This Saturday 9th April is global Internet of Things day, a day where technology leaders and internet citizens come together to discuss the future and what it may hold for us. You may have heard about the Internet of Things (IoT) and like many others, may have gotten a bit confused as to what it actually is and, importantly, what it means for you. Let’s take the opportunity to take a closer look and explore some of the numbers behind just how big the Internet of Things is.
Firstly, let’s a few numbers:
- Looking back at 1990, there were over 300,000 desktop computers connected to the internet.
- Moving forward to 2016, there are over 2 billion mobile phones connected to the internet.
- Estimates say that by 2020, there will be over 21 billion ‘things’ connected to the internet.
That escalated quickly, and it’s only getting faster. But what do we mean by ‘things’? Well that’s the point, it could be anything, including kettles, fridges, cars, bikes, lights, homes, the list goes on. This is the future.
The truth is, despite a lot of focus on consumer products including inventions from Google and self-driving cars from Tesla, the Internet of Things covers B2B too.
The underlying technology has multiple applications. For example, self-driving cars and the technology behind them can affect the future for B2B companies such as fleet management companies by allowing better product performance insight. We’ve covered this on B2B Marketing previously, with this post from Alex Clarke outlining a range of numbers and stats.
To help make sense of the numbers and show the sheer growth of the Internet of Things, the team at RS Components have put together this visual showing just how big the Internet of Things could become:
