Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere. The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube. We’ve embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of.
If you have time, the entire event is worth viewing. It delves into current successful use cases for Internet of Things. Panelists include representatives from HP’s sensor networks division, a medical software company, and a company which provides sensor-enabled products for vending machines.
The first speaker was Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow at McKinsey Global Institute. He explained that the Internet of Things is about incorporating sensors and actuators into physical objects, which “make the physical world part of an information system.”
Chui noted that the Internet of Things is ramping up for 3 main reasons: 1) sensors are getting better, faster, smaller, cheaper, more plentiful; 2) networks are everywhere (pervasive, if not quite ubiquitous yet); 3) our new ability to analyze data that these network sensors generate and being able to control the actuators. Chui then went over the report that McKinsey released last month (our summary and analysis).
We’ve excerpted a couple of minutes from the end of Chui’s presentation, when he talked about potential applications for Internet of Things. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, this is well worth watching.
The rest of the event focused on commercial solutions using Internet of Things. An example is vending machine software company Cantaloupe Systems. Co-founder Anant Agrawal said that for his company, “the Internet of Things eliminates the guesswork.” Cataloupe Systems provides sensor-enabled software for vending machines, which gives vending machine companies hard data with which to run their businesses more efficiently.
Here’s the full video of the forum:
Hat-tip Ethan Bauley from HP Communications, who pointed to the video in a RWW comment.
