The Information Age used to be confined to a computer screen connected to a broadband pipeline.
Then it leaped to a smartphone connected to a mobile data network. Now it’s everywhere. Today information exists in a vaporized state much like atmosphere, surrounding us. And thanks to oddly named wireless protocols like Bluetooth, ZigBee, Z-Wave, near field communication (NFC), and more, the increasing data smog generated by any type of motion or activity will no longer be lost; it will be captured, organized, and analyzed. The by-product of interaction with smart devices is
information, and plenty of it.
For the past twenty years, we have shuttled between two separate dimensions: online and offline.
That is about to change. Mobile data already infuses the flavor of Internet into every routine of our daily lives. Soon the Internet of Things will siphon data from every fixture in our homes and
workplaces and suck it back up to the cloud for storage. No longer a separate destination, the Internet is expanding into an unseen dimension that is everywhere at once, a vaporous overlay on top of the physical world.
Security expert Bruce Schneier observed that surveillance is the business model of the Internet.
Quite soon that business model will extend far beyond the confines of the personal computer into the real world around us. Soon the persistent tracking, profiling, and hypertargeting that are fundamental to the business of the Web will become a normal background condition in the gym, the kitchen, the car, and in our city streets, malls, and shopping centers.
Data is a big business, and the Internet of Things opens up a huge new trove of bits to be mined.
During the next five years, the biggest trend in durable products and consumer electronics will be the addition of intelligence in the form of a microprocessor and wireless connectivity. Every product, appliance, vehicle, garment, accessory, building, sign, streetlight, pallet, shipping container, storage bin, warehouse, railroad car, vessel, and package that can possibly be connected to a digital network will be. Every interaction will be tracked and recorded and sent to the cloud for storage.
When that occurs, the usual dynamics of the Vaporized Ecosystem will come into play, but this time the conflict will occur in staid old manufacturing industries instead of in the cutthroat computer and mobile phone sectors. Entire product categories will be reinvented, mature businesses will be upended, and new entrants will dominate.
> Closed proprietary systems will be pitted against open systems
> Corporations will struggle to maintain ecosystem hegemony
> New competitors will enter the market, spurring innovation
> Entirely new use cases will emerge
> An entirely new data asset will be defined
THE REINVENTION OF FORMS AND FUNCTIONS
Consider the humble lightbulb. Thomas Edison didn’t invent it, but he did perfect it. At least, he improved it sufficiently to sell lightbulbs in huge quantities. He did such a good job that the industry named the lightbulb after him. The whole world settled on the screw-in bulb as a standard, and it hasn’t changed much since his time. In fact, the standard Edison lightbulb is so commonplace that it is a punch line. The reason lightbulb jokes are considered even slightly funny is that they depend on a universal constant that everybody is familiar with: the same bulb is screwed into the same socket in every fixture in every building. The incandescent bulb has been around so long in exactly the same form that we take it entirely for granted.
Today the lightbulb is changing fast. As Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program, wrote on his blog, “We’ve seen more innovation in the lighting space in the past three years than in the past 125, when the incandescent was invented.” Why? In late 2007 then–US President George W. Bush signed into law a bill that passed with bipartisan support in Congress to establish energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs. By 2012 new lightbulbs were
required to use 30 percent less energy than the classic Edison-style lightbulb. The law specified a target, but it did not specify any particular technology. This spurred innovation: a diverse range of competing formats emerged to meet the new standard, including compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), improved incandescents, efficient halogens, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Of these formats, LEDs emerged as the most versatile of the bunch. They come in a range of hues, from warm “soft” color to bluer daylight tones, and in a range of brightness. They consume one-sixth the energy used by the classic incandescent lights to generate comparable lumens. They last a lot longer too, up to 50,000 hours. That’s fifty times longer than the old-fashioned bulbs. According to the US Department of Energy, LEDs have the potential to reduce US lighting energy usage by nearly one-half.
Initially, LEDs were designed in the same sizes and shapes as the classic Edison bulbs, the better to fit into the 4 billion screw-type sockets already installed in fixtures across the United States. Other
LED bulbs are designed to resemble standard spotlights, reflectors in recessed lighting, candles for chandeliers, globes, sticks, and even spirals like CFLs for specialty fixtures. But shoehorning a cluster of LEDs into an old-fashioned form is not the optimal way to use them. That’s a transitional step.
Bulbs are necessary for the older incandescents and fluorescents because they rely upon chemical reactions between gases and heated filaments to generate light. That reaction occurs in a vacuum, which can only happen in an enclosed space, and that enclosure must be translucent to emit light.
Hence the glass bulb. Light-emitting diode bulbs are different. They don’t rely on chemical reactions to generate light, so they don’t need a bulb. They don’t even need glass. Moreover, LEDs don’t
generate very much heat: that’s a sharp contrast to the old Edison bulbs that lose 90 percent of their energy as heat waste, not light. No heat means that LEDs are cool to the touch, which makes them not only safer but far more versatile than the delicate glass-encased gas-and-filament bulbs could ever be.
By 2010 LEDs began to evolve away from the traditional bulb forms. Some LEDs are produced in long strips, rolled like baling wire, for use under kitchen cabinets; others are freeform resin
sculptures in natural shapes like trees and geometric shapes. They can be found in wickless, cordless, flameless candles; and huge flat LED wall panels provide a kind of luminous wallpaper that absorbs sound and provides an ambient glow. The result is an interior designer’s delight. In the past five years it has also become common to illuminate places where Edison-style bulbs could never fit. Light- emitting diodes are embedded inside plastic weatherproof containers for patio plants, woven into illuminated garments for pop music stars like Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry, attached to safety vests for construction workers, and incorporated into a lighting safety system for horses called, naturally, Tail Lights. Designer Ben Kokes has even created two titanium wedding rings with diamonds that are backlit by LEDs when the happy couple clasps hands.
