CES ‘junk’ and the rise of personal data stores

IoB Insiders Andrew Tarver looks back at CES ‘junk’ and the increasing rise of customers having their own personal, digital data stores.

The new Davos is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The same hype, the same excitement that was associated with Davos two to three years ago. What you saw at CES is an abundance of gadgets for the end consumer. Linked to my article last month, most of it was junk, mad ideas which will never see the light of commercial success. But you have to look through the junk and look for the underlying themes that are omnipresent.

Keeping it simple, there were three themes;

Digital data collection
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning
Personalization

What we are seeing, is a growing set of companies using personal digital data, to build a profile of the individual and their needs. They use intelligence to provide insights to the individual, or to sell on products or services to an individual, in a personalized manner.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the mechanisms to collect this data. Each individual device will collect a use case specific set of data, and then this will be used by use case specific AI, to provide personalized insights. This is the point, everything is use case specific. That is how IoT works today, that is the only real way to train machine learning algorithms and that leads to a plethora of apps on our phone.

Now we see a proliferation of concepts, devices and ideas. All with their own sensor, their own AI and their own interface. It is like the wild west, with new technologies which can change nearly every aspect of our lives, but which really wont impact them much at all.

Personal data stores

In the coming years at CES, we will start to see a consolidation of end-to-end solutions. We will still have multiple sensors, devices and “things” collecting data, but this will be persisted to my personal data store, not hundreds of device specific personal data stores. This aggregation of personal digital data will then enable a more holistic view of my needs, powered by more powerful and broader AI.

This is when the technologies start to become useful to the individual, because we allow the technology to be smart, and represent my real needs. This is when you will see the explosion of IoT linked to the individual. There will be a simple subscription service, where an individual can link devices to their personal data store. This will then track millions of digital data attributes a second, per individual.

We are a long way from this paradigm. Over the next few years we will see more crazy inventions, failures outweighing successes by 100 to 1, or in that order of magnitude. But as long as you keep the end state in perspective, and holistic intelligent self, you can see where this is heading and how this data architecture could be of real use to the individual.

If you are developing around IoT, think about how this fits into YOUR broader life and the relationship with other “things” connected to the internet, collecting data. How can this aggregated digital data, collected from multiple sources, be more powerful to me as an individual if delivered as a broader offering, rather than as a specific use case?

I will think about it as I use my smart toothbrush.

Andrew Tarver is a technology entrepreneur and founder of tech start-up, Jigsaw