Your fridge interacting with your car may sound like something from a sci-fi movie, but is it becoming a reality? There are already models of smart fridges that monitor the stock levels in your fridge and even allow you to order more from an integrated touchscreen.
The screen also provides meal planning and tells you exactly how many calories your favourite recipes contain.
When our cars are driving themselves, we will more than likely be glued to a screen and more than likely an interactive screen integrated into the vehicle that can make restaurant recommendations, book the table then drop us off.
It isn’t a stretch to imagine our smart fridges ‘talking’ to our smart cars, especially if our route takes us past a specialty store that happens to carry a product that is almost empty on the shelf!
Imagine driving home from work dreaming of your favourite meal but not knowing if you remembered to pick up a key ingredient, with a few simple buttons or voice commands, you can check your inventory and if you’re running low, ask your car to take you to a supermarket that carries the product. Meaning dinner parties will always go without a hitch.
Yes, it may sound slightly invasive and creepy but with IoT, inanimate objects or ‘things’ communicating data over the internet will become our everyday reality.
The romance between your car and fridge is a simplistic, domestic example of how IoT will optimise our lives but the opportunity for businesses of the future is almost beyond imagination with the use of data between machines, in real-time, optimising processes and driving efficiency.
The sad reality is, machines talking to machines is far more efficient without a human in the middle adding all that procrastination and emotion!
And IoT isn’t limited to industries and machines purely in tech and innovation industries, it is already making an impact on more traditional businesses.
A gaming and vending machine business are using real-time data to streamline efficiencies and drive more revenue.
Up until recently, the company would place a game or slot machine in a pub and pop by every few weeks to empty the cash and based on the revenue collected, ascertain whether or not the machine has been popular with the locals.
After fitting a specialist SIM card into each machine that collects and then sends data to the HQ of the supplier, they know exactly how popular a machine is and if it needs to be emptied.
They can also see what times of the day prove more popular, swap out machines that have been a flop and compare which type of venues do better with which type of machine.
This saves time and fuel by removing unnecessary ‘pop-ins’ and means the gaming company and landlords can see clearly what is working and forecast revenue effectively.
If every pub slot machine had this data the company supplying them could even plan their routes for more efficient collections. What a great way to modernise such a traditional business.
The key component for both of these examples to run successfully using IoT is specialist IOT SIMs.
These super sims are not locked to a single network, rather they are actually compatible with every network.
This is even more important if your machine is on the move – think Uber and Deliveroo, the reason you can track your delivery driver is the fact a multi-network sim is nestled somewhere in the vehicle… little do these vehicles know, they are about to become besties with a fridge! The sims are designed purely to pass data, not voice, video, or imagery, and a 2G connection is more than adequate.
The best news for businesses wanting to leap into the future by optimising processes is there are plenty of platform providers ready to help build out your own personalised IoT eco-system and help you define how your ‘things’ will collect and report data. Some industries have already built out platforms that could save you from having to start from scratch.
Business owners worldwide are already recognising the power behind this with many already seeing firsthand the efficiency and opportunity in their industries.
If you’re a business that sells, operates, or services things, vehicles or devices then there’s a huge opportunity for you in IoT.