Interesting facts about M2M

For people who have read about M2M or for who haven’t, this post will give an idea as to what the future holds when it comes to technology. M2M is a simple concept where two machines communicate to each other to achieve a common objective. The communication is done through complicated sensors that are installed in the machines. Here are some interesting user cases of M2m I found;

Entertainment
iLuminate essentially takes a simple M2M concept and turns it into art: dancers wear bodysuit and costumes that light up wirelessly to match the music and choreography. The difference with the iLuminate platform is that performers wear illuminated costumes that can be controlled without having to keep pressing buttons. Based on the sources they further said that, “the software's accuracy means cues can fire every 5 milliseconds, which is 1000 times faster than a human hand clicking a button.”

Home appliances
I think we’ve all seen this part of technology in future oriented movies where the entire household can be controlled by a click of a button. However in reality this kind of technology is coming true bit by bit. The introduction of Smart TV’s is one example. At a recent Consumer Electronics Show, LG has showcased a "Smart Refrigerator" prototype demonstrating various M2M-based "smart home technologies". One unique feature was a food management which allows consumers to check food items stored inside the fridge such as location and expiry dates via their smartphones or its built-in LCD panel. The appliance even recommends dishes that can be cooked using the ingredients that it happens to be storing. How convenient!! 

Big Data and the Telecom Industry

Mobile phones are already well on their way to replacing cameras, cash, tickets, calculators, maps, notepads and many more and they are becoming ubiquitous. Within the next five years smart phones are going to become the center of our world. The smart phone will start the car, make phone calls, check bank account balances, make payments and track locations. Literally people will not have to carry anything else but the smart phone. 

In the mobile network there are more than 6 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, and every day, 10 billion text messages are sent. Thus to facilitate great customer relationships, enterprises will want near real-time information on every kind of data emanating from consumer mobile devices in order to sharpen their understanding of consumer demographics and buying patterns. Not only enterprises, mobile operators can use these real time analytics in delivering a superior customer service. 

Based on a new IBM study on how telcos are using Big Data “85 percent of the respondents indicate that the use of information and analytics is creating a competitive advantage for them – a 124 percent increase in the last two years.” 

For example one of US major mobile operators is combining its customer record data with sentiment analysis where they are able to determine what type of people pass by a billboard at a particular time of day and what products they are interested in. This allows them to precisely target its billboard advertisements to the demographics.

What's so Big in Big Data?

Organizational leaders require analytics to exploit their growing data and computational power to be smart and get innovative in ways they never could before. Consider retailing for example. Physical bookstores could track which books they sold and which did not. They could tie some of those purchases to individual customers if they had a loyalty program. These bookstores had limited information and thus could not make informed decisions. Then the online shopping and e-commerce gained popularity moving transactions to the internet. This transformation resulted in businesses gaining better insights of who their customers are and their behavior. Now online retailers can not only track what they bought, but can gain information about what other items they looked at, how they were influenced by promotions and reviews. 

Every day business and consumer life creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: posts to social media sites, sensors used to gather climate information, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is called big data. 

Big data is more than gathering data; it is about finding useful insights that can be used by organizations in making decisions. Leaders across countries consider big data as a management revolution where enterprises analyze massive amounts of data to identify valuable information. Senior executives now prefer to run businesses on data-driven decisions. They require scenarios and simulations that will provide guidance on the best actions to take.