cost and the most important question is how ready are we to embrace this sudden surge of IOT devices. Challenges for the growth of Internet of Things are both technical and socioeconomic in nature. While the devices themselves only require a couple of watts to function, the fundamental necessity of IOT is strong network connectivity. In the United States we are moving towards 5G but there are still developing countries where the infrastructure is not strong enough to even support 3G connectivity. In such places IOT is a luxury they can ill afford. Obviously as we have seen first with personal computing and then smartphones, United States have been the vanguard in technical advances and the rest of the world seem to catch up pretty soon. The gap between the US and the rest of world is shrinking at a fast pace due to globalization but there is still work that needs to be done. Storing such large volumes of data in the cloud will also require growth in data centers as well as data analytics. Companies such as Intel have been churning out state of the art high performance multi-core server chips which are the heart and soul of data centers. But these chips have a significant cost associated to them unlike the devices themselves. At the same time, predictive analytics are a playing a very important role in the growth of IOT. As I mentioned earlier, these devices keep track of our lifestyle and large retailers use this information in pushing through their products to us. For example when we were expecting our son and were shopping at different baby stores ostensibly for new born boys, the data bases kept track of things that we were buying and lo and behold when I logged into amazon next time there were suggested items that I could buy for baby boys. In other words there are algorithms in place which can predict human behavior based on existing data. The other day I was reading an article which suggested that by the year 2025 there will be a large scarcity of data scientists who could make sense of all the data that is being stored in the cloud. Many US universities are warming up to this requirement and have initiated graduate level courses specializing in data sciences.

There is also a big social issue associated with IOT which I think can prove to be a big hindrance even if we have all the hardware and software in place to proliferate them. Smart devices have pervaded our everyday life and in some cases things start becoming a bit creepy. For instance in the example of the smart refrigerator I had cited above, in order for the appliances to order stuff online my credit card information would require to be stored in its memory which compromises my personal information making my account susceptible to hacking. While the refrigerator will keep ordering the same brand of milk or bread unless told otherwise, it could very well be possible that I would like to try out a new type of milk or a healthier low calorie bread. Similarly while my smart coffee maker brews the same coffee type every day when I wake up, there might be times when I would want a stronger coffee or one with less sugar and creamer which raises questions about how “smart” are these smart devices actually and can they really operate without any human intervention. Companies such as Samsung and LG have launched television models which can function using voice recognition. In other words without using a remote control we can change the audio settings or sift through channels by speaking to the TV sets, While this has vastly improved the entertainment aspect of television, have we ever thought that in return of this added convenience, the TV sets are eavesdropping into our lives and every word that we speak in the house are transferred through them to the service providers. Again this will be seriously compromising our personal safety. Companies such as Nest have helped us take a giant leap towards smart homes by creating programmable thermostats. These thermostats can be controlled remotely using apps from our smart phones. At the same time, people with evil intentions can completely reprogram the software and start tampering with the systems. Similarly there are smart baby monitors which when a baby wakes up starts playing their favorite lullabies. Obviously the lullabies are not stored in the monitors to save on memory and are instead stored in the cloud. When a baby wakes up, the monitor recognizes its body movements and plays the songs from the cloud and pretty soon the baby is back in deep sleep. That is the happy path. Now think of what can happen when someone hacks into the system and instead of lullabies the babies start hearing something scarier and then imagine his/her reaction to it. Being a new parent I shudder at such thoughts.

The point of this article is not to point out the inadequacies of IOT devices or highlight only the issues but we need to pause for a minute and think where our life is headed with these devices. Do we want to control our own lives or do we want to live on autopilot surrounded by smart systems. It is a question which we need to address holistically. Do we have stringent laws to catch and punish cybercrimes or is there a need to beef up our cybersecurity? A very important question is the cost we have to pay to get “smarter”. While the devices are really cheap the infrastructure required to operate them are not. However, with the attention that IOT has drawn globally I am very hopeful that IOT can become the next internet since human beings are the smartest animals on the planet and our history is replete with stories of some of the extremely challenging problems that we have solved.