S1E20: The Beauty and Promise of IoT and Why We’re Screwing it Up

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Stacey Higginbotham, Founder and Editor of Stacey on IoT.

Stacey has been covering technology for major publications for almost two decades and now produces a weekly podcast, newsletter, and daily articles covering all aspects of the internet of things under the Stacey on IoT brand.

In this interview, Stacey explains the intersection between IoT and edge, how to think about IoT from the bottom-up perspective of the devices and manufacturers, and shares some interesting use cases and innovative companies tackling the most challenging problems in the space.

Key Quotes:

• “The idea [of IoT] is that we now have cheap computing, we have cheap sensors, and we can start pulling all this information and synthesizing it in a very cost effective and efficient way. And we can know–not quite everything–but a lot about everything. And it's beautiful.”
• “IoT makes the invisible, visible. So you can see things that you haven't seen before.”
• “Think of IoT as the physical infrastructure that ties the internet, combined with the physical infrastructure needed on the things themselves. And then you add AI to it, which is the analysis and the synthesis of the data that's going to be coming in. That's the soul. AI is the soul, IoT is the body, and then you have this wonderful cloud of information that is so transformative.”
• “I want to make it easy for people to get excited about IoT, because this is really a big deal. It's as big as the invention of broadband or bringing mobile connectivity to everybody. You get all these new applications and we're just scratching the surface, and it's going to be awesome. Unless we utterly screw it up, which we totally are.”
• “I don't know if we're ever going to get to the ‘cloud version’ of the edge. When you're thinking about computing at the edge, you can't expect the wolves to all behave gracefully. So we have to build more safeguards in, which is going to be less efficient, which the cloud people hate. And the people talking to the cloud people are like, ‘it's really important.’ There's a dichotomy there that I think is under appreciated.”
• “The cloud thinking is ‘how can we form a monolith, how can we build an application that can run across a bunch of these servers?’ In IoT, I think we're going to come into this realization that what we really need are a bunch of individualized, highly personalized, customized applications. So the opposite of a monolith.”
• “Right now, especially when we talk about privacy and security, we're having this debate over convenience versus our potential loss of our individual liberties. I don't think many people are thinking of it that way, but they probably should be.”

Sponsors:

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Vapor IO, the leader in edge computing. We want to be your solution partner for the New Internet. Learn more at Vapor.io

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Links:

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Stacey on  Twitter

staceyoniot.com

The IoT Podcast