The internet of loos

Auntie Beeb reports that the loos at Heathrow Terminal 2 are being fitted with sensors to detect how many people are using particular toilets, and when.

Feel free to snicker or chortle right about now.

OK, so what does this mean?  The overly harsh take would be "Yeah, that's about all this whole 'internet of things' things is going to amount to."  A more optimistic take would be "Heathrow is one of the world's busiest airports.  If they see a benefit to this, there must be something to it."  While I've seen any number of "there must be something to it" endorsements fail to pan out -- too much of this is a good sign of an impending bubble -- I tend to lean toward the second opinion.

Yes, I'm not thrilled with the term "Internet of Things", but I think that this is more because what we're seeing is a gradual trend of (some) ordinary things being put on the internet, and not a brand new phase or some sort of new internet.  Lots of things have been on the internet, some for longer than others.  Weather sensors.  Webcams.  Taxi cabs.  Temperature and voltage sensors for computers in datacenters.  As time goes on, the portion of internet data generated via human intervention will probably decrease, and the amount generated by various ... things ... will probably increase.

This isn't the hardcore IoT vision, though.  All the examples I gave are things that naturally actively generate data.  Even Taxi Cabs have always needed to communicate their location and status.  Fitting them with GPS and putting them on the net just makes that process more accurate and efficient.

The full IoT vision involves tagging everything with some sort of net-friendly identifying device, say an RFID, which can then be scanned.  If every book on your bookcase, every fork in your silverware drawer, every pair of pants in your closet and so on is tagged, then you just need to wave a scanner around in order to upload an exact inventory.

Perhaps more realistically, if newly manufactured objects carry RFIDs -- and some do -- then gradually people will come to have more and more net-visible things around them.  What we choose to do with that data is another matter, as are a number of privacy concerns (what's to keep someone from walking by your house with a scanner and seeing what's in it?).

In that sense, the Heathrow loos are more like weather sensors and taxi cabs and less in line with the "tag ALL the things" concept.  Interesting though they may be, they don't say much one way or the other about how the larger IoT vision will play out.

Is the Internet of Things still a thing?

Traveling in the Valley, I drove past a billboard from a company boasting of its role in helping build the Internet of Things.  That made me pause for a second.  I hadn't really heard the term in a while, and this isn't one of those cases where the Valley is ahead of the tech trend.  Not so long ago, I seem to recall, the Internet of Things was getting quite a bit of hype in the world at large.

What is this IoT, by the way?  It's the idea that all the things in your life, or at least way more of them than now, are connected to the Net and in some cases happily talking to each other.  So, say, when your toaster pops up a slice of toast you can get a text on your phone that you can't read because you're driving to work and forgot you'd even put anything in the toaster to begin with.  Or if all your clothes have RFIDs sewn in, you can easily track what's in your closet and what's in the wash (or what you're wearing, but you may already know that).

OK, that's a bit glib.  There are some interesting applications.  I'm pretty sure.

There are a couple of kinds of hype terms, I think.  Some are just pure hype.  You'll hear them for a while, then it will turn out that there wasn't any there there, and they quietly go away.  There was a lot of this flying around in the dot com days, of course.

Some hype terms, however, have an actual useful idea behind them.  The internet and the Web, for example.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the particular hype term will survive -- remember the Information Superhighway?  We call it the internet now, but the concept behind it hasn't gone away and will continue to develop.

Some of these kinds of terms will fade in and out as the underlying concept goes through cycles of hype, backlash, rehabilitation and possibly hype again.  AI is one.  E-commerce would be another.

I suspect that the IoT is one of these.  We can expect surges in hype, followed by periods of "meh", and maybe a name change or two, but over time more and more things with computing power or computer friendly id tags in them will get connected to the world at large -- thermostats, TVs, cars, security systems, stoplights, dishwashers, consumer goods ... maybe even toasters.  Possibly things that don't have significant computing power will get enough to get on the net, too.  Maybe roads and bridges get large numbers of sensors that can communicate conditions back to some control center.

So, even if the billboard is a bit jarring to someone not immersed in the Valley's particular media bath, the company behind it is probably engaged in something significant, and maybe even useful.