{"id":1272,"date":"2019-02-15T10:32:02","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T10:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kusuaks7\/?p=877"},"modified":"2023-08-07T09:15:47","modified_gmt":"2023-08-07T09:15:47","slug":"welcome-to-the-iot-technosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/iot\/welcome-to-the-iot-technosphere\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the IoT Technosphere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ready to learn Internet of Things? Browse courses<\/a>\u00a0like\u00a0Internet of Things (IoT) Training<\/a> developed by industry thought leaders and Experfy in Harvard Innovation Lab.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When I talk about the Internet of Things, it\u2019s my habit to talk about the IoT Ecosystem as a whole. Maybe it\u2019s time for a\u00a0change.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The IoT Ecosystem<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The concept of an ecosystem is a useful analogy for IoT. Although it was in use as a phrase before his blog post, Bruce Sinclair (the same Bruce Sinclair that presented recently on\u00a0digital twins<\/a>, actually) provides some meat to the metaphoric bones of\u00a0why IoT is an ecosystem<\/a>\u00a0in an essay that\u2019s a nice entree to and overview of IoT at the big-picture level: Like the ecosystems that we\u2019re familiar with, IoT has a variety of interrelated entities that form a system \u2014 some entities produce data, some entities consume that data, and so on.<\/p>\n

But more and more, the concept of IoT as an ecosystem just isn\u2019t enough: It\u2019s too large and it\u2019s too diverse. We might, for example, reasonably talk about the IoT wearable device ecosystem, or the Industrial IoT ecosystem \u2014 but how do we accurately capture the scope and the scale that is IoT in its entirety?<\/p>\n

The IoT Biome \u2014 The IoT Technome?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Should we perhaps be talking about IoT as a biome, rather than an ecosystem? In nature, one simplistic way of thinking of a\u00a0biome<\/a>\u00a0may be as a collection of ecosystems with life that shares common properties across those ecosystems. Thus, although there\u2019s a Death Valley ecosystem, and a Gobi ecosystem, and a Saharan ecosystem, etc., we can talk about the desert biome as a whole because life in each of those ecosystems tends to hold many features in common. Does the same hold true for IoT? Should we be referring to the IoT Biome, or perhaps even better, the IoT Technome?<\/p>\n

Maybe. It\u2019s certainly fair to say that IoT devices have evolved \/ are evolving to share certain features in common across their deployments. Connectivity is the obvious, on-the-nose, example, but many devices are also evolving to have edge computing capabilities and many other features in common.<\/p>\n

Thus, while we might justifiably think about connected devices as comprising the IoT technome, as a concept it doesn\u2019t achieve our goal of finding a phrase that aptly encapsulates IoT as a whole.<\/p>\n

The IoT Technosphere<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Instead, I agree with the IEEE that we need a concept that more appropriately reflects\u00a0IoT as being an ecosystem of ecosystems<\/a>, or a global ecosystem.<\/p>\n

What to call such a global ecosystem is not quite as simple as one might think; academic articles have been published on\u00a0what to call the global ecosystem<\/a>\u00a0in attemtps to help standardize the terminology. My personal preference is to speak of the global ecosphere as being the ecosystem of ecosystems that we\u2019re after, since it reflects the environment, the inhabitants of that environment, and their interactions with it all at once.<\/p>\n

From there, it\u2019s a short and obvious leap to arrive at the phrase \u201cIoT technosphere\u201d to signify everything for which we have been using the term \u201cecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m nowhere near being the first person to coin \u201ctechnosphere\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s been used elsewhere to signify\u00a0all man-made things on Earth<\/a>, for example. Nor do I foresee \u201cIoT technosphere\u201d necessarily supplanting \u201cIoT ecosystem\u201d in the popular consciousness when it\u2019s such a buzzword \u2014 and in \u201cThe Three Phrases of Pitch Indifference\u201d I\u2019ve even argued that using\u00a0IoT buzzwords<\/a>\u00a0can sometimes be the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

That said, my mission here isn\u2019t to change the world \u2014 it\u2019s to change the way that people think about IoT as a whole. The IoT technosphere (see what I did there?) is too big, and there are too many disparate yet interrelated parts, for any one player to go it alone. Instead, think of IoT as an ecosystem of ecosystems.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the IoT Technosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The concept of IoT as an ecosystem just isn’t enough: It’s too large and it’s too diverse. We might, for example, reasonably talk about the IoT wearable device ecosystem, or the Industrial IoT ecosystem\u200a—\u200abut how do we accurately capture the scope and the scale that is IoT in its entirety?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":2763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[93],"ppma_author":[2566],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iot","tag-internet-of-things"],"authors":[{"term_id":2566,"user_id":77,"is_guest":0,"slug":"david-dewhirst","display_name":"David Dewhirst","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","user_url":"","last_name":"Dewhirst","first_name":"David","job_title":"","description":"David Dewhirst  is the Principal Partner ThreeTwelve Creative, a marketing agency focused on the IoT, SaaS and PaaS ecosystems. He focuses on thought leadership and marketing strategies for ThreeTwelve and its clients, and worked for several years as a software engineer for startups MediaBrains and AgingCare.com"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29922,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/29922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.experfy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}