THE SO-CALLED Internet of Things (IOT) is actually a relative term, being relative to the supposed term Internet of People (IOP).
The legal fiction here is that IOP is supposedly already “done” or is “saturated”, and therefore the next stage or evolution should now be IOT.
Of course, nobody is really saying that IOP will disappear, but nobody will deny either that in terms of size and number, IOT will become bigger and more voluminous than IOP.
On my part however, I would say that IOP will not disappear in the same way that paper will not disappear. As we all recall, we all talked about a paperless society, but what we ended up was a society with “less paper”.
I think that one irony in these modern times is that many people would still prefer to have “hard copies” even if “soft copies” are already available in many types of digital forms.
As it is happening, it would seem that the more digital forms there are, the greater the temptation to print these into “hard copies”. Common wisdom tells us that it is better to have more “soft copies” in order to save more trees.
Although this apparent wisdom would seem to make a lot of sense, we would all seem to forget that industrial tree planting for paper production actually exists, and so does a huge paper recycling industry.
For some reason, nobody seems to be computing how much energy and pollution to maintain the infrastructure that supports the production and storage of “soft copies”.
Perhaps it is either pride or hubris that makes the heron that sits on top of the water buffalo think that it is as powerful as the animal. I recall that it might have been pride or hubris that made people in the past think that “wired” was in, and “wireless” was out.
The dominance of “wired” did not last long however, because “wireless” eventually became the dominant mode. When that happened, some people began to think that “wired” was out because it was obsolete, and “wireless” was in because it was new or modern.
In reality however, we could not get rid of wires even if we wanted to, because there is no choice but to build a patchwork of “wired” and “wireless”. The fact is, what we now know as new is really old, such as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless technology.
In much the same way that paper and paperless has co-existed, I would say that IOP will co-exist with IOT. Having said that however, it is very important for all of us to understand that IOP is all about “people to people” (P2P) and IOT is all about “machine to machine” (M2M).
Stretching my earlier statement, I would say further that P2P would and should co-exist with M2M. In that connection, it is often said that the mobile phone as we know it today is the first real IOT device, simply because it is capable of being used as an M2M device.
Going back to the subject of knowledge-based economy (KBE), we should not lose track of the fact that the Philippines is supposed to be the Short Messaging Service (SMS) capital of the world, at the same time it is also supposed to be the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) capital of the world.
What do SMS and BPO have to do with each other?
To answer that question, I now have to make the bold prediction that the business of the BPO industry will eventually shift in dominance from “voice” to “non-voice”. It is not yet clear to me how and when that will happen, but what is clear to me is that “voice” and “non-voice” will co-exist, in the same way that IOP and IOT would also co-exist.
To be more specific however, the “non-voice” business will be dominated by IOT. That is not all however, because for sure, IOT will “do nothing” except to generate and gather bits of data that would eventually build up to become Big Data.
From that point on, everything would follow, starting with data analytics and eventually leading to business intelligence.
Even if we could say that we have failed in the past to create NVA from the older technologies that came our way, we now have this very huge opportunity to create NAV from this broad ecosystem composed of BPO, IOT, M2M, Big Data, data analytics and business intelligence, all most likely to be dominantly hosted in the Internet Cloud.
Needless to say, this huge opportunity includes new inventions that should all be protected by patents. Down the line, let us not forget that patent creation should lead to product development.
In other words, we should create new patents in order to produce new products in order to broaden our KBE. We need to work together to make this happen, meaning that we should talk to each other.
If there is anyone out there who would not talk to each other, they can all talk to me, because I have volunteered not only to be the “router”, I also volunteer to be the “access point”./PN
