Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Obviously, the dividend of the Internet of things market is coming.

According to the relevant survey report, China has 1.3 billion activated IoT terminal devices in 2017, and by 2022, this number is expected to reach 4.5 billion, with an annual compound growth rate of more than 28%.

The beautiful business imagination and ecological vision brought by Wisdom are gradually driving the technology giants and terminal equipment industry chain into the competitive pattern of the IoT market.

However, on the other hand, today's Internet of things market is also showing the market form of two-water diversion. Some of the Internet of things products with marketing and one-sided performance-to-price ratio as the axis, coupled with the influx of copycat brands, are creating a "crop circle" with a bottom price and serious product homogenization at the bottom of the market.

At the same time, technology giants and some ambitious start-ups are relying on the smart benefits of new technologies such as AI to open up a new blueprint for the market.

The story of escaping from the crop circle is being staged today on the busiest stage in China's technology industry.

An advanced version of the Internet of things is already on its way.

AI is rope climbing and technological advantages are linked: what are the giants of the Internet of things doing?

More and more Internet of things equipment manufacturers admit that we are doing AI rather than Internet of things today.

Of course, on the one hand, this is because the technical threshold of traditional Internet of things devices is too low to form a brand premium. On the other hand, it is also because under the future trend of the humanistic Internet of things, AI is the most reliable technical means at present.

To establish a human-centered Internet of things device experience requires devices to establish the ability to speak, see, identify, and then produce product capabilities that can achieve active care-then AI is a reasonable technology export, or even the only export.

So we see that there is no Internet of things brand that does not do AI today. From the debate over the entrance of speakers to the ability to connect small devices such as cameras, wearers and door locks to machine vision, to "big guys" such as televisions, refrigerators and cars, they are being controlled by voice interaction technology. The advance of AI into the Internet of things has become the main trend of the IoT industry today, even without one.

But this breakthrough raises another problem. The ability of AI is different from simple WiFi module connection and customized white shell, but a technical competition that requires algorithm, computing power, platform and other technical conditions to compete hard.

In other words, if you want to get rid of the low-end quagmire and get rid of the cruel atmosphere of homogeneous competition, the best way to rely on is the technical strength and R & D system.

For example, we can see that Baidu's DuerOS has become a ghost card in the field of the Internet of things, largely because it has the best data in many areas of language interaction, such as far-field awakening, complex semantic recognition, continuous dialogue and so on. Based on the self-research and self-ownership of the underlying technology, it is relatively easy to build the commercial impact of the Internet of things product layer.

Various players in the Internet of things industry are introducing technological advantages into the field of the Internet of things in their own way. For example, Ali began to try to build its own scene at the back end of Tmall elf, taking advantage of Ali's ecological advantages to build a relatively complex AI experience; for example, Huawei recently launched the Internet of things product matrix, which takes quality control and intelligent manufacturing as the selling point; 360360 began to introduce the "big security" background into the Internet of things, putting forward the concept of S-AIoT, in order to enable its intelligent hardware products with security and AI technology.

When the industry begins to pay attention to the net distance of far-field awakening and the face recognition efficiency of intelligent cameras, and then begins to move towards the differentiated intelligent experience of the IoT industry, it may be the core path for the Internet of things to get out of the "crop circle" of homogenization competition.

And the plan to escape the swamp can be vividly likened to holding on to the rope of AI and using its own accumulated expertise in differentiated technology as a hook to stabilize step by step. At some point, we will find that the swamp has become a graveyard of bad money.

Back to the user level, the real imagination of the Internet of things lies in the upgrading of users' purchase motivation, rather than simply competing with the number and type of devices to drive marketing. From this perspective, hard core technology research and development and user modeling are becoming a racetrack that must be switched by IoT manufacturers.

In the new "humanistic IoT" competition, AI technology is becoming a new engine and fuel. Similarly, the centrifugal force brought about by the upgrading of the user experience will also throw the "technical aphasia" players away from the core track.

Crop Circle: a crude Internet of things

There is a phenomenon in economics called "crop circles".

We all know that crop circles are thought to be traces left by aliens and look very mysterious and scary. However, some investigators actually studied the scale of crop circles and found that these so-called "alien relics" were actually made by one or two farmers with the help of modern farm tools.

