On the Internet of Things, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog
Mulligan points out one of the aggravating aspects of the internet of things as it exists now: everyone is creating their own disparate and isolate devices that really don’t communicate with each other, that each use separate schemes and protocols. My weather station outside talks only to the wall mounted LCD display, and there’s not a history or log kept. If I were to get a Nest thermostat, it would be separate too.
There isn’t really a “home OS” or “Homepervisor” system, and there isn’t a standard for automobile HUDs, and there … well you get the idea, I could go on and on. All of this is bound for change in the coming years.
Both Mulligan and Rhee have been involved in developing IoT technologies for years. Mulligan helped design the latest Internet protocol, IPv6. He was a founder of the ZigBee Alliance, which advocates for the ZigBee low-power communications standard, and he has worked on sensor and smart-grid projects for the U.S. government and various corporations. Rhee cofounded and was the chief technology officer of Millennial Net, which helped commercialize low-power wireless mesh networks.
“The hype [around IoT] far exceeds the delivery so far,” says Mulligan. Part of the problem is that individual organizations work in their own isolated environments, developing their own specialized products for a particular market, such as wearable electronics for health care. Neither the people nor the products are talking to one another. People do sometimes argue about whose protocol or product is the best, but that isn’t advancing the industry, he says. “We’ve built gizmo after gizmo, protocol after protocol, yet everyone keeps waiting for the next protocol or the next gizmo because that’ll make the IoT take off,” says Mulligan. By shining the national spotlight on these projects, Mulligan and Rhee hope to jump-start the kind of cross-sector cooperation that could move the industry forward. All told, 24 different teams, each with 1 to 10 participants, gave 10-minute presentations and demonstrated their projects on the exhibit floor.
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