One of the very exciting areas of tech is the Internet of Things. The IoT is a very rapidly growing sector and will start to pop up on everyone’s radar sooner rather than later. Some say growth is expected to reach $30 billion by 2020. That’s just five short years from now. That sounds great, however, that’s just what companies are spending to be a player. Revenue opportunities for companies in the IoT space are not as clear at this early stage.
The IoT seems to be on everyone’s mind these days from investors to companies who are building it and growing rapidly themselves in the process. Thinking about what the IoT means is a very exciting prospect.
It’s like thinking about the Internet in the mid 1990s. We know it will be big. We just don’t know all the ups and downs we will experience along the way. And we don’t know the direction it will follow in advance.
This is like building the highways before we build the cars to travel on it. That’s always the case isn’t it? We have to take things in this order because if we build the cars first, they would have not road to drive on.
While that is always the case, it’s also always a little uneasy as we watch the billions of dollars feeding this growing beast before we see any profitability, which is years down the road.
The buildout is big news for companies in many sectors like software, hardware, services and security. These are all players in the IoT buildout. When it’s complete, all this will be connected just like we do with the Internet.
However, the IoT is going to be huge and it’s going to be important. Already, IoT is a trillion-dollar industry. It's still in the buildout stages and we are just in the very beginning. Over the next several years we will see tens of billions of connected devices start to log on. Growth could be very rapid.
Although, as always, there are many different definitions of what IoT actually is. Any way we slice this beast, today not everyone knows what the Internet of Things is, but tomorrow it will be second nature. Uptake could be very fast.
Smartphones, tablet’s, smartwatches will all be connected. So will computers, televisions and radios. That’s not all. Every device will be connected including our cars, refrigerators, homes and everything that can be operated with electronics.
As you can imagine, I think this is going to be huge.
During this buildout stage, this is an enormous growth opportunity for industries like telecom, wireless, computer, network and more, on the consumer side, business side and government side of the ledger.
Then when we start using the IoT, it will be an equally enormous, but different opportunity for these same sectors.
With all that said, there will be winners and losers at all times.
While there is no leader today, but this is a very important piece of our future whether we look at this as a consumer, a business user, or a government user.
This has enormous potential growth opportunities and that makes it attractive to workers, partners, governments and investors.
I’ll be writing about individual companies and new technologies of interest as time passes. This should be a very exciting area to follow for investors, customers and partners for small, lesser-known companies and big, brand name companies as well.
So keep the Internet of Things on your radar during the initial buildout stages, and when we all start to use it. This network of networks is going to be important going forward for decades to come.
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