The Internet of Things and Elements Interactive

Published in

Elements blog

5 min readSep 21, 2015

More and more everyday devices found in our homes, offices and streets are connected and interact with each other — without human interference. We considered these devices to be part of the network of Internet of Things (IoT).

The Internet of Things is emerging as a third, and likely bigger, wave in the development of the Internet, following the rise of the fixed Internet in the 1990s and the mobile Internet in the 2000s. While the fixed Internet connected 1 billion users via PCs, and the mobile Internet connected 2 billion users via smartphones (on its way to 6 billion), the IoT is expected to connect billions of “things” to the Internet by 2020. Gartner says there will be 26 billion connected devices by 2020. According to Cisco there will be 50 billion, while Intel estimates 200 billion and IDC predicts even 212 billion. In any case, these are all really big numbers.

Why is it relevant for Elements?

At Elements we see the Internet of Things as the next big thing, where we want to be part of. Elements Interactive started 20 years ago as a web development company. In 2003 we embraced mobile development, pioneering on platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile. Today, the mobile phone has evolved towards a device with user friendly apps that interact with large and complex back-ends.

By its very nature, IoT’s implications will reach far beyond the tech sector into many other industries. From our history and the core nature of Elements we are a technology company, with a natural interest and eagerness to research and try out new technologies and tools. IoT is not only technology-driven, but technology is certainly a big component with regard to success or failure of IoT initiatives. It is therefor that we need to jump on the bandwagon. Next to that we anticipate that the smartphone will be the hub (for connectivity) and dashboard (through apps) for many IoT solutions and implementations. And of course it is fun and challenging to enter a market we have not been active in yet.

Our current experience with projects and implementations that could be considered being IoT are:

Why just now?

A number of significant technology changes have come together to enable the rise of the IoT. These changes are a global trend whereas Europe is a front runner. These changes include the following:

Low-cost sensors: The average cost of a sensor now stands at €0.54 ($0.60) versus €1.16 ($1.30) ten years ago. Sensors vary widely in price, but generally they are now cheap enough and small enough to justify new business cases.
Smartphones: With a large and growing installed base, smartphones are now becoming the personal gateway to the IoT, serving as a remote control or hub for the connected home, connected car, or for the health and fitness devices consumers are increasingly starting to wear.
Cheap bandwidth: The cost of bandwidth has also declined dramatically, by a factor of nearly 40X over the past 10 years.
Cheap processing: Similarly, processing costs have declined by nearly 60X over the past 10 years, enabling more devices to be not just connected, but smart enough to know what to do with all the new data they are generating or receiving.
Expanding wireless coverage: With Wi-Fi coverage continuing to expand around the world, wireless connectivity is available for free or at a very low cost in many places, given Wi-Fi utilizes unlicensed spectrum and thus does not require monthly access fees to a carrier. On the other hand it is expected that GPRS will become extremely cheap as well
Big data: As the IoT will by definition generate voluminous amounts of unstructured data, the availability of big data analytics is a key enabler.

The IoT Solutions World Congress and our take out

With all this in mind we decided a couple of weeks ago to go and talk with some people to get an objective view and more insights on the topic. On top of it all we went to Barcelona to visit the IoT Solutions World Conference event.

The IoT Solutions World Congress is still a very small congress. If you compare it with the gigantic Mobile World Congress (also held in Barcelona), it is not even one tenth in size. So it seems we are first wave participants. There were approximately 50–60 companies presenting themselves: the usual suspects (like IBM, Intel, HP, T-Mobile, Vodafone, General Electric and Microsoft) but also smaller niche players and local heroes (like ThingWorx, Whizz Systems, Carriots and Atlantis Technology). Most of them focus on specific platforms, others on hardware solutions. The business models aren’t defined yet. Everybody is talking about a few possible implementations, which could be divided in a few broad categories:

Smart cities
Smart energy
Home automation
Health solutions
Retail solutions
IoT for banks, tourism and transportation

The market is currently primarily focusing on B2B solutions since they expect the best chances are there. From an ROI perspective, chances to implement successful solutions are better in a B2B environment than the less controllable consumer market. Good to see was that the mobile (phone and/or tablet) is an important device within every IoT solution.

Visiting the conference gave us a lot of new insights, focus and contacts to continue to further build our IoT proposition. It is very clear to us that this is a path we need to explore further and definitely fits within our core competences. We are not done yet!

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