Five Trends in IoT ICOs 2018

IoT, or the Internet of Things, is one of the most popular buzzwords of today and a global trend that is penetrating all walks of life. IoT has already disrupted a bunch of verticals like finance, healthcare, or urban infrastructure, and taken them to the next level. In this article, we’ll review the key IoT trends and scenarios addressed by some upcoming ICOs. The projects in question are

#1. Security

Earlier this year, Researchers at MIT and Michigan State University discovered numerous vulnerabilities in celebrated smart devices. This raised concerns in the community urging manufacturers to resolve their security shortcomings. Tackling the issue, many big brands have started investigating blockchain as a technology that may eliminate IoT safety risks. Firstly, by removing the single point of failure from the picture.

Let’s take Augmate as an example. An original Google Glass at Work partner, the company caters to the needs of workers using wearable glasses, where the glasses constitute a constructive element of the IT ecosystem. What Augmate ensures in the first place is control over multiple siloed devices without compromising security. The solution allows administrators to apply OS upgrades and security patches, deploy and uninstall applications on specific devices, or tweak general permissions and system-level settings. The Augmate project leads us to a related trend — privacy by design.

#2. Privacy

Users of complex systems have a right to enjoy data sovereignty and flexibly manage their assets. Building on blockchain and distributed ledger technology, Augmate upgrades its infrastructure to revamp data security and put users in control of the data.

#3. Decentralizing trust

Blockchain has the potential to change the world due to its decentralized nature. The absence of a central authority empowers people with new financial and legal freedoms that wouldn’t otherwise exist. A wide range of industries (real estate, accounting, legal, retail, e-commerce) have already leveraged blockchain to build relationships of trust between buyer and seller. Moreover, blockchain enables new market players providing them with equal transaction transparency. The legal cannabis industry, for one, is a great beneficiary of decentralized trust models.

Here are a couple of sample projects. Conventment, an IoT-powered security and logistics platform for legal cannabis, seamlessly connects various businesses and makes sure operations are performed in compliance with legal and safety regulations. Another decentralized trust project that comes to mind is IoTBlock, a blockchain registry of real-time health reports generated by IoT devices.

#4. Sharing economy

The sharing, or peer, economy is gaining a strong foothold in the market. Blockchain and IoT may benefit from the development of sharing economy in a number of ways.The automation between devices makes the sharing economy more efficient and user-friendly. IBM provides an example with a car rental: “Discovery can occur in real-time, just looking around for cars that announce they’re available for rent through Bluetooth beacons. Unlock and drive away using your smartphone or wearable as a kind of Bluetooth identity card, and upon return, a GPS can tell the owner where the car has been returned and calculate miles traveled for an automatic charge to your credit card.” That’s way more convenient than the use of a physical key and sending an email to confirm the payment.

Changing gears: a promising project, ParkApp (IoT for auto payments) employs IoT to facilitate parking in crowded urban areas. One of the features of ParkApp is “Spot exchange” which informs other drivers when you leave the spot. Isn’t it a dream?

#5. Big data

Big data analytics is one of those next big things that are already here and always in motion. Big data is bulky and hard to process, so before businesses can make any sense of it, some software has to take care of the data. WOS, for one, is a platform for data mining services. Its goal is to provide processed big data to companies and — indirectly — make their customers happier. WOS incorporated IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain technologies to deal with consumer’s Big Data.

As a rule, IoT projects are a great source of valuable user data, where users can trade their data to providers — or choose to keep it to themselves. That’s the beauty of free choices!