IoT Evolution World Goes to Mobile World Congress

Hola, amigos.

I’m a few days into Mobile World Congress, out here in Barcelona, Spain, and I’m finally getting a minute to take a breath and consider some of the patterns in the conversations I’ve been having.

The scope of this show is epic. Brands from Japan to Sweden and everywhere in between are bringing all the noise they can muster, and IoT is the star. Everywhere you look, everyone is trying to claim a piece of the industry, some with more success than others, sure, but the eagerness just to be part of the conversation is palpable. You can feel it as you walk through giant booths like Ericsson’s, where connected transportation solutions are front and center, and over at Qualcomm’s exhibit IoT has fingers in almost every solution the brand’s put out.

It’s not just the big players, either. We spent time with a Swedish consortium of startups and long-standing technology experts and nearly every company has the IoT at front of mind. We found the same story in the Irish, Israeli, German, Argentinean and dozens of other national contingents.

What were they talking about, you ask? Well, some of it was what we’ve been talking about for years: security and standards. SIGFOX and the Industrial Internet Consortium are out with the full court press, as are most of the other standards players, and no conversation escaped without some mention of how to solve security and privacy.

The most interesting things discussed, however, got past that stuff pretty quickly. This year, it seems, will be the year of practicality. The smartest minds in the tech world are tired of hearing about hype and “potential.” They want to know what is being done now. They want to see use cases that actually work and to learn from field trials what the real challenges will be for IoT implementation. And I agree.

Meanwhile, it’s time to start looking beyond the “things” in the IoT, and start figuring out how to make the systems of things work that are the real endgame for this industry. We’re maturing past the smart thermostats and want to get to figuring out the Smart Home, Smart Building, and Smart City. How will all of these layers work together to get us to the “Arthur C. Clark Moment” where the technology of the IoT will finally reach that point of invisibility and be truly indistinguishable from magic.

Ubiquity. Let’s get there. And here at MWC 2016, I’m starting to see how we will.