Internet of Things Conference 2014 in Berlin

From 31 August to 3 September 2014 was the Internet of Things Conference held in Berlin. My goal was to build new ideas on the Internet of Things Conference and to pursue the development of the Internet of things.

During the conference days there were many possibilities in form of keynotes, power workshops, sessions, many discussions and networking to get an overview of the current state and the future trends.

As our company engages in the innovative data, system and process integration services I payed a particular attention to security, standardization and user experience oriented topics from the IoT world.

Let's connect all the things!

Due the large variety of devices, protocols and syntax is the data and system integration needed more than ever. The communication protocols as MQTT, XMPP, CoAP are considered as standards for the transmition and event distribution between devices and applications.

During the conference many of frameworks have been introduced. The very interesting one was the project Ponte. It is a sort of bridge for the M2M communication that defines a simple REST API to expose the machines needs through REST, exposing multiple protocols like MQTT or CoAP through the same API. More than that multiple data formats such es JSON, XML, Msgpack, Bysant are supported and automatically converted between each other.

The conference has shown the fact that there is still a long way before the real use cases can be rolled out. At least 5 things have to get solved before the IoT can become successful:

1. User acceptance
2. Security and safety
3. Standardization
4. Latency
5. Law and regulation

Although we are active in the field of systems, data and business process integration for years thare some challenges and specific features for the IoT world:

• the longevity of the device (updates hard or impossible)
• the size of the device (capabilities are limited - especially cryptography)
• the fact there is a device (without user interface)
• the data (highly personal)
• the mindset (functional designed without any security applied)

The conference in Berlin was a great platform to meet the nerds from the IoT world and to get up-to-date about the current status of the standards in this domain.

Based on my experiences collected during these three days I have got a lot of impulses and new ideas, how we can get closer to the reality and what we can offer to our customers based on our innovative and integrative technology.