‘There was a moment when industrialism began to advance when men were apprehensive. Such men as Emerson and Thoreau were afraid that everything would become stereotyped. In fact, what has happened in the industrial revolution has been quite the contrary. Different models develop all the time: passenger planes, bombers, small planes, large planes. The species is multiplying fabulously. There’s no such thing as a stereotype.’
R. Buckminster Fuller, 1962
Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers. He was also one of its most influential inventors and futurists.
Fuller was a man of strong creative passion. He spent his life applying innovative design to create technology that did ‘more with less’ and improved human lives.
As early as the 1930s, Fuller wrote about the house as a ‘machine for living’.
The quote above was Fuller’s response to critics of one of his better-known designs: the Dymaxion house.
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This was a house with no foundations. It hung from a central mast, which minimised the danger from earthquakes and took away the need to grade a site prior to construction.
You could put up a Dymaxion house in less than 24 hours. All utilities, including cesspool, water tank and a diesel engine to supply power, were located in a core below the mast. That made it possible for a family to live independently and move from place to place at will.
The Dymaxion house never went on the market. Housing technology was insufficiently advanced and Fuller couldn’t source funding in post-war America.
But you’ve got to respect Fuller’s foresight. Throughout the 20th century, humans have insisted that their homes — and the machines in them — do ‘more with less’.
By the 1960s, new ideas about the networked homes of the future were gaining traction.
The 1964 World’s Fair in New York City transported visitors through the ‘Home of Tomorrow’, complete with domestic robots and a clunky videophone.
Since those days, promises about the ‘connected home’ have been made again and again.
Residential futurism — the kind that relies on connected machines improving our lives — has a long history.
Very little has come of all those promises…until now.
Machine to machine (M2M) communication is on the cusp of taking the world by storm.
You might have heard it described as the ‘internet of things’. Put simply, M2M communication is the rising wave of objects that connect themselves to the internet. It’s the ability to connect everything…I mean everything…with a vast network of wireless electronic devices that can talk to each other.
Decades after mankind first dreamed up remotely connected devices, the rapid growth of wireless networks and computing power has finally turned M2M communication into reality.
It’s a technological explosion.
And it will offer you incredible possibilities.
Think about using your smartphone to monitor your health. Or owning a house that adjusts its own lighting and heating based on your whereabouts.
Your house might see you at the supermarket and send you a text message asking if you want the oven to be switched on.
And when you’re ready to cook dinner, your fridge might suggest some meal options based on which of your foodstuffs are closest to their use-by date.
It might seem hard to imagine at the moment. But a few years from now, pretty much everything that opens and shuts in your house, your workplace and your local neighbourhood will become internet connected.
That’s the vision I witnessed earlier this year at the Connect technology conference in Melbourne.
Several dozen companies exhibited their digital technologies.
Although the exhibitors operated in many diverse industries, they all told me the same thing. M2M communications are no longer a pipedream. The technology is real, it’s economically viable and it will change the world.
The numbers I’ve seen forecast for the ‘internet of things’ are truly astonishing.
Business Insider estimates that nine billion everyday devices will soon be connected to the internet.
Just take in the chart below. It shows that the number of connections in the ‘internet of things’ will grow in the next few years to surpass the number of smartphones, tablets, PCs, smart TVs and wearable computers combined.
Millions, if not billions of remote assets will be connected by wireless networks in the coming years. Think cars, vending machines, parking meters, security cameras, ATMs, utility meters and medical monitoring equipment…just for starters.
All of this will result in tremendous growth. It will drive trillions in economic value as the ‘internet of things’ soaks into household and business life.
There are four key drivers. They are: improved connectivity and network quality, cheaper data and bandwidth rates, cheaper M2M communication devices, and easier adoption by businesses.
History tells me that this will revolutionise many industries.
New processes will be automated.
New types of data will be generated, gathered and analysed.
And machines will start making more and more predictions without human guidance.
M2M communication is still very much in its infancy, but it’s taking off quickly. So quickly, in fact, that Google Inc [NASDAQ:GOOG] this year paid more than US$3.2 billion for Nest Labs — a four year old company that makes ‘smart thermostats’.
Right now, Nest allows you to better manage the heating and cooling in your home. It also provides real-time feedback to utility companies. That helps them manage energy demand at peak load times.
But the potential applications of this kind of smart technology are limited only by Google’s imagination.
Imagine the rivers of personal data that will flow from networks like this. And of course Google — the world’s largest media company — will want a piece of that action.
For the ‘internet of things’ to be truly effective, everything needs to be connected. In the next ten years you’ll see a boom in connectivity that’s unlike any the world has ever seen.
This boom will spawn an industry that’s worth more than a trillion US dollars per year.
But if you think the only way to cash in on this growth will be through US listed companies like Google, you’d be wrong.
It will be the small companies with bright ideas that have opportunities for really explosive growth on the forefront of this trend.
For investors, this is an exciting time to get in on the ground floor of a new market with enormous potential.
Regards,
Tim Dohrmann+
Small-Cap Analyst, Australian Small-Cap Investigator
Ed note: The above article is an edited extract from Australian Small-Cap Investigator.
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