The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) is a blip, a tiny speck on the tech landscape when compared to the behemoth of the Industrial internet. Smart tape measures, smart socks, smart dog collars, smart beds -- dumb hype. While one can be stoked about the convenience of using your phone to unlock the front door or dim the lights for a wild evening of Netflix and Courvoisier with your significant other, the Industrial IoT world will literally be the backbone for civilization.

The true potential behind Internet of Things lies in its impact on industry. Instantaneous information that is acted upon from massive networks of data collection devices that weave through all things that are manufactured, as they are manufactured, by what they are manufactured by.

Take a look at smart lighting. Install connected bulbs at home and you get an ability to remotely control your lights, set up different intensity, and the aforementioned night of Netflix and Courvoisier. Now take this capability into an industrial setting. Can you fathom how much money campuses, warehouses, and manufacturing plants can save on adaptive lighting? The same goes for heating. Nest is a wicked cool device, but smart temperature management leading to improved comfort and energy efficiency is an enterprise gold mine. Beyond the bottomline of a corporation as well as what it can do to combat greenhouse gases and Climate Change. Businesses like Callida and Silvair are already laying the groundwork and selling into these massive new markets.

Transportation is being flipped on its roof with the advent of autonomous cars. No wonder: it’s an appealing vision to step into a car, provide it with a destination, and then just sit back without traffic jams or road rage incidents. But where the real change happens isn’t with your daily commute, but logistics and transport. In the not too distant future big rig trucks will crisscross the US with maximum efficiency reducing the price of diapers at Walmart and millions of other product categories.

As Harel Kodesh, CTO at GE Software noted that already transportation is being transformed in real-time by IoT, “(When) combining every single tweet posted per second, there is about 80GB of Twitter data generated every day. …(However) the data generated by a single airline flight (already) totally dwarfs this figure. Information such as the engine’s health and status, the aircraft’s vibration and the cabin’s temperature is collected and analyzed closely by teams of people – from mechanical engineers who are building the airframe to marketing and performance scientists looking to understand why the cabin was too hot or cold. This equates to 500GB of data per flight, and when you think of the fact that there are around 100,000 flights a day, you can start to appreciate the sheer scale of this operation (today)” What will it be tomorrow? And handling this information -- that’s where Big Data gets freak’n real (are you feelin’ me, brah).

And what about retail? Your smart fridge might be able to message you that the milk is going bad, but what retailers understand as smart fridges sure as hell saves them a lot of money. Beacons and other sensors add a whole new layer of ambient intelligence to brick and mortar stores. At Estimote we’ve recently rolled out of beta the next version of our Analytics API. Before the public release, we’ve spent months testing it with our largest retail clients and I can tell you without shadow of a doubt: physical world analytics are the next big thing for retail. Show marketers and store managers traffic patterns, heatmaps, comparisons between the same sections across the whole chain, and lots of other data made possible by beacons and you’ll see their eyes shine.

Few have said it as succinctly as Ryan Craver did recently in an interview published on Medium: “As beacons and sensors develop, they’ll be the silent brain behind many organizations, like retailers, airports, museums and and so on.”

Just wait until warehousing times are nearly abolished and real-time pricing becomes “a thing” allowing for incredible pricing efficiency to take place as goods are moved on these smart fleets, to the showroom floor, to the trunk of consumer’s cars at the snap of a finger. Imagine instant discounting or Uber-like surge pricing on any and all goods.

And finally we arrive at where we live -- smart cities. Public-private partnerships between municipalities and companies will unlock massive efficiencies and opportunities. We’re already seeing the effects of transforming the urban landscape with IoT. Milton Keynes in the UK is utilizing IoT for waste disposal. California’s Santa Clarita is battling drought with data analytics. And Barcelona invests a lot into intelligent traffic lights that is making the commuter nightmare a dream.

Now imagine city as a platform like forward thinkers like Peter Marx the CTO of Los Angeles who is putting new means of data collection in place and opening it up to hackers, thinkers, and businesses. LA is letting them all build services on top of cities using data gathered from numerous sources including networks of sensors scattered around. Traffic, public transport, tourism, culture, commerce, administration: you can hardly name a field that is not being transformed. This “Smart City“ industry is projected to be a 400 billion USD market by 2020. According to research by McKinsey, 600 cities from around the globe are expected to generate 60 percent of the world's GDP by 2025 -- a clear imperative for cities seeking to be leaders to evolve into smart cities.

This new Industrial IoT World some with challenges in security and privacy, battery life and product lifespan, constant connectivity, data generation and analytics, but all these issues are conquerable and in fact are being attacked and addressed by numerous innovative start-ups and corporations. Consumer IoT is fun. But don’t mistake fun for the truly transformative. If you want to go big, go for Industrial Internet of Things.