The Future of Internet of Things

Over the last few years, the internet has taken over the market. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most influential technological development in the industry today with almost every commerce firm wanting to apply it in their enterprises. The concept of IoT is to connect everyone and everything in the market including consumers, goods, and devices. As this connection becomes extra efficient, more benefits and changes are going to be experienced in the market. For instance, the technology is providing retailers with the opportunity to give order fulfillment to the fullest through tracking the product until it reaches the consumer. Reordering of goods is no longer manual since, through this technology, the system can calculate and predict the next date that the product is likely to be ordered. IoT is automating support system not only for internet systems but also products like the refrigerators. Consumers are currently having a vast of information concerning the products and also have options. IoT will enhance suppliers' competition, and hence the quality of goods will improve. IoT will also bring new experiences concerning customer satisfaction; for instance, marrying commodities like cars with personal data will enhance personalized experiences.

Case Study

Currently, the most trending and exciting innovations under the IoT is the smart parking technology. With the increased traffic, and illegal parking complains, entrepreneurs have found a way to solve the problems (Khanna, 2016). The system collects data from the parking slots, the IR sensors, and installed Pi cams (Khanna, 2016). With the help of sensors, the data is sent to the cloud and then integrated into a Smartphone displaying the availability of a parking slot (Rathore, 2016). This case study seeks to find out how effective is the smart parking systems and the possible future improvements.

Findings

The smart parking innovation has brought relief to many people and organizations. For drivers, it has always been a major problem to find a parking lot around the city, and hence parking has been the major contributing factor of the ineffective means of transport. However, with IoT, one can find a parking lot before arriving at the destination and avoid causing road congestions and delays. City businesses are now able to manage the parking spending without estranging the visitors. IoT is also likely to increase the tax revenues charged for parking (Pham, 2015).

There are significant innovations expected in the smart parking technology with a combination of IoT. To avoid issuance of parking tickets, the system can provide a meter time extension service where a driver gets a notification on the expiration of meter time, and he/she can choose to extend the time via the phone app (Rathore, 2016). A high-value system will be able to solve and categorize parking violations. The traffic officers will be handling the parking violations according to the threat they pose by tracking the parking behavior from a phone or the police’s systems (Rathore, 2016).

Businesses and parking agencies are expected to enjoy the smart parking more than anyone (Khanna, 2016). Through the system, the parking agencies will be able to rent out all the slots at all times and hence will get added revenue. Additionally, businesses can use this system as an advertisement platform (Zanella, 2015). The number of people who own personal cars is very high, and a majority of them decide on the store or restaurant they visit based on the availability of parking space.

Conclusion

The Internet of Things has gone beyond searching for a cab. The IoT technology and its maximum utilization depend on how big the pool of data is. About this, it will take a combined effort from all the stakeholders in the parking business to utilize this amazing technology.

References

Khanna, A., & Anand, R. (2016, January). IoT based smart parking system. In Internet of Things and Applications (IOTA), International Conference on (pp. 266-270). IEEE.

Pham, T. N., Tsai, M. F., Nguyen, D. B., Dow, C. R., & Deng, D. J. (2015). A cloud-based smart-parking system based on Internet-of-Things technologies. IEEE Access, 3, 1581-1591.

Rathore, M. M., Ahmad, A., Paul, A., & Rho, S. (2016). Urban planning and building smart cities based on the internet of things using big data analytics. Computer Networks, 101, 63-80.

Zanella, A., Bui, N., Castellani, A., Vangelista, L., & Zorzi, M. (2014). Internet of things for smart cities. IEEE Internet of Things journal, 1(1), 22-32.