Jordan Duffy: The Internet of Things at TEDxSouthBank (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Entrepreneur and innovation expert Jordan Duffy’s TEDx Talk: The Internet of Things at TEDxSouthBank conference. 

Jordan Duffy – Entrepreneur and innovation expert

So, the Internet of Things. Who loves the Internet? If you didn’t put your hand up, get out. If you haven’t used Google at work to do your job better, then you are wrong.

And who loves things? The chairs you are sitting and the glasses you are wearing, friends you hold pretty much everyone, some weird people down here.

Well, the Internet of Things — there’s a lot to it. I’m going to try to breeze through this in 7 minutes. But let’s jump into it.

Let’s jump into what Internet of Things, IoT really is. Now in the digital world, we can make everything talk to each other. We can make our phones talk to each other. We can make Facebook talk to each other. And in the physical world, not so much.

This is where our lives and technological development kind of stopped. But now, we are able to build a network so, multiple of physical objects — your chair, your table, your lounge those tim tams in the fridge — they are connected to the Internet.

If you don’t know what the Internet is you same weird people who said no, get out. It allows you to send so you can create and transmit, receive, so that you can receive and interpret and exchange data, you can have conversations with things around you.

So IoT will allow multiple physical objects, like the tim tams to be connected to the Internet. They can send just how good tim tams are to other tim tams and to you. And they can receive just how many people want those damn tim tams.

And they can have a conversation with other items in your fridge. So we are entering a very exciting time where we will have chairs, couches pretty much everything that’s in your home connected to the Internet or at least have conversations with things around you.

Now, still very ominous right? Even though we have a definition that I may or may not have gotten off urban dictionary. But, let’s break it into four sections. Hardware. Little bits and pieces like this. The hardware is what actually allows us to connect digital items to physical objects.

So I can put this on a door and it will tell me when the door opens. This is a dollar by the way, a dollar. So we have hardware that senses things.

We have data. Data actually starts to make sense of what all this is. It’s things we push around all the time everyday, we don’t really think about.

But for example, this piece of hardware here creates ECG data. It tells me how fast my heart is beating. Let’s actually check that out right now. Yeah, okay, 110, great Essentially this has also changed over the last 10 years.

We used to push data around in heavy, kinda standardized format. We’re seeing a lot of different ways of doing this now. We see JSON strings. Let’s see you interpret that, Marky J-S-O-N, yeah. And now data is getting leaner. We can say more with less. And data is becoming the universal language. Not English, not Chinese, not Auslan. But the universal language of things.

And software. What we do once we have that communication once we have that piece of information? The software is what interprets it, it’s what controls it. It’s what analyzes it and allow it to do stuff. It’s Facebook. It’s your Instagram. It’s the things that actually take pieces of data from these pieces of hardware and makes it do stuff that is valuable to you.

And the last step without all of this stuff, if it wasn’t connected, it wouldn’t mean anything. And connectivity of the last 10 years we’ve seen go from cellular phones that were size of bricks, through to Wi-Fi to ethernet, to 2G GSM 4G. All these different acronyms that are awesome. But essentially it has gotten cheaper. It has gotten faster. This is an RF transmitter.