The Internet of Things

In our latest video, we wanted to address a few of the basics behind IBM’s smarter planet strategy. We interviewed three IBMers, featured in the video above – in order of appearance: Mike Wing, Andy Stanford-Clark and John Tolva – and asked them to talk about what Internet of Things, System of Systems, and Smarter Planet mean to them. We tried something new with this video, interviewing these gentlemen, then animating around some excerpts from the audio captured.
Although Internet of Things and System of Systems are not IBM-bred concepts, they help to explain a great deal about what is happening now where the digital world meets the physical and intellectual. An excerpt from the film:
Michael Wing: “Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself – natural systems, human systems, physical objects – have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didn’t used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And it’s all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.
Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That’s where societies become more efficient, that’s where more innovation is sparked.
When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations.