Occasionally, you come across a piece of thinking that makes you go, 'oh, right, that's a veryinteresting point'.
So it is with a recent article by Toby Ruckert, CEO and Founder of Unified Inbox, a platform tobring and display all your social media and email communications in one place.
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Toby Ruckert, CEO and founder ofUnified Inbox[/caption]
Unified Inbox is a pretty major play in itself, and has no lack of competition. With a bunch ofdevelopers and marketers spread around the world Ruckert and his team are giving it their bestshot.
However, it is a recent article in
Ruckert, while not overly talking up his own company, contends that the IoT (the about to explodenumber of able-to-talk-to-the-internet smart devices) will only start to become really useful whenit 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 simpleand straightforward way to reliably connect them with the rest of the communication and informationgrid.
Today, obviously, you'd connect through the cloud. But there is no uniform protocol for how suchdevices (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 channelwould be both a nightmare, and require constant updating.
The pull-out quote is:
Securely connecting the Internet of Things (IoT) to theInternet of Communications (IoC) from an evolutionary perspective to me is one of the greatestchallenges we have to face – and solve – before the next cycle of innovation around artificialintelligence (AI) comes into play.
He even gives a snazzy diagram.
Finally, Ruckert suggests that there is a great opportunity for the Telecom industry to play amajor 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.