The Relationship of the Iot and the Smartphone

Introduction

A term that is often crossing our path at the moment is the Internet of Things. Although the term “Internet of Things” was first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, its emergence only recently began to take off. It is supposed to be a new, third wave of disrupting technology throughout the internet´s history (Witchalls, 2013; Gubbi,Buyya, Marusic, Palaniswami, 2013). As the internet emerged, the first big wave began to rise: we have all experienced the vast integration of personal computing in our daily lifes. Also, the second wave is nowadays ready to become of age: mobile internet and the connected devices. The era of easy accessibility to mobile broadband and widespread Wi-Fi access points disrupted the way we communicate and our phones defined real mobile computing (Witchalls, 2013).

By the start of 2015, an estimated 2 billion smartphone users will be roaming the world (Brown, Zeitman, Smittenaar, Adams, McNab, 2014). Major innovations in the smartphone industry opened up many possibilities for the IoT (Goldman Sachs, 2014). The researchers at Goldman Sachs (2014) and Mattern et al. (2010) argue that the smartphone is the consumers’ gateway to the Internet of Things. The device is becoming the remote, the hub and really the center of the way we operate and communicate with things in our surrounding that are connected with it.

But what exactly is the Internet of Things? IoT in the literal meaning of the words can be everything. All that there is can be connected in a certain way and in different levels. As Fleisch (2010) argues, we will only adopt devices that can actively communicate with the internet in our view of IoT for pragmatic reasons.

Because of the writers' personal experience as a sales associate at a big Dutch telecom provider, the author is provided with insight in the trends that are flowing through the smartphone industry and also has deep interest in the smartphone and the evolution of the technology. During the experience, the notice of the smartphone changing little in the past three years yet its application changing ever since. The author also intuitively agrees with the Goldman and Sachs report (2013) and Yared (2013) that the smartphone and contingent technical developments are great enablers of the IoT. The next step is to argue if the process would also work in reverse: is the IoT changing the features and future of the smartphone?

To combine the enabling perspective of the smartphone with this question, the main topic of this paper is constructed: How are the emergence of Internet of Things and the evolution of the smartphone related to each other?

In order to cover this central question, the paper is divided in two parts. The first part will cover an introduction to IoT and current developments in the market. Also, it will address the following questions:

How could the IoT influence our lives?

How is the smartphone integrated in the IoT?

The second part will cover the physical and market-related changes in the smartphone industry and will try to answer the following questions:

How is the smartphone influencing user’s lives?

How is the smartphone changing in respect with the developments in IoT?

At the end of the paper a discussion will argue the findings and speculate on the future of the smartphone.

Internet of Things

A general definition of IoT is hard to find in the academic literature. However, there are some terms many authors agree on. One of those terms is that IoT consists literally from two components: ‘Internet’ and ‘Things’. The verge of the different views in the literature are mostly divided in two different orientations: Internet oriented and Things oriented (Mattern and Floerkemeijer, 2010; Atzori, Iera and Morabito, 2010). Fleisch (2010) argues that the term IoT does not differentiate between infrastructure level and application level, but that those differences do exist. Another common ground in the vision of these researchers is about the vision of IoT as an extension of the internet into the real world a kind of transformation into a larger realm. Interconnections between objects are creating a smart and connected environment (Gubbi et al., 2013 & Atzori et al., 2010; Mattern and Floerkemeijer, 2010)

For pragmatic reasons, this paper takes on IoT as a network of internet-enabled participants that can communicate to other devices or users, in this way constituting a next generation internet. A ‘Thing’ oriented perspective.

How could the IoT influence our lives?

The amount of possible applications for IoT is numerous. However, the current proposed market segments can be segmented using existing literature on the topic. Combining the

views from Gubbi et al. (2013) and Atzori et al. (2010), the five segments to categorize applications for IoT are: Personal & Home, Enterprise & City, Healthcare and Transportation & Logistics.

IoT applications in these segments vary on different levels. Fleisch (2010) argues that these levels can be summarized as seven different value drivers for IoT applications. The levels range from simplified manual proximity triggered actions (such as pet tagging) to mind changing feedback loops that alter the behavior of users (such as smart metering and connected apps are about to do at the moment).

As Fleisch (2010) also argues, the IoT dissolves numerous media breaks that now often are needed. These media breaks represent human interaction in a certain process (be it semi-automatically in a digital environment, like sending a machine generated report, or a physical task such as taking a print out the printer to read it). This means that machine to machine (M2M) interaction is instigated by IoT and human interaction in these data streams is eliminated. We can clearly see M2M interaction in the new kind of wearables that are designed (Apple Watch, FitBit, Samsung Gear Fit). These smart watches and bands are transferring information about your health or activities to your smartphone, which delivers you statistics and possible actions you could undertake. Some of these inventions even write a weekly full blown report concerning the user’s activities/health.

How is the smartphone related to the IoT?

As already explained in the introduction, the author intuitively agrees with Goldman Sachs researchers on the notion that the smartphone is a great enabler for IoT. In many proposed applications, the smartphone is the remote operator, receiver or actuator. The smartphone acts as a mediator between