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We've been connecting our environment to the Internet since the Internet's
been around, but I think that the reason why it's becoming so exciting now is that
effectively smartphones have basically commoditized this wonderful stack of
technology from processing to memory to communications that.
Now it's so cheap we can take a little mini smartphone stack and
embed it in all sorts of things in our houses, in our cars, on our bodies.
And so now we can literally make computing environments that live in our homes.
We can turn our office building into a compute environment.
And that means there's a UI for how you interact with your office building.
There are APIs for
how other technologies can get information from the office building.
In order to sort of have the Internet of Things be as interesting as it is,
it not only needs the smart sort of stack of technology on the processing and
networking side, but you also need a lot of sensor technology.
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I've been fortunate to have worked with a couple of, I think,
some of the more exciting early successes in the Internet of things.
One of the more well know ones is Nest.
And so, Nest is the really incredible team who built the Apple iPhone and so these
guys really knew how to, not only to make a really intelligent, smart, connected
devise, but also how to make something that really appeals to consumers.
And the smart thing they did, is they said that the thermostat shouldn't just
be a dumb switch on your wall, it's going to be a sensing, intelligent, connected
smart phone that manages your temperature and all sorts of things in your house and
they put some sensors in this product that allowed them to determine are you home or
not and can we take action based on the occupancy of your home.
And if you're not home, this is a relatively simple idea, but
if you are not home, we are going to turn up or down the temperature.
So if it's the winter, we're going to go ahead and let the house cool down, and
then when you come home, we'll detect your home and
we're going to heat it up for you.
And so it's just some of this, again, smart detection and
understanding of occupancy.
And then some really basic learning technologies
that allows them to sort of predict and react and understand consumer preferences,
but then makes the device really work for the customer.
So it's not adding complexity, it's really simplifying your life.
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The way I think about it is I feel like it's sort of the next frontier of
innovation.
And if you look back historically at waves of innovation in Silicon Valley,
they're very pretty clearly defined by there's a big hardware innovation,
whether it's hard disk drives, or PCs, Internet networking equipment.
And then that enables a really long period of software innovation
on top of that big leap forward in hardware platforms.
And so for me, the internet of things is kind of that next new platform area.
Post the iPhone, the smartphone and the tablet ecosystem.
And so right now what we're seeing is a little bit of the Wild West.
People are trying to figure out so what's the standard look like?
What are the communication standards?
And you know to complicate things there isn't sort of one specific
instantiation of this platform, there's lots of different things.
So in a net of things it's going to look very different in a residential situation
versus an industrial situation and so I see this as the super, super early days.
And this is a period that's going to last for quite some time.
Another way to think about this is in the really beginnings of new
areas of innovation, you tend to see very vertically integrated companies.
Companies that If I'm going to make a smart thermostat,
I have to do everything, because this is a new part of the industry.
And so, everything from the firmware to all the hardware to the software,
and so, these are really big undertakings.
And then over time as more companies find success, there will be pieces of
the tech architecture that get picked off and turned into services and
then we'll start to see sort of this horizontal technologies.
For example, one that I think makes a ton of sense to sort of horizontalize
sooner rather than later is that this notion of I want to connect
something to the new internet like a on demand Wi-Fi connection or an on demand,
almost like a whisper net as a service kind of thing.
So I suspect that we'll start to see some companies that go after these technology
layers but it's hard to lead with that when it's still the wild west and
people don't really understand.
What are the killer apps?
How are consumers going to be interacting with these things?
What really gets me excited as an investor in the Internet of
Things is I think it enables some really interesting new business models.
So one company that I'm on the board of is called Enlighted and
it's easiest described as sort of Nest for commercial buildings.
And they put a sensor at every light in the building.
And these sensors allow them to control energy use on lighting based on occupancy,
but then they can also do things like controlling HVAC,
they can understand the occupancy of the buildings themselves.
And then they can do a lot of other things around security and
space planning and so when you take a step back what's exciting about what
the technology enables is that by putting in this hardware sensing platform you're
getting some proprietary new data that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get.
And then once you have this data you can then build this series
of software applications that provide different insights to the business
owner around different areas of their business.
And so ultimately I'm really intrigued by Internet of Things opportunities,
where again the hardware is purely unlocking some more information buried
around us that then enables us to then build really valuable software businesses.
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That's where we have to be just really careful about how we implement these
things, and we want to implement the right amount of data to be able to take
action and do the right things for the customer, but not too much,
where we cross any kind of line.
Now we're self limited when it comes to Internet of Things, because if you're
outfitting 100,000 square feet of floor space with sensors, guaranteed, you're
actually being really selective about what data you're actually bringing back.
And so, again, it's just about being very targeted and
focused on the specific applications.
And so you're not just collecting all types of data for data's sake.
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In enlighted situation, frankly the big site really is occupancy and
understanding how people are using buildings, but
occupancy is harder to understand than you'd think.
And right now you've got these very basic occupancy sensors that everyone's familiar
with in their office.
Where after 10 minutes of not moving the lights go off and
you're like, I'm still here.
[LAUGH] And so the problem with those sensors is they're pretty low resolution.
And so the key is how do you find sensors that really understand
there's a human who's sitting in the office who's sitting very still.
And so getting a lot of better granularity around sensing is really important,
and that's part of again, the technology embedded in the Internet of Things.
But once you have really good high-resolution data around occupancy,
you can really, dramatically change how the building operates.
And one of the things we talk about with this Enlighted company is we're helping
redefine the future of the at work environment.
So when you come into your office, it knows you're there, it's adjusted for you,
the light's set to your level, the temperature's set to your temperature.
There's a bunch of things that can be accommodated to ultimately make it
a better work experience for the person who's in that office.
But, then for the company themselves, what we've shown so far that when we install
these sensors in the lights we save 50 to 70% of all lighting energy.
Dramatic, dramatic energy reduction simply by just shaving off lighting usage
when people aren't actually using rooms, and just very simple things like that.
We can also do similar,
not quite as much savings, but similar things around energy as well.
So the environmental implications of this kind of Internet of Things
deployment is massive and doesn't put the customer out in any way.
So I love the fact that, as a customer, you're not sacrificing for
the lights to control and turn off when you're not in a room.
And so it's just the building being much much smarter about how it's being used.
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