Industry 4.0 – industrial Internet
The Internet of Things (IoT) is spreading everywhere – industrial, business, commercial and consumer. GE is focusing on the industrial side, calling it ‘The industrial Internet’. The Germans call it ‘Industry 4.0’ - the 4th manufacturing revolution. The first revolution was the introduction of steam and coal energy in the late 1700s; the second was electrification of manufacturing in the early 1900s; the third was the introduction of programmability and the PLC in the early 1970s (Dick Morley is widely considered the PLC inventor).
Industry 4.0 is the ‘Internet of Things’ – data and control beyond just information and ideas. IoT is sensors, technology and networking all coming together to allow everything to exchange information as burgeoning ‘big data’.
According to IDC, the spending on IoT was almost $5 trillion in 2012 and expected to be about $9 trillion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of almost 8%. The installed base of ‘connected’ things will be over 200 billion by the end of 2020 including 30 billion connected autonomous things. This will become a new construct in the information and communications technology world.
WIRED magazine’s June 2013 cover story on IoT showed that the future will be about connecting devices to the millions of invisible transactions of daily life. It’s not just about more cool features on individual gadgets, it’s about connecting them all to generate vastly more useful information and the ability to control.
As more devices emerge that connect to the Web, more of them are able to connect to each other. An example is OpenRemote’s software that can connect and automate all kinds of devices. For example, several Internet connected home gadgets – thermostats, door locks and window blinds – which each have separate apps for operation can be merged with OpenRemote into a single iPad app to control everything.
All this is happening very fast. How is your company involved? Lead, follow or simply slide into oblivion.
Growth of virtual currency – bitcoin
Bitcoin is a crypto currency where the creation and transfer of virtual cash is based on cryptographic protocol, independent of any central authority. Money can be transferred through a computer or smartphone without any intermediate financial institution. Issuing bitcoins and managing transactions is done collectively by the network. Bitcoin is open-source; its design is public; nobody owns or controls it and everyone can take part.
Unlike traditional currencies where central banks decide how much money to print, no central authority governs the supply of bitcoins. It is not backed by physical assets, is not run by any person or group, and its value depends on people’s confidence in the currency. Bitcoin recently broke $200, compared to $12 a year ago and the market remains highly volatile.
This electronic cash system concept was introduced in a 2008 paper by a developer known only as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. Bitcoin transactions are processed by servers, called bitcoin miners, which confirm transactions by adding them to a ledger, updated and archived periodically using peer-to-peer file sharing.
In addition to archiving transactions, each new ledger update creates some newly minted bitcoins. The number of new bitcoins created in each update is halved every four years until the year 2140 when this number will round down to zero. At that time no more bitcoins will be added into circulation and the total number of bitcoins will have reached a maximum of 21 million bitcoins. To accommodate this limit, each bitcoin is subdivided down to eight decimal places, forming 100 million smaller units called satoshis.
China’s got the bitcoin bug. A real estate developer in Shanghai just announced that it’s now accepting bitcoins for one of its mid-range flats in a posh Shanghai suburb. Half of the world’s daily bitcoin trading volume now comes from China.
Bitcoin has a credible future as an alternative to traditional payment methods. Momentum is coming from around the world, as amateur investors, venture capitalists and technology enthusiasts keep pumping money. The volume of transactions remains tiny, but some think this currency could eventually become as ubiquitous as e-mail.
A tiny but growing number of stores, travel agents and online merchants are starting to accept this digital currency as a means of payment. One couple recently travelled the world using just bitcoin – I wonder where it will lead.
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
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