The benefits of emerging Private LTE and 5G connectivity also bring the complexity of managing multiple, parallel networks.
Networks
In the conservative culture of most manufacturing-based businesses, competitive advantage is usually perceived to lie in ownership, secrecy, control, and sometimes adversarial relationships with suppliers and partners. It goes without saying that such a culture does not blend well with the notions of openness, transparency, and trust.
To date, most of the successful platform businesses are consumer- or user-focused. Fewer B2B markets have embraced this type of business model. We predict this will soon change.
As more and more companies delve into developing smart systems, they are quickly finding that competitive differentiation shifts away from unique, vertically focused product features. The new focus will be on how the product is actually used—how it fosters interactions between and among users in a networked context.
We’ve been speaking professionally about pervasive computing and the Internet of Things since the late 1990s when most people in business had no idea what we were talking about. Now everybody knows what we’re talking about, and many companies are trying to take part in it, but “giving the world…
The IoT is a distributed computing challenge. Smart Systems and IoT deployments are by their very nature distributed systems. We hear lots of talk about the “cloud” as it relates to the IoT to the point that in many cases it seems like the “cloud” is being presented as the…
Marvin Minsky, a cognitive scientist and one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, liked to say [in the early 2000s] that we can make a computer capable of beating the reigning genius of chess, but we can’t make a robot capable of walking across the street as well as any…