We are really looking forward to seeing many of you next Tuesday. Here is the final installment of the Q&A series with our speakers. Prof. Dohler has been looking at the IoT space for a long time as a researcher, entrepreneur, and an academic.
We caught up with Prof. Dohler to get a preview of our upcoming Mobile Breakfast Series event in London on June 17th.
You have looked at the IoT opportunity both as an academic as well as an entrepreneur. What’s your sense of the opportunity? Are we beyond IoT being a theoretical exercise?
IoT was a dream 25 years ago with the first DARPA projects; it started to migrate from an interesting academic exercise to industrial innovation via standards work/etc. about 15 years ago; and has become commercial reality some 5 years ago. The potential market is enormous, the problem is that the market has not fully developed yet. This will require time and money. IoT is thus an enormous opportunity today, yes!
You have done quite a bit of work in the Smart Cities space? How does the implementation impact the common man? How should governments think about funding such initiatives? Does it offer any significant competitive advantage to the city?
The problems of Smart Cities today had been summarized in a recent blog of mine under https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/design-sig/article-view/-/blogs/designing-smart-cities-in-2013.
It boils down to "smart" (ie IoT, Big Data, etc.) not properly synch’ing with "city" (i.e. infrastructure providers, etc). Despite the enormous potential of bringing smartness into cities, very little is visible today. The problem with the uptake is that the market is not developed yet, which means that innovative companies have to survive long sales cycles, etc., etc. Difficult times, still!
If you look 5-10 years out, what are some of the exciting developments in R&D that we will start seeing in real-life?
The most exciting thing for me would be if wireless finally really became invisible – and I hope by 2020 we won’t have to stress out which technology we use to connect our IoT devices. Another exciting area is the combination with robotics since the IoT would allow us to collect data; Big Data process it; and robotics act on it – and thereby close the data cycle.
The IoT space is quite fragmented right now. Will that hinder progress? Where will the value lie in the value-chain?
The value currently is in the verticals, and with some specific industries, such as health, transport, construction, and oil/gas. Once these verticals have expanded, the horizontals will start to become important because one can leverage the true Big Data value by cross correlating data sets which each individual vertical cannot do.
Venue: Telefonica, 20 Air Street, London, W1B 5AN London, UK
When: June 17th. Breakfast and Registration: 8-9am, Panel Discussion: 9-10:30am, Networking: 10:30-11:30am
Internet of Things: Exploring the next big thing in mobile
Prof. Mischa Dohler, King’s College, London and Cofounder, Worldsensing
Dominik Fromm, GM – Mobility Services, BMW
Carlos de otto Morera, CEO, Thinking Things, Telefonica
Raine Bergstrom, VP and GM, Intel
Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting (moderator)
Look forward to seeing you next week.