BIA/Kelsey Bookshelf: 'The Internet of Things'

Last year, like millions of others, I bought a Nest thermostat. It is connected to my WiFi, and I can use its iPhone app to turn off the heat from the Airport. It also knows if we aren’t home, and shuts down to 58 degrees when we don’t walk by it every two hours.

A few weeks ago, I went a little further, and bought a Rachio, a lawn sprinkling system that integrates with the Nest. It tracks the weather via the Web, and adjusts my backyard watering stations based on precipitation and heat. And then I jiggered it, so that I can use its iPhone app to turn on the lights on my stairway when I am arriving home after dark.

I don’t have a self-driving car yet, or keyless home entry. And I don’t get too close to the military’s drone program. But those are all in the family, too. As are the Apple Watch and Google Glasses.

The Family, of course, is known as “The Internet of Things.” What it consists of are devices that combine tools with automation and radio sensors and data from the Cloud and the Web.

The Nest story became especially interesting to us in business when Google bought it for $3.2 Billion last February, and its leaders became the head of Google’s new Internet of Things division. At the time, it seemed like a stretch. But the Nest division keeps growing (Carbon Monoxide detectors, etc.) IoT might just be driving the next generation of efficiencies. Intel and other tech giants have similarly-named divisions.

Samuel Greengard, a writer for CMO.com and other thought-leader publications, has penned a handy new book for MIT Press called “The Internet of Things.” It nicely covers the history of IoT’s development from the Industrial Internet to the Internet of Humans to the Internet of Everything. The book connects the dots on where IoT can go, and also provides fair warning on the things that can go wrong (and we aren’t just talking about Google car crashes in San Francisco).

The 210 page paperback ($15.95) has a good glossary, a nice bibliography and is a fast read. And you’ll see why BIA/Kelsey conference speakers in coming years are perhaps as likely to come from Honeywell and Rain Bird as they are from NBC-U, Comcast, Google, Facebook,Intel and Microsoft.

(Here’s a question: If you worked for Google, would you rather work for Nest or AdWords?)