Handshaking with Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things in abbreviated form is known as IoT. It provides a mechanism where gadgets, machines other than conventional systems viz. Desktops, Laptops, Palmtops, tablets and smart phones are capable of communicating to each other over the Internet. The communications between such entities are not restricted to human interventions. Which means machines and systems can directly communicate with each other using the internet. Thus IoT provides a communicating environment where non living objects and living beings are tagged with unique identifying tags enabling them to exchange data using Human Machine Interactions (HMI) or Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.

The Journey So far

• It will be interesting to take a look at the communication timeline progression.
• The first pioneering breakthrough of data transmission using Electromagnetic Telegraph surfaced around 1832 courtesy a Russian scientist Baron Pavel Schilling, popularly known as Paul Schilling.
• Same time around, in the year 1833  a German Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and another German Physicist Wilhelm Weber demonstrated how to communicate using Electromechanical Telegraph over a distance of 1500 m.
• A decade after, in the year 1844 an American painter, an inventor  Samuel  Morse came out with Morse code system for transmitting far distance telegraphic messages.
• Antonio Meucci an Italy inventor , Alexander Graham Bell a Scottish scientist and Thomas Watson an US bookkeeper made several attempts with electromagnetic telephones in the late 19th century before Bell finally was credited to be the inventor of Telephone in 1876.

         

In 1926, Nickolas Tesla predicated that at an opportune time, humans will witness Telephone devices so small that they fit in the vest pocket, which would work in wireless mode.

• It won’t be out of place to quickly run through the evolution of computers  though scope of this writeup is limited to communication.
• In 1833 Charles Babbage an English mechanical engineer pioneered to lay down the foundation of a general purpose computing device; which consisted of an arithmetic logic unit, a control flow with an integrated memory.
• Since then we have witnessed the computers to evolve and refined through several generations. Right from being housed in big rooms built up with huge electrodes to Mainframes, to Macros, to Minis, to PCs, to Desktops, to Laptops, to Palmtops, to tablets;  so on and so forth.
• Gradual and steady transition from Analog to Digital computing devices.
• With computing devices becoming available more prominently  now there was a huge curiosity amongst the scientific and resource community as how to connect these devices and exchange data.
• Lot of networking projects were funded by government bodies, military  establishments and educational institutes such as ARPANET, NPL, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, CSNET, NSFNET etc.
• Late ‘60 s  through Late ‘90s  the internet was used by the boffins and geeks, more for scientific and research works with  very limited and restricted  commercial usage.
• Since early 2000 all restrictions were removed and internet were opened for mass usage.
• Some protocols are http, ftp, smtp, imap, mailto, telnet.

# Year 1969; ARPANET was formed. 

# Year 1974; TCP / IP was constituted.

# Year 1984; the Domain Name System was established.

# Year 1989; Tim Berners-Lee proposed WWW and created first Webpage in 1991

The Way Forward

• In our times we have witnessed a galore of transition wherein, computing devices have been consistently becoming smaller and smaller. And with this, they bring striking features such as fast processing / computing speeds, smaller size memory  with extraordinary huge storage capacity, low power consumption and most importantly ever expandable capabilities.
• We have seen how Internet is becoming accessible from all nooks and corners regardless wired or unwired. And with the passing time how refinements are being achieved to improvised on its speed, bandwidth and availability.
• Technology remains Young on the face of time, shall always be a gospel truth to ponder.
• Now as we are about to cross over decade and a half of the 21st Century, we are all set to witness a new transition.
• We have just boarded on a new technological era which is mandated to connect you, me, he, she, him, her, we, they, us, them, that (Refrigerator), this (Car),  those (Play stations), etc. etc.  All are going to be connected over the Internet.
• Its time, we are going to witness Internet of (every) Thing !

The phrase "Internet of Things" has been  coined by Kevin Ashton executive director of the Auto-ID Center.

• Since early 2000 Internet created a huge impact on the masses.
• Players like Amazon and eBay popularized  electronic commerce. 
• Buying, Selling, Trading, Banking, Procuring, Staffing, Financing etc etc.; everywhere it was to be seen a  quick adaption to internet.
• Google, Yahoo, Lycos spearheaded the search engine market place.
• Free web based (anytime, anywhere) emails were offered thick and wide by Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc.
• Least we talk about the wide throng acceptance of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Pinterest, Digg, g+, YouTube etc. These have now become necessity of ones lifestyle.  
• With the advent of mobile internet during the late 2000, mCommerce  paved its way and ever since started creating huge impact with the availability of the Internet on the Tip, Internet on the Move

# Posting moods and updates on Facebook timeline  

# Blogging and posting Micro Blogs with a Twitter handle.

# Keeping connect with friends and acquaintances on WhatsApp 

• IoT will break all the barriers of communication capabilities.  We can very well see seamless communications between  Machine to Machine in tandem to Human Machines Interaction.
  
