"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth."

Just recently I had the opportunity to attend the event Iot:: Empowering the Enterprise. The event was opened by a welcome note by Padmasree Warrior, CTO of CISCO, who predicted IoT as the next revolution of technology wave.
Then Wim Elfrink stepped onto the stage and started off that his kids would only have two statuses in life, asleep or alive. He questioned IoT being a hype and emphasized the fact that IoT could only be built in a joined effort. Furthermore he presented evidence that the selling of sensors would be exploding and sensors are being deployed everywhere. Only 1% is of our world today would be connected so far. He mentioned it would be less about the data more about how to transfer data to knowledge and wisdom. (Which reminded me after the famous Frank Zappa quote;) Surprising to me, Wim mentioned the public sector as the largest opportunity for sensors, he was calling for new governmental regulations to drive new opportunities. Finally, opened the stage for startup called relayr.io that provides connectivity to sensors bundled with an analytics platform.
Next on the agenda was panel discussion on the IoT eco-system. Debjit Mukerji from Siemens presented the notion of Web of Systems as an approach for moving from sensor-cloud analytics systems to decentralized, local information processing systems. Thus, IoT systems would not solely depend on connectivity to a cloud but could operate and reason locally in real time closer to the phenomenon. Debjit mentioned the importance of enterprises for startups to learn about industrial business cases, receive real-world feedback, access to testing resources and customers.
Amit Chaturvedy from Cisco Investments said the IoT would a global phenomenon wherof silicon valley startups would be mostly focusing on consumer applications, Germany would be leading in industrial developments, Asia about smart cities...different geographies would have different drivers.

From the startup pitches I recall pubnub allowing to connect devices in a secure manner, helium building networks on top of commercial wireless networks, edyn for monitoring plants (I can't help but hasn't Koubachi done than some time ago?), skyspecs making drones saving for industrial use, Ayla offering a network layer for remote monitoring, and placemeter quantifying the real world in real time using computer vision and video sensors.

VR Ferose from SAP sent out the message that connecting would be only the first step, the real value would be to learn from the data and most importantly provide enhanced customer experience. As an example he joked about settling down in the Bay area could be based on three apps google express, amazon prime and uber. IoT instead could go far beyond this experience provide new insights into predicitive maintenance and connected insurance. VR underlined his arguments by a remote control car demo where the premium rate has been adjusted to the driver's driving behavior. Personally, I was happy to see how earlier research [1] finally found its way into practice.

The last keynote on the program was delivered by Helmuth Ludwig who described integration of data during industrial manufacturing could be used the optimize performance and time to market. He mentioned the example of Omneo allowing to analyze events at real time. As you can't do physical prototypes for testing mars rover, simulation software can be used to eliminate prototypes, save resources, and increase efficiency. The future would rely on tools helping companies to produce in new ways, more efficiently and faster. For that reason, Siemens has opened its research lab in Berkeley to build bridges from the knowledge pool of universities and startups to the corporate world. As an example of this bridge he presented the video The Missing Link.

Overall, I enjoyed very much being at this event feeling the great passion for Internet of Things both in the corporate and the startup world. While I found a lot of belief that IoT will happen (e.g. presented by cisco), I still see more thoughts to be spend on innovative ideas about how IoT can really provide value across domains. Connecting millions, billions, trillions - whatever the large number should be - is just the first step. Just having access to more data does not really provide value in itself. 

How can we leverage these investments across completely different domains? How can a temperature sensors describe itself as a temperature sensor and team up with an air pressure close by to provide a more comprehensive picture and simultaneously calibrate itself using the data of another temperature sensor close by? Why would the owner of the temperature sensor allow access to his sensor, what could be an appropriate business model look like? How can we keep track of this connected layer, upgrade it and maintain it over time? How much can we achieve in the cloud, what do have to do locally, how can we transition effectively between cloud and edge?

To make IoT a reality in the enterprise there has to be more than collecting data, as Frank Zappa already recognized: "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth..." ;)

[1] Johannes Paefgen, Flavius Kehr, Yudan Zhai, Florian Michahelles: Driving Behavior Analysis with Smartphones: Insights from a Controlled Field Study, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGMOBILE Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'12), Ulm, Germany, December 2012 [PDF].