King Solomon’s Digital Data Mine: The Industrial Internet
If corporations can be people, then certainly all non-living objects can have their own email addresses, facebook pages and even twitter accounts? If you think I’m not serious then you’ve probably not heard about the new/old Internet, the one that’s for “everything.” It’s also referred to as the “industrial Internet.” What could companies hope to find there? Hopefully the start of a brand new goldrush in data mining and a source of entrepreneurial inspiration that has gone missing in the current weak economy and the wane of the first human Internet age.
General Electric is one such corporate person attempting to spark the next industrial revolution by trying to leverage the Internet superpower of “information convenience” on tasks that are typically ignored or previously too complex to manage, such as windmill blade speeds and hospital bed allocation. GE is your typical aging conglomerate, an essential source of fundamental human needs such as electricity, transportation and medical technology, whose footprints can cast huge shadows on the entire planet. In areas where 1% improvements mean millions of dollars, it makes sense to push hard to create the next future of interconnected, data generating everything where no object is safe from being tagged a live node.
Recent articles on GE’s “Industrial Internet” commitment:
- GE Looks to Industry to for the Next Digital Disruption (New York Times)
- General Electric Pitches an Industrial Internet – With more sensors and more data, GE wants to wring efficiency from industrial systems (MIT Technology Review)