  

 IoT Applications are not just limited to Healthcare, Education, Logistics, Lifestyle, Finance, Governance,  Management etc.

 Potentially its reach is beyond ones digital imagination !

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent

from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a

powerful force for business transformation, and its disruptive impact will be felt across all

industries and all areas of society.

Vice President & a distinguished analyst at Gartner, Jim Tully suggests:

“The digital shift instigated by the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information), and

boosted by IoT, threatens many existing businesses. They have no choice but to pursue IoT, like they’ve done with the consumerization of IT,”

Objective

Children are our future, marching towards better humankind. It is our foremost responsibility and duty to understand this important aspect and come out with level best to help them in their quest.

Children in our society are tagged both as privileged and non-privileged class. But they need to be mandatorily covered under some kind of scheme; whereby they can leverage equal opportunity of food, shelter, clothing, healthcare and most importantly education.

Scope

Scope of this post is limited to the critical building block “Education”. While we take up this critical building block, we would get into an interesting stream of thought process whereby we would try and understand as how we can help our children in picking up a right career path at an earlier stage and help shaping their future.

“You need to…” Problem?

As a kid takes the first baby step, proud parents start fantasizing as how their kid would stand few years ahead from now. Some would want their kid to become a specialist physician; some would say that their child is going to become a top notch lawyer, while many would see their kid to become top brass bureaucrat. This wish list as what their kid would become in time to come vary from parents to guardians. Strange enough, nobody cares about the liking of the kid, nobody bothers about to gauge the potential of the kid, rather all proud parents want to see their wards to ride on the bandwagon which they dream off.  And it is very unfortunate to observe that how this underline “You need to become …..” decree of the parents becomes potential ruiner of a bright career of their child. Amazingly enough though the inbuilt brilliance of some kids helps them to excel in their career paths as scripted by their parents. Now let us imagine for a minute, how far these kids would have gone with these kind of brilliance, in case the career paths were of their liking and taste.  Knowingly or unknowingly, whatever the case may be, it is criminal to decide on the career path of our kids as per our wish and liking. Why the heck we want to see our kids as tomorrows doctors, lawyers, bureaucrat so on and so forth.  Why we fail to understand that after all our kids are human too, of flesh and blood with same anatomy as our with abundance of feelings and emotions. They too have the same potential; perhaps more than what we have, therefore why our kids should not decide on their career paths? And, we as parents should be only focusing on giving them the right kind of atmosphere, required help, assistance and most importantly guidance to make them understand as what is good and bad. Rest, we should leave them map their career path vis-à-vis their liking & taste and unleash their potential to make it real big. That is the way actually things should have been instead of that “You need to…” problem, which unfortunately seems to stand out everywhere.

Effects of “You need to…” Problem

Now that we understand the problem to its core, let us look at the ill effects that are sprouted by virtue of this. As our kids start going to their schools, our wishes and objectives start surfacing more prominently. It is absolutely inhuman to see these small kids struggling to make their way to the schools with a truck load of books and other stationary. One will never make it out as which standard these kids are studying. The load that the first standard kid carries is almost the same of the child who is going to class sixth. Then they study at school, study at home, busy with the tuition class. Study and study at every possible time to prepare for the tests and exams. Point here is that we too have gone through this same cycle in our times, but hardly can we recollect an incident when we felt so overburdened by the study load, as our kids are facing today. Yes, this is a harsh reality one need to accept. Unknowingly we are just over killing the innocence of our kids. As a result, their gesture and behavior gradually starts reflecting stubbornness, harshness and other adjectives which we never can think of for our kid. But fact of the matter is that, the kids audacity tends to grow more and accelerates directly at the rate with which we retaliate and try to straighten them in order to make them intact within the set goals and objective. This is absolutely unwarranted and uncalled for. Neither we as a parent want to compromise on fantasizing the grand dream of our kids’ future nor are we willing to understand their liking, taste, desire and aspiration. Thus a communication gap is developed between the kids and the parents and it only gets widened with time. This is actually a very nasty situation, which no parent will ever like to tread upon. But irony of the entire situation is that every parent will ever willingly give up their fantasy, the dream of looking their child becoming what they want to, had they get any indication that it is killing their child softly inside. No parents will ever like to get into this situation. Unfortunately, there is no alarm which rings during such alert situations and by the time a parent realizes the actual problem, it’s often too late by then. Alas! the communication gap is never bridged and it’s only because the child is completely shackled and goes into aloofness. They work in reactive and robotic mode and only to the extent which gives satisfactory responses to their parents, nothing more and nothing less. This is very risky and dangerous.

A child who is affected with such syndrome gradually loses all the brilliance and end up landing into a mediocre career stream. This is very unlikely to what their parents had been fantasizing from day one and now this. A parent will never want to get into this situation and therefore a child needs to speak his mind and heart out. But the question is how?

We need to have somebody with whom the child can share his feelings, thoughts, likings, disliking, tastes etc.

  

To address this typical situation, platform Saarthi is envisaged.