IoT Models: Cisco vs Google

Last week's LED Professional Symposium sparked many discussions about IoT business models. It starts with lights, but after all lights are no longer about being a light source. Lights are sensors. Lights are routers. Lights are computers. And most importantly, lights form infrastructure mesh data networks.  Connected lights transform ceilings into digital ceilings and this really becomes now the essence of IoT.

Lights are not lights. And a network that connects them is not a lighting control network. It is a multi-service infrastructure / sensory data network. Feilo Sylvania says the value of presence heat map data harvested by lights is 6-7x higher than the value generated with the most energy efficient lighting system.

So if this data really has that much value, immediately the ownership dispute kicks in: who owns it? And this is a deep gray area now: nobody dares to clearly answer this question. But clearly two models are going to emerge: the "Cisco model" and the "Google model".

The Cisco model is based on selling the infrastructure and maintaining it, while keeping the data private where it belongs. As today Cisco runs the Internet but does not store nor read our emails.

The Google model is when you get the infrastructure and maintenance for free, but you let them harvest the data. And there is nothing wrong with this model, as there are tons of benefits such as increased comfort and energy savings, you might be getting just to letting them harvest the data. As long as there are the benefits, people should not have a problem with that.

Humans are social species and willing to contribute. And this is why, longer term, I believe the Google model will win. We are willing to share and contribute data, even compromising privacy to some extent, in order to reap the benefits of value added services built on top.