Last week, I discussed how IoT is changing the telecommunications industry, and the vast amount of data the industry will have to support (158 million years worth of HD video). Be sure to read part 1 if you missed it.

What will happen is that there will be APIs that enable services and applications to be generated from all this analysis of the data. We are seeing API conferences pop up and this is the key reason why.  These truly M2M interactions will transfer data from one point to another point, building up some large information database someplace for analytics to do their thing.  Trends will be seen that couldn’t be seen before impacting all of us in still unknown ways. 

Many IoT interactions will be M2M that require human interaction in a relatively short period of time. Some examples include a tire pressure sensor indicating low tire pressure which shows up on our car console (one most of us probably have seen in our car way too many times), a smart city or smart home water sensor measuring lower water pressure and thus a “leak” somewhere, or even a beer keg sensor measuring low beer and thus the need for delivery of another beer keg.  Again, there will be applications that enable these alerts.  These M2M-IoT interactions ultimately require a person to actually do something relatively soon.

But there will be some M2M-IoT use cases involving real-time communications and real-time person activity.  One that we all might have experienced is using your credit card outside of normal patterns.  For instance, if you travel and use your card in a state you never have travelled to, you might have gotten your spend declined at the register, only to get a text message asking you to hit a number to approve the spend.  This all was generated in the background by M2M interactions.  Now expand that out to IoT. 

Next week, I’ll have more specific scenarios of what your life might look like in an IoT world.