While millions of beacons and sensors get deployed on the ground all over the world, another part of the Internet of Things is going up.
Up, as in the air, as drones for business are beginning to take flight.
Everyone likely recalls the Amazon announcement a while back that it’s looking at drone delivery for packages. Google is looking at it as well.
But now Sony is getting into the act, launching a new drone company (appropriately inside its mobile division) not to sell drones but rather to sell drone services.
Kind of like software as a service (SaaS) but really drones as a service (DaaS), for businesses to hire out the unmanned flying objects to remotely check things out for a company.
Many other drone-like things will be created for ground operations, though these generally are called robots, since they don’t fly.
The key is that all of these objects, whether flying, moving around on the ground or simply as stationary sensors, will be interconnected.
The value is not in the objects but rather in the information that leads to the services they collectively provide.
Putting the mega issues of security and privacy aside for a moment, the mass of location data alone that can be accumulated is nothing short of staggering.
When drone and sensor type connections are integrated with real-time mobile sensor data, the marketing capabilities are only limited by a brand, marketer or agency imagination.
Drone marketing isn’t yet here. But the drones and sensors are coming and we all know what follows an aggregated audience.
________________________________________________________________
What to learn more about IoT? Check out the agenda of the upcoming MediaPost IoT: Shopping conference here.