The rise of the IoT

Most Nigerians are not aware of the next big thing, the ‘Internet of Things,’ otherwise referred to as the IoT and its role in our everyday lives. Surprisingly, the term isn’t exactly new, tech companies and forecasters have been speaking about it for years. After all, the first internet-connected toaster was unveiled at a conference in 1989.

IoT is a concept that not only has the potential to impact how we live but also how we work. It also refers to machine communication; cloud computing and network of data processing sensors. Which could be mobile, virtual and instantaneous connections. In simpler terms, it is about connecting devices over the internet, letting them talk to us, applications, and each other.

A popular example is the smart TV, which basically prompts and decides what you watch!

In the next ten years, everything could be connected to the internet of things although the world of connected devices still has a long way to go before consumers fully embrace it.  Gartner, an analyst firm reports that by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected device. That’s a lot of connections. Some even estimate this number to be much higher, over 100 billion,

The IoT is a massive system of connected “things” which also includes people.  The relationship will be between people-people, people-things, and things-things. Nowadays, people connect their car to their phones and their phones to home devices. IoT enables proactive resolution in response to response to real time events which ultimately makes it easy and economical to get and transfer information from any physical item and place.

In Nigeria, NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) which is a revolutionary e-payment solution that services the banking industry outperformed other means of payment channel in a recent survey of the National Bureau of Statistics report for the Q3 of 2016 of N9.59 trillion in 38.83 million transactions.

This trend reveals that millions of Nigerians are using smartphones and other devices used in communicating and transacting, it is safe to say IoT in Nigeria is rising? We have to steadily embrace this digital evolutional transformation that will make businesses, governments and people remain relevant and of course disrupt the ways things are done.

Recently a group of millennials from hotels.ng created an app that works on a web browser which provides a global auto-complete address standard as the API recognizes similar addresses and can predict locations with accuracy.

IoT is more than smart homes and connected appliances, however. It scales up to include smart cities; Singapore, London, Barcelona, Oslo and a host of emerging cities use connected traffic signals that monitor utility use, or smart bins that signal when they need to be emptied – and industry, with connected sensors for everything from tracking parts to monitoring crops.

But everything has its downside. With the rising number of cybercrimes and internet threats, security and privacy is a core issue in the internet space.

Most of these devices and systems collect a lot of personal data about people, the smart meter knows when you’re home and what electronics you use when you’re there and it’s shared with other devices and held in databases by companies.

IoT, on a global level is gradually affecting businesses and work, a lot of manufacturing companies use organizing tools, machines and people, and tracking where they are. Even in healthcare, a lot of people are already strapping smart watches or fitness bands to their wrists to track their steps or heartbeat while on a run which is of course connected to their phones, homes devices and computers.

The question now is, is the IoT real? Technology is full of new things and right now, it’s difficult for some people to trust the internet, but daily increasing number of people joins the band wagon of techie people. Hence, it’s too early to determine IoT success and acceptance. Let’s just say we would all be surprised because ten years from now, everything could be connected.

But what I am sure of is that the world is connected!