It seems to be very powerful, but in fact, there is a lot of moisture, and this kind of crop circle products can be found everywhere in the science and technology world. For example, at the beginning of the concept of the Internet of things, the definition was not clear, and any technological solution that connected objects could be generally referred to as the "Internet of things".

As a result, manufacturers can add WiFi components to the equipment, make an APP, paint it white, and then absorb a large number of "varied" hardware factories-- fresh and hot Internet of things products.

This "simplified networking" product, represented by Xiaomi IoT model, has achieved a very good rate of development during the market gap.

But looking back, what are the rules of the IoT market it established? It is easy for third-party enterprises to seek labeling, IoT technology is not difficult, low hardware cost, product iteration mainly depends on marketing-driven.

Almost no threshold of the Internet of things product positioning, the direct result is to make up the number of hardware factories and then enter the market. Continue to trigger the price bottom of the homogenization war, the word-of-mouth swamp of the Internet of things has been quietly formed.

If you want to get rid of the homogenization competition, perhaps the Internet of things industry needs to clarify such a question from the beginning: is networking an end or a beginning?

Humanism in Technology: where is the value Increment of IoT Market?

The "simple Internet of things" model represented by Xiaomi does literally realize the function of "giving the Internet of things". But if you stay here, users will be able to have two experiences: you can manipulate the device with your phone, and you can see the device data through your phone.

These two functions are meaningful, of course, but they seem to be a far cry from the industrial vision of Wisdom. And integrate quite a lot of functions into the mobile phone, in fact, resulting in the expansion of the interaction burden of users. For example, Xiaomi's different IoT devices have their own set of management rules, which is equivalent to the integration of several small APP under one APP. It seems to centralize the control of the device in one place, but in fact it is equivalent to letting the user get a lot of remote controls.

Here we should review such an understanding: what on earth can the technological solution of the Internet of things bring to the lives of ordinary people?

Humanism is an important sociological and psychological trend of thought after World War II. This kind of thought criticizes the theory of subconscious psychology represented by Freud, and puts forward that the real need of human beings lies in understanding, communication, aesthetic, and other higher-level social discourse.

The representative work of humanism, Maslow's Theory of Human motivation, holds that human needs and motivation is a pyramid structure. If you can meet the needs of people at a higher level, the more modern business recognition you can get.

Back to the IoT market, the current popular household appliances plus WiFi modular products can only solve the demand of "no need to go over and press the switch". Furthermore, machine intelligence to meet the high-level needs of human users, such as being cared for, understood, surprised and comfortable, is still in a blank stage today.

In other words, the main reason for the business quagmire of the Internet of things opened by Xiaomi mode today is that manufacturers are willing to sleep at the starting stage of "connecting products to WiFi", instead of exploring the way to use devices, networks and intelligent technology to create more advanced experiences for users-- that is, mistaking the starting point for the end point.

Xiaomi's IoT model is very representative: once a routine has been formed at the product level, the technology is no longer people-centered, but centered on the formed fixed format. In this way, the number of devices in the Internet of things is really easy to increase rapidly. For example, to connect more devices to the home, especially the "IoT" of small household appliances is particularly cheap.

But the negative effect of this routine is that the added value is too low, and there is no answer to the question of how to use the net to change things, and how to use things to promote the net. For example, IoT devices will not actively greet us; they will not actively turn on air conditioners and air purifiers for us according to the weather and room temperature; and will not follow us to optimize multiple devices to create an ecological experience at the same time as we suggest. At the very least, the Internet of things has to do something that mobile phones and hands can't do; at least, we can't get ourselves into trouble by using Internet of things devices.

These days we all pay attention to formulas, even crosstalk has a formula, so it seems that we can come up with such a formula for the way out of the quagmire of the Internet of things: user experience as the center, technology to add, interactive subtraction.

Under this formula, only the IoT enterprises that achieve core breakthroughs in key areas such as AI with heavy storage technology can achieve an advanced version of the Internet of things industry map. In this field, technological differentiation may be the most bulky, but it is also the only fulcrum, to get rid of the strange circle of homogeneous competition.

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