appliances in exchange for their eyeballs and data. In future, privacy may be a
rich person’s luxury^15.
More positively, there are benefits to digital service business models. There
are opportunities to develop ongoing relationships with customers, understand
more about the people who buy your products and what they do with them,
and tailor services better to their needs. Users are accustomed to (and mostly
comfortable with) web-based services that capture and store information about
them to provide a better service. The sensing and processing capabilities of
IoT devices open up potential to extend these personalized s ervices to the
physical world.
You may be able to capture user behavior that wasn’t previously visible,
perhaps in real time: e.g. how people are using energy via smart metering,
identifying and tracking people in a physical space, or monitoring traffic levels
via aggregated data about the density and speed of movement of drivers’
smartphones. Knowing how often or intensively a product is used, and what
for, enables you to tailor the service, sell supplies, improve the next version, or
offer additional services. For example, some Nespresso coffee machines now
come with a SIM card, allowing Nespresso automatically to send more
capsules when the customer is running low (see figure 4. 25 below).
(^15) Pertti Huuskonen, personal communication and 2007, ‘Run to the Hills! Ubiquitous
Computing Meltdown”, Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Advances in Ambient
Intelligence, Pages 157-172 (available at
http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csmax/csrsRG.pdf))