The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing quickly. More than 28 billion things will be connected to the Internet by 2020, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).1 Consider that over the last 10 years:
- The cost of sensors has gone from $1.30 to $0.60 per unit.
- The cost of bandwidth has declined by 40 times.
- The cost of processing has declined by 60 times.
Interest as well as revenues has grown in everything from smartwatches and other wearables, to smart cities, smart homes, and smart cars. Let’s take a closer look:
Smart wearables
According to IDC, vendors shipped 45.6 million units of wearables in 2015, up more than 133% from 2014. By 2019, IDC forecasts annual shipment volumes of 126.1 million units, resulting in a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.1%.3 This is fueling streams of big data for healthcare research and development—both in academia and in commercial markets.
Smart cities
With more than 60% of the world’s population expected to live in urban cities by 2025, we will be seeing rapid expansion of city borders, driven by population increases and infrastructure development. By 2023, there will be 30 mega cities globally.4 This in turn will require an emphasis on smart cities: sustainable, connected, low-carbon cities putting initiatives in place to be more livable, competitive, and attractive to investors. The market will continue growing to $1.5 trillion by 2020 through such diverse areas as transportation, buildings, infrastructure, energy, and security.
Smart homes
Connected home devices will ship at a compound annual rate of more than 67% over the next five years, and will reach 1.8 billion units by 2019, according to BI Intelligence. Such devices include smart refrigerators, washers, and dryers, security systems, and energy equipment like smart meters and smart lighting.6 By 2019, it will represent approximately 27% of total IoT product shipments.
Smart cars
Self-driving cars, also known as autonomous vehicles (AVs), have the potential to disrupt a number of industries. Although the exact timing of technology maturity and sales is unclear, AVs could eventually play a “profound” role in the global economy, according to McKinsey & Co. Among other advantages, AVs could reduce the incidence of car accidents by up to 90%, saving billions of dollars annually.
In this report, we explore the IoT industry through a variety of lenses, by presenting you with highlights from the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World Conferences that took place in both the United States and Singapore. This report explores IoT-related topics through a series of case studies presented at the conferences. Topics we’ll cover include modeling machine failure in the IoT, the computational gap between CPU storage, networks on the IoT, and how to model data for the smart connected city of the future. Case studies include:
- Spark Streaming to predict failure in railway equipment
- Traffic monitoring in Singapore through the use of a new IoT app
- Applications from the smart city pilot in Oulu, Finland
- An ongoing longitudinal study using personal health data to reduce cardiovascular disease
- Data analytics being used to reduce risk in human space missions under NASA’s Orion program
We finish with a discussion of ethics, related to the algorithms that control the things in the Internet of Things. We’ll explore decisions related to data from the IoT, and opportunities to influence the moral implications involved in using the IoT.
