IoT: business and technology

As much as I love this IoT class (Stanford Continuing Ed) as it gets me out of my comfort zone, the last couple weeks have been a real slog. Yes, thinking through the business plan and all the different ways that we’ll could be making money (or rather how hard it would be.) That’s when you realize that your team is not aligned on what the product is — when you realize well, there’s a good chance given that this is a start-up you won’t make money. That when you realize it would have been very helpful to do user research and get a real persona instead of a made-up one.

And then there is the technology. So many details to think about at each layer. That level of detail was perhaps the hardest to get through. The communication protocols, the hardware development or even whether we even wanted to do hardware development. The cloud! Oh the cloud. Is it possible we really won’t own the data? Is it possible that big cloud providers would sniff our data and use it in nefarious ways? (Is it possible that FB would use your own photos in advertisements for you? How pissed off was I when they tried that. Yes, they will do what it takes to make a buck.)

So much to think about. The complexity of IoT continues. Next week is security. Remember that famous DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on Oct 21, 2106 that took down most of the internet in the US for a day? Most of that was from unsecured IoT devices. Actually looking forward to the security of IoT conversation – I’m thinking it will be more engaging that the tech talk!