The Internet of Things (IoT): A slow burn until it can communicate with everything else

Occasionally, you come across a piece of thinking that makes you go, ‘oh, right, that’s a very interesting point’.

So it is with a recent article by Toby Ruckert, CEO and Founder of Unified Inbox, a platform to bring and display all your social media and email communications in one place.

Toby Ruckert, CEO and founder of Unified Inbox

Unified Inbox is a pretty major play in itself, and has no lack of competition. With a bunch of developers and marketers spread around the world Ruckert and his team are giving it their best shot.

However, it is a recent article in Teletimes International (see page 21) and his own website that reveals a depth of thinking beyond simply where we are now.

Ruckert, while not overly talking up his own company, contends that the IoT (the about to explode number of able-to-talk-to-the-internet smart devices) will only start to become really useful when it is able to seamlessly connect to the Internet of Communications (IoC) – Facebook, LinkedIn, email, etc..

He states that these smart devices aren’t so smart, and will remain so until there is a simple and straightforward way to reliably connect them with the rest of the communication and information grid.

Today, obviously, you’d connect through the cloud. But there is no uniform protocol for how such devices (say a smart fridge, or a device embedded in a bridge) would ‘talk’ to the wider world. Building separate Application Protocol Interfaces (APIs) for each device and communications channel would be both a nightmare, and require constant updating.

The pull-out quote is:

Securely connecting the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Internet of Communications (IoC) from an evolutionary perspective to me is one of the greatest challenges we have to face – and solve – before the next cycle of innovation around artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play.

Ruckert (well, he does suggest Unified Inbox is a solution) says that there is a platform opportunity to integrate and make easy the integration of the IoT with the IoC.

He even gives a snazzy diagram.

Finally, Ruckert suggests that there is a great opportunity for the Telecom industry to play a major role in creating a provisioning platform for the IoT world.

The race is on, and Unified Inbox is putting up its hand as an answer.

Having posed the problem, Ruckert provides a possible answer.

It is a well-thought out article, well worth the read.