There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow!

When Walt Disney commissioned the Sherman Brothers to pen ‘There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow’ as the theme song for the Disney inspired Carousel Of Progress, one wonders what technological advances the children watching the attraction at the 1964 World Trade Fair could have conceived during their lifetime. What would they have made of the internet, wireless communication and satellite navigation?

Imagine now, a world in which your home will detect when you wake in the morning, and begin warming the house to your preferred temperature, brewing a pot of your favourite coffee and softly welcoming you to the day with your selected choice of music. At first glance, this perhaps appears a distant vision of the future. In reality it is a future which will shortly be made possible by the ‘internet of things’.

So what is the internet of things? In short, the internet of things enables entities – people, animals, objects – to automatically transfer data over a network, typically without any human interaction. This communication is facilitated via sensors and actuators which are embedded in physical objects, enabling devices to understand an environment and respond accordingly. In short, tomorrow’s world will be predicated on communication, not just between people but between things.

In a sense, the internet of things has been around for a while and anyone with a smartphone is already part of the crew. For example, on our way home tonight our smartphone will be soundlessly transmitting the position and speed of our vehicles, enabling Google to gather traffic data without us even knowing about it. Yet, despite being touted by the Technorati as the Next Big Thing with each passing year, to date the internet of things hasn’t really come to fruition.

However, 2014 is the year when the internet of things will finally start to become a burgeoning reality and be visible in our everyday lives. The first main reason for this is that advances in the technology and communications industry have enabled the creation of inexpensive, power-efficient chips which enable almost any object to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. This will drive the extension of the partially fulfilled internet of things concept to become the internet of everything over the coming years. Secondly, the almost universally adopted smartphone enables technology companies to impose the internet of things on a large slice of the population, whether they desire it or not. In short, the use of ever-smarter smartphones combined with connected objects which are cheaper and easier to use will openup the internet of things in myriad new ways.

So maybe now it’s the time to start thinking of how you’d like to be gently stirred into consciousness every morning. Make mine a cup of tea with just a drop of milk and a spot of Miles in the background.

Written by Ian Hampson – CSfD's Chief Technical Officer… Dreaming of the perfect (automated) of cup of tea!

www.csfd.com