Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational speaker who can cover the topic of ‘Big Data’ and the Internet of Things at your next information technology event. Contact us to check availability. The full transcript of the above video is included below.
Full Video Transcript:
Hi and welcome to another edition of Strategic Business Insights. Today we’re going to talk about the Internet of things. What is the Internet of things? Well, as you know, we all have access to the Internet. You have access to the Internet; that’s how you’re watching this video. And we all interact with different platforms like Facebook or YouTube or our work or whatever it is on the Internet, and that activity that we do generates data that people can monitor. But the bottom line is that today actual machines are uploading information to the Internet automatically without any human involvement, and the best example is your smartphone in your pocket or maybe you’re watching this video on your smartphone. Well, all those apps and all the different technology on your smartphone, it’s all gathering data of everything that you do and everything that you use, and this is true not just for you but for every smartphone. Every single smartphone is harvesting data of how that phone is being used, how the apps on that phone are being used, where are you when you’re using those apps.
But it goes far beyond just your mobile phone that’s in your pocket. Think about the Nest smart thermostat, which is of course a huge rage right now. You can look for it up on Google if you’re not familiar with it, but it’s a thermostat that goes in your home that learns your usage pattern. It’s the smart thermostat, so it gets to see how your usage pattern is and it adjusts automatically and you can access it using your smartphone or through the Internet. It’s connected and it’s harvesting data and it’s learning how you use your home and how to heat or cool your home the way you like it best.
Even beyond that, there are smart meters. Here in California, PG&E is using smart meters which are monitoring the electricity usage and energy usage in our homes and seeing the patterns. They’re harvesting data. There are satellites going around our planet, taking measurements 24 hours a day, taking photographs, and all that’s happening automatically without any human being. It’s a computer program, and that information is being transmitted in many cases through the Internet to some central server. There are smart TVs. There are sensors in buildings we use. There are sensors in the cars we drive. Even the Airbus A380 airplane, that’s the biggest commercial airplane in the world—it’s a two-decker, a double-decker airplane, I’ve been on one of those, they’re huge planes—and they use four huge Rolls Royce engines on their wings, two on each wing. Those engines have sensors inside of them that are monitoring everything inside that engine of how it’s being used and the temperature and the airflow and the temperature of the air outside and what’s the efficiency of the combustion between the fuel and the air and what’s the force coming out of the back of the engine, and those engines, the sensors inside those engines, are accumulating—listen to this—30 terabytes of data every 30 minutes for every engine. There are four engines, so that’s 120 terabytes of data being harvested every 30 minutes. You can imagine how much data is being generated just from a one-way flight from San Francisco to New York or from Paris to Istanbul or Dubai. These are enormous quantities of data that are being harvested.
The reason it’s happening is because the machines can work way faster than human beings can. Machines don’t get tired. As long as they have electricity, it just keeps going. So whatever the computer program is, to monitor heat or distance or speed or pressure or whatever it might be, they can do that every 10 seconds, every 30 seconds or whatever the program dictates. It’s the Internet of things. It’s machines communicating over the Internet with other machines and as a result of this trend, the amount of data that’s being collected is going up by orders of magnitude.
And so that’s why we have fields like big data. People talk about big data. What’s big data? Big data is the processing of data sets that are so huge the traditional databases that we used to use, relational databases that we used to use to process data sets, they can’t handle that volume of data anymore, and so they’ve developed new ways of processing called parallel processing and open source platforms like Hadoop and MapReduce and all of these technologies which you may or may not be familiar. But it’s all happening because the quantity of data is exploding, and it’s exploding because machines are generating the data, not human beings. Human beings are, too, but machines are generating far more data than human beings ever could.
And the applications of the Internet of things, it’s everywhere. It’s environmental monitoring, it’s infrastructure management, it’s industrial applications. Energy management like smart meters, that’s a classic example of the Internet of things; smart meters is a perfect example. Healthcare is being more and more affected by the Internet of things as machines and monitoring devices are sending data without any human involvement. Building and home automation, whether it’s industrial buildings or residential homes, transportation systems, the applications are everywhere.
The Internet of things is when one machine automatically communicates data through the Internet to some central server or some other machine, and it’s resulting in huge data being collected. That’s the genesis of the big data revolution, which we’re just getting into right now, and the end result is going to be a more intuitive planet for all of us. We are optimizing earth. We are optimizing our use of energy, our use of water, our use of any resource. We’re finding patterns that we never knew existed because we’re monitoring everything and analyzing all of that data.
The Internet of things is revolutionizing our world and it’s revolutionizing it through the accumulation and analysis of huge quantities of data. Follow the trend. It’s an exciting time to be in technology.
Thanks so much for watching this video. My name is Patrick, reminding you as always to think bigger about your business, think bigger about your life.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a keynote speaker who has spoken at business conferences in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
