• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 1, 2015

It would be somewhat of a great understatement to say that The Internet of Things is a work in progress.

As more connected things join the network, more people around the world are becoming connected to those things.

There are 7 billion mobile cellular subscriptions and almost all (95%) of people are now within reach of a mobile network, based on a new major study by the International Telephone Union (ITU).

The seventh annual global study, Measuring the Information Society Report, in more than 200 pages covers 167 economies in an in-depth analysis of IoT and a connected world.

The ITU created an index identifying the overall most connected countries in terms of Internet connectivity and the adoption of data services. Korea leads the list and the United States is number 15, following Germany and Austria.

1. Korea
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. United Kingdom
5. Sweden
6. Luxembourg
7. Switzerland
8. Netherlands
9. Hong Kong, China
10. Norway
11. Japan
12. Finland
13. Austria
14. Germany
15. United States

The importance of the generation, processing and analysis of data generated by connected devices is identified as the source of most of the value to be derived from The Internet of Things.

For marketing purposes, the insight from all this data will be the true value from which contextually relevant messaging can be created. The report notes that the value of IoT is closely linked to the exploitation of big data, which comes with all of the associated data management challenges.

As in other studies, ITU projects the number of connected objects as large, forecasting that 26 billion to 100 billion devices will be IoT connected by 2020. These will include traditional unsmart devices, like toasters, light bulbs and refrigerators, all of which be made smart with real-time sensor equipped with communication capabilities.

The report credits IoT growth to a convergence of several factors, including the growth of the Internet, development of Internet-linked radio frequency identification (RFID), context-aware computing, wearables and ubiquitous computing.

As a work in progress, The Internet of Things is evolving, having started with people connecting to machines and then machines to machines (M2M).

The next stage will be The Internet of Everything, the connecting of people, devices, data and processes.

Content and communication will have to be created to ride along all of those connections.  

And that’s where marketing will be king.