Finding the killer IoT app: Why worry?
Companies and people have been on the search for the killer IoT app for a decade, yet nobody has found it. You can be sure that I have not either, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this article — I’d be furiously developing it.
Most companies are anxiously looking for the killer IoT app that their IoT reps could sell in volume to enterprise customers. The bad news for them is that there’s no true killer app for IoT, and that any company can create the right killer app to solve a business need of a customer or even a whole industry.
Nevertheless, we cannot avoid that fact that some people think pet care or fitness could be the killer IoT app, while others instead think the winners will be in verticals, such as predictive maintenance in manufacturing, smart home or smart cities. I have also read funny opinions that consider measuring temperature and humidity as the killer application for most of the IoT industry. The comment is comical, but at the same time ironic. In the absence of bright or innovative ideas, it seems that we would have discovered the fire when we install sensors and are able to visualize temperature and humidity in real time on the screen of our smartphone.
Instead of continuing to dream of finding the Holy Grail of IoT, I think it will be more productive to analyze by category the possible IoT applications that exist and, if I am enlightened, to try to guess which application would be the milk to launch myself to develop it without fear.
These are the five categories to search for the IoT horizontal killer app:
- IoT search
- IoT messaging
- IoT security
- IoT commerce
- IoT social
Searching for the killer IoT horizontal application is a chimera given the definition of the internet of things. However, the challenges that IoT has to overcome — that 50 billion machines can be found, communicate safely through various networks, socialize and favor the monetization of its services — open great opportunities for hardware and software engineers to develop different killer IoT applications. And I’m sure some will find it. I wish I could be part of one of them.
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