The LED is changing the illumination industry so swiftly that the term “lightbulb” may eventually fade from use. Just as the phrase “broken record” is meaningless to a Millennial raised on streaming music, the corny lightbulb joke won’t be funny in the future—if it ever was—because lightbulbs will soon be an artifact of a bygone industrial era.
There are so many different LED shapes emerging that an industry group known as Zhaga Consortium has been formed to bring some uniformity to the components by specifying
interchangeable parts from different manufacturers around the world. The specifications, known as
“books,” describe light engines in a range of shapes, from rings and circles to rectangles and strips,
but no bulbs. Electric light is breaking free of its Victorian-era constraints.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHYSICAL PRODUCTS TO DIGITAL SERVICES
New shapes and uses are not the only changes brought by LEDs. That’s just the first tiny step towards an even broader transformation. Designers are in the process of using LEDs to redefine the entire
concept of illumination. It’s the boldest move since the rural electrification programs that began in the 1930s.
Light-emitting diodes are semiconductors that use a computing technology known as solid state, which means that the devices are built entirely from solid materials as opposed to earlier vacuum tubes. Think of LEDs as miniature computers. Just like any other computer, LEDs can be programmed and networked. The old output of the Edison bulb, light, has been transformed into digital content.
What this means is that we can do things with light that we never imagined before. Consider these examples:
> The Color Up lamp from PEGA Design & Engineering takes advantage of LEDs’ ability to render millions of colors. With Color Up, users can use a scanner built right into the base of the fixture to sample a swatch of color from any surface, including candlelight or flame. Then the light will glow in that hue.
> Fos by Erogear is a wearable LED light patch for cyclists and kids who go clubbing that consists of a flexible Velcro-lined patch. It can be applied to any garment or wrapped around a wrist or leg and paired with a smartphone to display streaming video at sixty frames per second. You’d look good dressed in YouTube!
> Anime bicycle lights from ANIPOV turn bicycle wheels into illuminated motion sculptures that can be programmed to display animation and moving messages. It’s graffiti in motion, written with light on air.
> The GalaxyDress by CuteCircuit is a prototype on display at the Museum of Science and
Industry Chicago. It combines 24,000 LEDs with 4,000 Swarovski crystals to form a lightweight flowing surface for full-motion video. Thanks to the fact that LEDs don’t generate excess heat, this video ball gown is cool to the touch and only requires a few iPod batteries to light up.
This transformation of light into digital content lets manufacturers shift from making low-margin physical products to offering higher-margin services with recurring revenue. Home users might subscribe to or purchase downloadable software programs for lights. Or, as wags put it, it’s an opportunity to turn a $1 lightbulb into a $100 service. Flexible, programmable, and personalized products are proof that lighting has become a part of the Vaporized Ecosystem.
In 2012 Philips introduced one of the most comprehensive IoT lighting systems for home use. It included a set of software tools to create novel applications right on top of its Hue lighting system.
Now developers from all over the world are adding value to the entire platform by teaching light some new tricks:
> Light as listener: Hue Remote replaces the control software supplied by Philips and enables consumers to control the lights in their house via voice command on the iPhone app.
> Light as paintbrush: The Switches for Hue app builds upon Philips’ concept of “light recipes” by
allowing users to record preferences and settings for individually defined situations.
> Light as decoration: Goldee allows customers to calibrate the lights in their home to specific tones in a digital photo.
> Light as messenger: The Philips Smart Hue channel makes it easy to create a recipe to change the
LED color based on a news event, such as a favorite sports team scoring a goal. Similarly, lights can be set to change color to alert customers when a text message or notification arrives on their smartphone.
> Light as wake-up call: f.lux software lets customers program the lights in their home to replicate the color progression of a sunrise, so that they can wake up to simulated dawn.
> Light as mood: Ambilight connects the lights in a house via smartphone to a Philips TV so users can sync the color of the lights with the lighting on a television show or movie displayed onscreen.
> Light as DJ: Ambify analyzes the music in an individual playlist, matching the customer’s lights to the rhythm.
Other apps link the Hue lights to home telephones, thermometers, weather reports, alarm clocks, and just about any other gizmo imaginable.
The Philips Hue example shows us that a broad and diverse group of programmers will concoct more ways to make use of the system than the original product designers could possibly envision.
As we’ve seen in Chapters 4 and 5, the company that manages a software ecosystem must place a high priority on attracting developers and encouraging them to write apps that make novel use of the device. Companies that lavish support and attention on their developers tend to prosper.
Adding software controls to any hardware system is risky because it introduces the possibility of a bug or a hacker attack, a malicious programmer writing malware, or an incompetent programmer inadvertently inflicting damage on the system. This risk is managed by providing developers with application programming interfaces (APIs) that limit their access to certain data and system commands but do not permit them to access or manipulate the rest of the system. The API is like a buffer or a protective barrier that enables innovation without inviting chaos.
One side benefit of providing a rich set of APIs to a large pool of developers is that it introduces competition, which always spurs innovation. By opening up the smart device this way, manufacturers will turn old products into a platform for innovation. In turn, new uses create fresh opportunities to improve the product. The most successful companies in IoT will be those that are able to engage constructively with third-party app developers, maintaining the integrity of their systems without exerting excessive control over the imagination and creativity of the developers.