“Internet of Vehicles”–Owner Stickiness is the Key

The "Internet of Vehicles" is not a strange concept to the Chinese. At every single “Internet of Things” or Smart City summit, Smart Vehicles and Transportation has become part of the "Internet of Things" and a hot topic with billion dollar market along with smart devices in buildings and in grid talks.

The “Internet of Vehicles” turns your car into a service, and more efficiently utilizes the car. Peer-to-peer car sharing, where people rent out their own cars into a network can lead to even more efficient uses of personal vehicles. Ah, and you might even want to “Friend” your car as part of your social network community?

So what kind of services the owner of a car need?

The success of Apple has been broadly studied by enterprises. Apple’s lead, while not insurmountable, can be attributed to a few things, including a lineup of products that is broad yet connected, a meticulously controlled retail experience, and a very particular brand of leadership at the top. Most of all, it is the stickiness Apple created by the app store and the value chain that perfectly hit the human excitement button of feeling privileged by owning a iProduct. That is exactly the kind of services The “Internet of Vehicles” needed to offer to the vehicle owners.

Apple became a platform. The app store continues to be profit after the tiny mobile device was sold. None of the mobile phone manufactures had ever imagined before. The “Internet of Vehicles” services need to adapt the platform model just as Apple did in the mobile phone space. Service providers need to learn from the Apple eco-system and create the owner stickiness. “Who you are”, “Where you are”, “What you are thinking about”, “What you are doing”, it is the human nature to “share” and “brag”. There is not much difference if you are holding your iphone or sitting in your “icar” when it comes to The “Internet of Things”.

Innovations And Opportunities - The Sky Is The Limit

It turned out… not only Weibo (microblog) is hot in China right now. Internet of Things (IOT) caught no less attentions than social media. From concept to planning, to technology standards to applications, there are quite a few breakthroughs. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China Academy of Science & Technology, and Jiangsu provincial government have put together a strategic plan for the development of Wuxi center of IOT. Government entities are actively developing IOT standards. Many provinces, as a result, started building the IOT industry zones, technology centers, etc. Enterprises and entrepreneurs are taking innovations and new application developments to the next level. 

I see several real-world applications that worth to scale. A company in Suzhou has developed a smart card solution with embedded security chip for healthcare industry. The technology becomes more and more mature and actually has been adopted by a few hospitals. Wuxi center of IOT has started to plan smart grid and environmental protection solutions based on IOT. Another example I came across is an environmental protection system that utilizes IOT technology. Wireless sensors are placed in the beautiful Lake Tai, one of the five largest freshwater lakes located at the border of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in Eastern China. Data collected from the sensors are analyzed and studied in real-time for pollution monitoring and prevention. We've seen water and air pollution in China being a major issue. What if we have an Internet of Things that are telling us what happen around us in the matter of second?

If 2011 is not the year of the IOT, in the next five years we shall see large scale deployment of smart solutions and applications in all industry sectors as well as smart homes. Science fiction's technological predictions will continue to come true. New business opportunities and value added services will be developed. According to a market research, by 2020, the world M2M communication services to human communication services ratio will be 30:1, and the potential of the IOT market will likely reach trillion dollars. 

Things Are Connected To The Internet

In 2008, the number of things/devices connected to the Internet exceed the number of people on earth. By 2020, there will be 50 billion things connected to the Internet. This is according to a joint study by Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, AT&T and some other research institutions.

Internet of Things is most likely the next biggest thing. It is the most exciting revolution that will impact our daily life and business process, and change our way of living and working. It will yield tremendous opportunities in almost all vertical markets, transportation, utilities, healthcare, education, energy and government. The things and devices connected to the Internet are not just smart phones or tablets, they are EVERYTHING. Here are a list of things that have knowingly been connected to the Internet. The rest will be your imagination.

¨       Smart phones

¨       Tablets and computers

¨       Cows and other animals

¨       Cars and trains

¨       Alarm clocks

¨       Coffee makers

¨       Energy and gas meters

¨       Air conditioners and refrigerators

¨       Wines and jewelries 

¨       Bars and manufactures

¨       Buildings

¨       Sewer systems

¨       Children and human hearts

21st Century is the Century of Smart Cities

A couple of months ago, China Smart City Planning and Development Summit (中国智慧城市规划与建设高峰论坛)  was held in Beijing. So what is Smart City?  Smart City is a set of Smart Solutions from transportation to healthcare, to public safety and security, to building and waste management, to education and city administration (Smart Local Government). It is a Internet of Things to improve the quality of life. 

With the fast development of high-speed broadband infrastructure in China, it is important to look at what will be the real value of this new infrastructure. It is now being built that offers a range of features such as ubiquitousness, affordability, low latency, high speed and high capacity. It will link millions of devices, such as sensors, that will enable the management of environment, traffic, infrastructure, and society as a whole much more efficiently and effectively.

There are three phrases to develop a Smart City. First of all, there is the digital city stage while the city is networked and information are digitized. Secondly, the intelligent city stage that has a new generation of Internet ("Internet of Things") infrastructure built with certain level of intelligence. Finally, it is the smart city stage, while we emphasize more on the real-time communications between people and the city, people and the "Things" are connected which form a better living and eco-friendly environment in harmony.

China wants to lead again. It has been investing billions of dollars each year in new technologies as part of a plan to develop "Smart City" projects around the country. "Internet of Things" is going to be a real game-changer. We should expect to see applications designed, manufactured and deployed across major cities around the country soon in the next 2-3 years.

We are acquiring resources in studying and analyzing the market and solutions. So expect to hear more in the coming months about new development of the Smart City projects.