Companies get into IoT for multiple reasons. In the case of Arrow, the Internet of Things (IoT) was thrust upon it. Now, however, Arrow Electronics is trailblazing into IoT platform services.

Last year, Arrow did nearly $24 billion in revenue that was largely split between two businesses: electronic components and enterprise computing solutions. Historically, these two divisions had little overlap, but IoT has bridged the two units.

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A similar story is occurring at organizations everywhere as IoT converts disconnected things into computing peripherals. For example, hospital refrigerators that store blood and medicine are increasingly integrated into intelligent building management and communications systems.

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Everything about the modern doctor’s office feels primitive. It’s one of the few businesses that requires I use my telephone for scheduling — unless it’s about lab results. For that, they prefer fax. Even the doctor’s tools, such as the blood pressure cuff, scale and stethoscope, are largely the same as the equipment used in my childhood.

I get that the industry needs to be cautious regarding change and that legal requirements further complicate matters, but changes are overdue. Because medical professionals are unlikely to adopt unproven tech, the evolution will most likely come from existing tech being used in other applications.

Let’s take a look at how things might change in healthcare technology:

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Property and ownership are among the most basic concepts of a modern society. Our ability to clarify who owns what separates us from savages because property and ownership help us maintain our independence and identity.

The rules of property and ownership have evolved over centuries. There are clear transfer procedures for all types of property, including real estate, cars and even books. The problem is these age-old concepts are not holding up in our connected and digital world.

Cambridge University Press

“Property ownership as we know it is under attack and fading fast,” writes Joshua Fairfield in his book Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom. “The Internet of Things and digital property ownership systems are being built on the old feudal model.”

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“That was easy” is the iconic tagline of Staples. The international retailer has used that line since 2003. In 2005, the slogan took a material shape and appeared in ads as a red “easy” button. Now, Staples is giving its next-generation of the Easy Button a serious IoT makeover.

The button was meant as a metaphor to represent easy business transactions. But that didn’t stop people from wanting an actual button. Staples responded by producing Easy Buttons as a “stress relieving” novelty. Pushing the button causes it to say, “That was easy.”

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Connecting the world changes everything. That’s what businesses and consumers are learning as they embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) for everything from household garage door openers to smart-city applications that solve traffic congestion and reduce crime.

But IoT is more significant than just adding connectivity to existing products or services. In fact, it is about changing the way products and services deliver value. In the process, products are becoming services, and services are becoming more intelligent.

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The hospitality industry is not immune to this evolution, and, in fact, it is well positioned to benefit from IoT. That’s because the industry is poised to improve the customer experience while simultaneously reducing costs.

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There are lots of motivations driving organizations to install location-tracking technologies. The obvious driver is to find things, especially things on wheels, such as medical equipment in a hospital. It can also be smart to keep tabs on things in transit, such as a container. But the biggest reason to track things is simply because we can. 

We can also use these technologies to track people. Some solutions such as facial recognition can literally track people, but usually we just track a device someone might be carrying. We can now literally track the customer’s journey (through a retail store). 

There’s a popular misconception that global positioning satellites (GPS) are usable inside, but they range from worthless to unhelpful. GPS satellite signals require a direct line of sight to multiple satellites. 

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I like Gartner’s concept of the technology hype cycle. It assumes that expectations of new technologies quickly ramp to an inflated peak, drop into a trough of disillusionment, then gradually ascend a slope of enlightenment until they plateau. Of course, not all technologies complete the cycle or transition through the stages at the same pace.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has arguably been in the trough for 60 years. I am thinking of Kubrick’s HAL and Roddenberry’s “computer” that naturally interact with humans. That’s a long trough, and despite popular opinion, the end is nowhere in sight.

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There’s so much excitement and specialized research taking place that AI has fragmented into several camps such as heuristic programming for game-playing AI, natural language processing for conversational AI, and machine learning for statistical problems. The hype is building again, and just about every major tech company and countless startups are racing toward another inflated peak and subsequent trough.

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A Swedish rail line can now collect fares by scanning its customers for embedded biometric chips. The primary benefit is the elimination of a physical ticket—plus it’s harder to lose. It sounds futuristic, but my dogs have been sporting embedded chips for over a decade.

If you think about it, physical tickets are kind of silly. They are a surrogate for the person. The practice of scanning a ticket instead of a person was likely established when there just weren’t many viable alternatives. Technology now offers a more direct approach.

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The subject of the Internet of Things (IoT) has an extremely broad range of interpretations. Some immediately think of the “thing” itself as a connected thermostat. Others see it as a means to extend products into services. Most interpretations gravitate toward financial reward through data collection and analysis.

I recently attended IoT World in Santa Clara, California, and was struck by this diversity. Every conversation I witnessed had a five-minute preamble/negotiation just to agree on a common perspective. It’s kind of like the three blind men and the elephant parable, but instead of three men, it’s 1,000 people touching a sculpture made of wet clay.

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