I decided to write this article because I see confusion and too much optimism about IoT today. It remembers me the times of the RFID bubble where people where expecting a tag on every can, while it was clearly impossible since the price of the tag was not sobstainable in almost any market.

Just a short bio: I’m founder and CEO of Openpicus, a company active on development and production of connected devices. During the last 3 years I saw hundreds of IoT projects and events about IoT. I’m also tutor about “IoT impact on business model” at Luiss business school in Rome.

My fist consideration is that the hype around IoT is really too high, sometimes almost ridiculous. I partecipated to many panels and events about IoT and here’s my list of the “dangerous signals”:

Starting from 2010 companies are talking about the 20 billions IoT devices coming in the next 5 years. Today is 2015 and still they are moving the timeline 5 years ahead . Again.

. Again. The 99% of the IoT devices I see on the market are not solving any real problem or need. They are just gadgets satisfying the excitement of few high spending early adopters that have a "tech erection" if they can turn on a lamp using on the web. While the lamp itself is straight in front of them , not on the other side of the world.

or need. They are just gadgets satisfying the excitement of few high spending early adopters that have a "tech erection" if they can turn on a lamp using on the web. While , not on the other side of the world. Nobody, really nobody, is talking about the real cost of a connected device . I’ll try to explain this later.

. I’ll try to explain this later. As my business partner Gabriele said: “there are more slides about IoT than devices”. It means there's no market when people is talking to much about how big that market WILL be.

Let’s start from the first point. Chip makers are facing a problem, a big one. There’s a market saturation of smartphone and tables and they pray for a new wave. This new wave has to be IoT, otherwise there's nothing else in their radar.

So what they are doing to drive this revolution? New products maybe? New low-power microcontrollers with embedded connectivity? Well, yes but mostly they are pumping money on conferences and events about IoT.

During the 90’s a chip maker was investing money only on one-day hands-on workshops. The target of these events were professional designers and companies because they needed to catch their attention for their next project. Each slide at those events was really full of meaning. Zero slides about futuristic visions.

Now chip makers are trying to attract another kind of people: the communities. Broadcom (Raspberry) or Intel (Galileo) are talking to geeks, nerds and makers while few years ago you needed a black tie and a business card just to get their attention at the fairs.

The question is: why they are so hardly approaching to communities? Easy, they are praying for the miracle! They hope that the next Zuckerberg will make an IoT device and not a software platform.

Well it’s really hard to believe for me for several reasons. To design and produce a consumer product needs experience and budget. A light team to design a consumer product is generally made of 10-30 people with 10+ years of experience each one.

Second point: 99% of IoT devices are useless. Most of the new IoT devices ideas are coming from hackathons. We been sponsors and I’ve been in the jury of several hackathons and sorry to say but the ideas are almost always the same: a tweeting vegetable, a connected coffee machine and so on.

I don't want to mean that’s bad: these guys are learning a lot during an hackathon. The sad part of this is that the jury push the excitement of these guys. And you know what? They start to think to create a company from that point! These companies are based on nothing, no need to satisfy, no experience, nothing. The wrong assumption is: if we made this in one night, it can’t be so hard to clean it up and putting on a retail store. Wrong, super wrong guys.

Let’s go to the money side: the real cost of an IoT product. An IoT device is made of a piece of hardware, obviously, and a Cloud backend that is less obvious. And here comes the problem. A professional Cloud backed for IoT costs tens of thousands dollars for year! So if you sell just few thousands devices you will have to sustain a monthly cost of some dollars/month/device. You don’t believe me? Try to contact one of those Cloud for IoT companies and ask for an offer. You will receive a nice looking 20 pages pdf with some info and in the last page you will get the $$$ surprice!

You can say: well, lot of businesses have this kind of costs, but they make money the same! Yes, sure, but are you sure that

Somebody is willing you to pay a monthly fee for each tweeting vegetables?

You may think I’m pessimistic about IoT. Well I’m not of course, I’m on this business, but I can't stand anymore the endless talking and the hidden reality.

Internet and objects will ever meet? The answer is yes, they started to meet more than 10 years ago when IoT was called M2M.

The growth of IoT depends on several conditions in mine opinion:

The connected version of an unconnected device must provide a 10X advantage. It must satisfy the customer 10 times better .

. This advantage is so valuable for the customer that he will be happy to pay a monthly fee.

Some people today think that their IoT device will be bought just because it’s a status symbol. Well, unfortunaly turn on the lights from a mobile phone is not a status symbol. Even the smartphone itself is not a status symbol anymore.

I want to enter into the security area. We are very careful while buying on an ecommerce website for example. Even my mom knows that she had to check that the lock is closed before inserting her credit card.

You know what’s odd? That customers doesn’t know if and which security his new IoT device integrates. On the IoT devices there’s not a label or any info on the user manual about this.

IoT devices are not even telling you where your data are going. I recently read a tweet of a Philips Hue owner: he said that his lamps where sending/receiving 309Kb/s of data all the time. To do what? To whom is sending these data?

I really hope that somebody will give these answers otherwise the IoT market will remaing a market where verbs will continue to be conjugated in future tense and the sales volume growth will remain a nice graph on a Powerpoint.

Do I think that IoT is a mega bubble? No, or just partly. Because from our prospective we are facing an increasing demand of connected devices, but in professional markets like industry, agriculture and logistics. 90% of the requests coming to us are for custom designed devices, but most of the time the customer needs are really similar.

Why the professional market is so IoT hungry? Easy, because real time data for them is money. How? Real time data are driving real time decisions. Decisions are made by manager or by algorithms, but the goal are always the same: save time or resources or effort.

The case of agriculture is the most iconic: we worked to solve a problem on strawberry farming. The problem is that for a special type of strawberry a level of humidity over 70%, even for few hours, may cause the a bacterium to spread. Can you imagine to put on the waste a whole greenhouse of strawberry just because you had no data about humidity in real time?

In other markets, like logistics, having data in real time, plus a web dashboard may help companies to guarantee an higher level of service to customers and to differentiate from competitors.

The nice news is that all these markets are more than happy to pay you a monthly fee, because the value of these data for them is absolutely higher than your fee. Companies are used to pay a fee to get a service, that’s the point.

Professional market pretends a service, not a web dashboard or a cool looking mobile app!

The other side of this is about numbers. Each company, each application, seems to need a custom device. This is slowing the growth of the IoT: going to billions devices is hard when the standard leadtime for the design of a professional IoT device takes 4-8 months.

We are trying to solve this with our new line of connected smart boxes www.iomote.com

These boxes are connected (Wi-Fi first and later GPRS) and are compatible with a large number of sensors. We go from temperature and humidity (air and soil), to current, air quality, light and so on.

The professional IoT market is basically looking for two kind of features: datalogger (with settable timing) or an active IF-THEN based alert system. Iomote devices have those features and the user can control everything on a free Cloud dashboard.

We also understood that some companies wants to use their own Cloud for things or a commercial one (IBM Bluemix, Amazon and so on). Iomote devices are easy to customize to let them talk to any Cloud.

We really hope that Iomote will help the IoT market in a way that very soon the number of connected devices will overtake the number of the annoying copy/paste slides about IoT!